Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 review : Double smart

Basic gallery and video player

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos comes with the stock Android gallery. It only shows a downsized version of your images, which isn't that insufferable in the case of the Galaxy Y Duos and its 3 MP photos.

Images and videos from different folders in the built-in and microSD storage appear in different sub-galleries. Online Picasa albums are supported too.

Vanilla Android gallery

You can also organize the photos by date via a button in the top right corner which switches between grid and timeline view. In grid view, there's a date slider, which can also be used to sort photos chronologically.

The gallery supports finger scrolling or panning so you can skip images without having to return to the default view. Just swipe to the left or right when viewing a photo in fullscreen mode and the previous/next image will appear.

Thanks to multi-touch support pinch zooming is also enabled on the Galaxy Y Duos but you can also double tap or use the +/- buttons. Zooming and panning are pretty smooth but there's no kinetic scrolling.

Options

The video player found on the Galaxy Y Duos is plain and simple. You can use the Gallery or the My Files app to browse videos. The player only manages 3GP and MP4 videos at low resolution. Even 480p videos seemed to be a problem.

Pretty basic video player

Music player

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos uses the TouchWiz UI music player. It sorts the music in a tabbed interface. Among the options are current playlist, all tracks, playlists and albums, artists and composers. You are free to remove some of the filters to make the interface easier to navigate.

TouchWiz music player

The Now playing screen is dominated by the album art for the track. You can swipe sideways to navigate back and forth between tracks from the current playlist.

Now playing screen

Equalizer support lets you enhance the music experience on the Galaxy Y Duos. There's also a 5.1 channel virtualization option available when you plug in a pair of headphones.

Equalizer settings

Stereo FM radio with RDS

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The interface is simple - there's a tuning dial and you can save as many as 4 stations as favorites. You can also play on the loudspeaker, but the headset still needs to be plugged in to act as an antenna.

FM radio on the Y Duos

Good audio quality

We've come to expect good quality audio output from Samsung smartphones and the Galaxy Y Duos S6102 is no exception. Obviously, audio quality wasn't one of the corners the Koreans had to cut to keep the price tag low.

An active external amplifier lets the Galaxy Y Duos show its full potential and achieve some excellent scores. It's not particularly loud, but everything else about its output is as good as it should be.

The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a huge hike in stereo crosstalk, and some extra intermodulation distortion. The rest of the scores remained pretty decent so it seems the Galaxy Y Duos is ready to offer more than what the average user needs.

And here come the full results so you can see for yourselves:

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Basic camera

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 has a slightly better camera than the single-SIM Galaxy Y, but not by much. What you're getting is a 3MP fixed-focus camera and no flash.

The camera app has a pretty good user interface, which is touch-friendly and has great built-in features such as smile shot, preset scenes, geotagging, effects, on-screen guidelines and panorama mode.

Camera application

Even with a slightly updated camera, the Galaxy Y Duos is no cameraphone, but it will do in a pinch. If you'll be looking at the photos downscaled on a computer screen, they are actually passable.

Check out the samples below to get an idea of the quality.

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 camera samples

Photo quality comparison

The Samsung Galaxy Y Duos has a 3MP camera and it qualifies for a run in our Photo compare tool. It holds up pretty well in our synthetic resolution chart as far as 3MP shooters go. The next chart shows okay colors (but with a slight blue tint). Under artificial lighting there's no color tint as some phones have, but the amount of detail is average for a 3MP shooter.

Samsung Galaxy Y Duos S6102 in our Photo Compare tool

Video camera still stuck at QVGA

Naturally, the Samsung Galaxy Y Duos offers video recording and it got a slight upgrade too - it still records videos in QVGA resolution, but the framerate is now 24 fps (up from 15 fps).

Watching videos on the Galaxy Y Duos screen is fitting - they are a match for both resolution and quality. But don't upload the videos to YouTube.

Camcorder app

And here goes an untouched QVGA@24fps sample for direct download.