4 of the best budget smartphones from Samsung

A few days before Samsung’s highly anticipated New York event where it announced the Galaxy S4, it held the Africa Forum in Cape Town and announced a range of new products. Samsung also announced four phones targeted at emerging markets. The lineup consisted of two budget-friendly phones, a higher-specced dual-SIM and a water-resistant phone with underwater photo capability.

Savvy South African consumers would be happy to see that they have added two dual-sim phones to the line up, both of which come with “Always On” functionality. It’s also good to note that all these phones come loaded with not only Android, but also Jellybean 4.1. Often Samsung have loaded its budget phones with Java or its in-house operating system Bada, which lacked full functionality and a robust app store.

It would be quite interesting to see how these phones do in a market that’s already overcrowded with budget friendly smartphones such as the ones from Huawei and Alcatel.

The Headliner: The Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos

Many would be excited to hear that Samsung finally announced a dual-sim smartphone for the higher end market. The Grand Duos come packed with S voice, a 5 inch screen and Android Jellybean 4.1.2. The phone actually looks sleek but to keep costs down, Samsung have skipped some of the functionality from its other flagship phones, such as HD resolution and internal memory. The Grand Duos only comes with an LCD screen and 8GB . It is notable that the phone also comes with an SD card slot so the memory is expandable, fixed memory phones such as the iPhone lose customers this way. Again, to keep costs down Samsung have added a fairly average 1.2Ghz CPU to the phone with a middling 1GB RAM. Interestingly enough, its chosen to add the popular Smart Stay and Pop Up functions from the Galaxy SIII. When it comes to Dual-SIM on a higher-end phone, this is probably a good choice.

The Rugged one: The Samsung Galaxy xCover2

Samsung has also added an “explorer friendly” phone to its lineup. The phone boasts features like the ability to be immersed in up to 1m of water. Users will also be glad to know that Samsung has added a camera key to this phone, which makes it easier to take photos while underwater. As expected with durable phones, the phone is also sand and dust proof. The phone comes with average specs such as the 800X400 display and only 4GB of storage. Targeted at the mid to lower consumer markets, it comes with a dual-core 1ghz processor and just 1GB RAM.

In addition to the two higher-end devices above, Samsung also added two new budget phones to its lineup, which cater specifically to African Markets.

The Samsung Galaxy Star, another dual-sim phone

The Galaxy Star comes with a fairly average 3-inch QVGA screen and dual sim support. It is noticeable that Samsung did not provide support for 3G in this device. The device does sport a 2MP rear camera and Android 4.1 Jellybean.

The Samsung Galaxy Pocket Neo

The Pocket Neo is very similar to the Star with the same 3-inch screen, but comes with an improved processor at 850MHz. It also offers the 4GB internal memory, 2MP camera and 512MB RAM as included in the Galaxy Star.

Image: Galaxy Star, xcove2, Duos via Phonearena.com 

Image: Galaxy Neo via Q4Points.com