Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 review : Double smart

Gingerbread a la TouchWiz

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 is a fairly low-end phone, so coming with Gingerbread 2.3.6 out of the box is understandable. The topping of choice is Samsung's home-baked TouchWiz launcher and the result is quite good, the low resolution and limited screen estate aside.

Here's a video demo that will show you the whole thing in action:

Once the Galaxy Y Duos is unlocked you're greeted by the familiar TouchWiz homescreen. You can have up to seven panes to populate with widgets but you don't have to use all the screens all the time. If you need less, deleting the extra ones will speed up navigation. You can zoom out with a pinch gesture to enter edit mode, where you can add, remove and rearrange the homescreen panes as you see fit.

Android 2.3.6 with TouchWiz custom launcher

The notification area gives you various toggles and quick settings: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Sound and Auto rotation of the display. Then there's the switch which lets you toggle between SIM1 and SIM2. Below that is the carrier IDs for both SIM cards and what little is left of the 3.14" screen is left to notifications of missed and ongoing events.

The notification area is quite busy

The status bar (visible when the notification area is closed) shows the reception for both SIM cards and a number indicates the currently active one.

Pressing the menu button on the homescreen will let you put more content or change the wallpaper. Live wallpapers are supported too, though there are none preinstalled (you can go to Google Play if you want any). The context menu has shortcuts too for search, notifications and settings.

Placing widgets on the homescreen • Setting a wallpaper

The task switcher is mostly unchanged in TouchWiz with the exception of the task manager button. The app is accompanied by a homescreen widget, which shows the number of currently active apps and saves you the need to install a third-party task killer.

The proprietary task manager

Typically, the app drawer consists of side-scrollable panes, much like the homescreen, instead of a vertical scrollable grid (like in the vanilla Android). You can do a pinch zoom to rearrange pages with icons, but there's no easy way to create new pages. Folders aren't supported either.

Menu is easily reorganized

Hitting Edit from the context menu lets you change the first three of the four shortcuts visible at the bottom of the screen. The fourth one is fixed as it toggles the app drawer and the homescreen.

Synthetic benchmarks

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 relies on an old 832MHz processor and has 290MB of RAM left after the Broadcom VideoCore 4 GPU has taken its cut. We don't expect miracles here, but let's see how it stacks up against a couple of other low-end Androids.

BenchmarkPi and Linpack show CPU performance on the level of the Galaxy Ace. The HTC Explorer has a newer Cortex-A5 core and beats the older CPU despite its lower clock speed.

Benchmark Pi

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  1755
• HTC Explorer
  1397
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  1911

Linpack

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  10.3
• HTC Explorer
  15.8
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  9.9

The Galaxy Y Duos has the lowest screen resolution of the trio - QVGA vs. HVGA for the other two. Even so, the framerate of the 3D benchmark, NenaMark 2, is well below acceptable levels. Benchmarks are heavier than casual 3D games, so they should be okay.

NenaMark 2

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  13.2
• HTC Explorer
  15.1
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  12

Both SunSpider and BrowserMark show that you can't expect stellar performance in either JavaScript or HTML5.

SunSpider

Lower is better

• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  11966
• HTC Explorer
  10784
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  9061

BrowserMark

Higher is better

• Samsung Galaxy Y Duos
  19634
• HTC Explorer
  22464
• Samsung Galaxy Ace
  27844