Samsung Galaxy Mini S5570 Review: Right on the mini

Excellent organizer

Let’s start with the calendar app. It has four different types of view - agenda, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The organizer centerpiece - the calendar

The agenda view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It’s a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized – the buttons are big enough and easy to hit.

The Calculator

The alarm clock app is decent and allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start and repeat time. But you don’t have the Stopwatch, the Timer and World Clock options. Still you get a Voice Recorder.

The Clock • Creating alarm • Voice recorder

As usual, Samsung has included the My Files app – a simple to use but functional file manager, which also doubles as an image gallery. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files over Bluetooth. It will only browse the memory card.

The My Files app

Few applications

Samsung filled the Galaxy Mini with a few of their home-brewed applications and we really appreciate their work. Most of them are quite useful and can be updated via Samsung Apps – the secondary app repository on your phone. Whenever Samsung updates any of the current apps or widgets, or releases new ones, you’ll find them here.

Social Hub combines messaging and media sharing – this one app allows you to create a message (it may pack media content too) and then send it to various services – SMS/MMS, email, social networks.

The Memo • The Social Hub

Countless apps available in the Android Market

The Samsung Galaxy Mini is running the latest version of Android and this is where the true power of Android comes from. You can download thousands of apps for whatever you can think of and the Mini will have no problems running them.

The structure of the Android Market is quite simple – featured apps on top and above them, three sections (Applications, Games and Downloads). There is also a shortcut up there for initiating a search.

The Android Market will give you access to over 100 000 applications

The Applications and Games sections are divided into subsections (e.g. Communication, Entertainment etc.) so you can filter the apps that are relevant to you. Of course, there is also an option of displaying them all in bulk, but you’ll probably need days to browse them all that way.

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

GPS through Google’s eyes

The Samsung Galaxy Mini packs a GPS receiver, which got a satellite lock in about four minutes with A-GPS turned off. A-GPS can speed this up quite a bit, but requires Internet access.

Google Maps is on board, complete with Navigation, which can do voice-guidance for free. Availability is still limited though, and it relies on Internet connection.

Still, even without Navigation, there is some kind of guidance: your route and current location appear on the screen so you'll reach your destination eventually, but you’ll need a co-pilot to read you the instructions for that one.

Google Maps

Quite naturally, the app also supports the Street View mode. In fact, this mode is probably the best part of Google Maps. If the Street View is available in the area you're interested in, you can enjoy a 360-degree view of the surroundings. When the digital compass is turned on it feels like making a virtual tour of the location!

Using Street View • What’s near by?

The Galaxy Mini doesn’t come with a third-party SatNav solution preinstalled but you can easily snatch one off the Android market. There are both paid and free options on offer.