Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime Review – Shine Bright Like A Diamond

Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime’s front camera can make you shine. No kidding. That’s the best and also the worst feature of this phone. Best because that’s exactly how everyone wants to look like especially in a ‘selfie’ and worst because it is totally a lie. Don’t believe me? take the same photo with its back camera and see the reality yourself. Obviously you wouldn’t want to believe that, that’s you. But sadly that’s the truth.

Hardware & Build Quality

You can currently only get Galaxy Grand Prime in white colour. Which is good for those whom likes phones in white colour and bad for those whom want a little darker colour. Its build quality is decent. Pretty well built. Although its made of plastic front and back. The back has matte finish. It’s white in colour but not milky white more like dull white colour. The glass in the front of Galaxy Grand Prime could be Gorilla Glass ’cause it feels pretty thick and solid. But it is not written anywhere officially. Neither on Samsung’s website nor on the box. So, i can’t be 100% sure. It does not have notification LED.

Display

Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime comes with 5 inch TFT LCD display of qHD resolution and despite of being TFT in nature. It has good viewing angles and colour reproduction. Colour saturation though is a little on the sharper side. Just like Samsung’s AMOLED display sometimes the colours look over saturated. All in all except for the resolution, it is a pretty good display.

Multimedia

Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime’s external speaker is pretty good and its music quality in earphones is good too. Very clear and could get very loud if you turn the volume to maximum. It doesn’t come with any proprietary music player like most expensive Samsung phones comes with. It uses the default Google Play music player. It does comes with a video player though and it can play 1080p videos without any problem.

Camera

Galaxy Grand Prime as you all know is being advertised as a selfie phone. So, lets talk about its 5MP front camera first. It doesn’t have front LED flash like Sony Xperia C3. And its front camera combined with a feature called ‘Beauty Shot’ that automatically activates itself when you turn on the front camera. Together they could make you look like the queen or king of this world. Yes, it can make you look that fake. What else do you want?

Anyone can pinch to zoom in the photo to find a spot on your face but they won’t be able to because the front camera does a damn good at picking up no details at all. In short, when you take a photo of your face with its front camera it will pick the face but it won’t pick any spots on the face and it even further enhances the photo by making your face looks smooth and shiny. It’s as close as you can get to an instant photoshop.

Let’s not forget about its back camera, shall we. It contains an 8MP auto-focus rear facing camera with LED flash. It can shoot videos up-to 1080p a sample of which you can see in the review video below. If you want to take somewhat ‘real’ photos or at least close to reality then use this camera. You can also take photos and videos together. It picks up a lot of details too unlike its ‘selfie’ brother. Its flash doesn’t spread around, it gets concentrated on one object and that makes the background of the photo looks almost black even when it is not absolutely black in the background. Something i noticed. You can see the samples in various lighting conditions in the image gallery below.

OS/Storage/RAM

Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime just like every other Galaxy phone comes with TouchWiz UI but the core Android version it comes with is Android 4.4.4 KitKat and it makes this phone very fast and absolutely lag free. I have yet to notice a lag in its UI. Its that good. It is so snappy that sometimes you won’t even believe its Android you are using. Storage wise it comes with 8GB of total internal storage out of which you’ll get around 5GB free and it is expandable via micro SD card. It doesn’t have default write disk or preferred install location options although it does comes have move to SD option. It comes with 1GB of RAM out of which you’ll have around 250MB free.

Performance

Just like any other phone with Snapdragon 400 chipset/processor. Galaxy Grand Prime also turned out to be a disaster in the heavy performance department. And it doesn’t even come with Snapdragon 400, it comes with its successor Snapdragon 410. Unfortunately apart from chipset’s numbers nothing has changed. Its performance is still the same. It still can’t play GTA San Andreas. Hell it can’t even play Modern Combat 5 properly. If you don’t know let me tell you that Snapdragon 410 contains quadcore Cortex A53 processor not Cortex A7 and Adreno 306GPU. Despite of having new processor and GPU its gaming performance is still unchanged.

Maybe the reason being that Cortex A53 is more close the Cortex A5 family rather than the Cortex A7 family of processors. Which is ultimately weak compared to Cortex A7. It simply doesn’t have the raw power. Hence this phone is not future proof at least not in terms of performance.

Connectivity

Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime is a dual sim device. It supports two micro sims. Its Wifi is very fast it connects pretty fast and doesn’t loose signal that easily. Its mic and ear piece quality is decent. Apart from all that it has screen mirroring, Bluetooth 4.0, 3G. It does not have NFC and it does not support USB OTG.

Battery

The screen of Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime is the biggest enemy of its battery life. Thing is its screen only looks good at a decent brightness level, say at more than half. If you keep it below that the screen might not look that good or beautiful. I am not saying it will loose all its colours it just won’t look that much vibrant. Because of its screen it looses battery pretty fast even when the phone is in idle state. Thankfully Galaxy Grand Prime has 2600 mAh battery and it also comes with ultra power saving mode. If you manage it smartly you might be able to take out more than one day out of its battery on normal use. Other wise you’d have to charge it daily.

Verdict/Choice

It’s time for my verdict and your choice! Let’s see… Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime is a selfie smartphone. Or a phone with good back and front camera and ordinary everything else. Ordinary as in neither good nor bad. The choice is simple, if you are a casual user who wants to do a little little everything on your phone but wants to take photos(especially of yourself) a little more than everything else then this phone is for you. And if you are a person that wants lag free gaming performance especially in graphic intensive games more than anything else. Then this phone is not for you. Simple as that.