Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime review: Mirror shot

A slimmer TouchWiz

The Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime runs on the latest available Android 4.4.4 KitKat customized with a stripped down version of TouchWiz. Here's a quick video to get things started.

The lockscreen is the default in TouchWiz - a simple screen with just the time and a camera shortcut (which can be disabled). The usual Swipe, Pattern, PIN and Password security modes are available.

A regular lockscreen

The homescreen is also base TouchWiz, with a 4 icon dock on the bottom and no Briefing/My Magazine pane. You can have up to 5 homescreens, panes can reordered and one is set as default.

A basic homescreen with no special panes

The notification area is similar to what we've seen on recent Galaxy devices but it too has some functionality missing. The Quick Connect and S Finder shortcuts won't be missed but there's no shortcut to open all toggles, even a two-finger swipe doesn't work. This means you have to swipe the row of toggles until you find the one you need. At least there's still a way to reorder the toggles.

Anyway, below the quick toggles is a brightness slider and below that the notifications. The brightness slider can be disabled.

Trimmed down notification area

The settings menu is a vertical list of apps divided into categories. The handy search function is gone, which can slow down inexperienced users until they learn where each setting goes.

Settings menu

Unlike Samsung's premium devices, the Galaxy Grand Prime uses the standard KitKat app switcher (with minor tweaks). This means it shows a vertical list of apps with their icon, name and screenshot. Three to almost four apps fit on the qHD screen. There's a shortcut to kill all apps, but the task manager is gone.

Task switcher

TouchWiz had become a leviathan through years of feature bloat, full of useful features though often hard to find or useful only to a select few. Recently Samsung took a hatchet to its Android skin and really trimmed down the cruft. The Galaxy Note 4 and Edge are running some of the best mobile software, even if we still have some complaints about cosmetics.

The Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime software is even more simplified and we actually miss some of the functionality - things like the customizable quick toggles, motion gestures were handy tools. After going through the pre-installed apps, we found that plenty have been cut in favor of AOSP/Google alternatives.