After the not-so-good success of the Galaxy S Duos 2, Samsung released it Galaxy S Duos 2 in December 2013. Though competition from Lumia 520 has been tough, S Duos 2 has managed pretty well, but owing much to the fact that other companies like LG, Sony, HTC et cetera haven't got any good phone in this price bracket.
BODY:
The S Duos 2 looks much like it's predecessor, the S Duos, but then, all Samsung phones now-a-days look alike. It's mainly made out of plastic, which does feel a bit cheap. The matte finish is a slight improvement over the shiny, fingerprint-magnet previous one, but it does attract a lot a dirt. After a use of around a month, it shows signs of wear and tear.
The front is covered by a single sheet of glass, ordinary glass. There is a hardware home button rested in the middle of 2 capacitive buttons, namely menu and back. On the back, there is the camera in middle, a 5MP shooter with an LED flash beneath it. On the right side, there is the power button and below which, there is a hot-swappable microSD card slot. On the left side, there is the usual volume rocker.
On the bottom there is a microUSB port and the primary microphone. On the top rests a 3.5mm jack.
HARDWARE:
Under the hood, there is a 1.2GHz Dual Core ARM Cortex A9 CPU which fits snugly into the Broadcom BCM21664T chipset, along with a Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU. All of these are coupled together with 768MB RAM, which give moderate performance in heavy games like Asphalt 8, Real Racing 3 et cetera. It has 4GB on-board memory, but has an expansion for an SD Card slot, as mentioned earlier. The slot supports cards of upto 64GB.
DISPLAY:
The 4-inch 800x480 LCD display is not over-the-top, but considering the price range, it's quite good. It packs 233ppi, and every other thing is quite average. The display is dull in bright sunlight.
CAMERA:
The 5MP shooter at the back is exceptionally good, for this price range. It manages well in the dark, and even in the brightest sunlight as well. The LED flash though is a bit of a letdown. The UI is fluid, and it can capture images quite fast. Video recording is limited to 720p at 30fps, even though the hardware can support 1080p at 30fps. The front camera is VGA, which is quite bad, to say. Samsung should have provided at least a 1.3MP for 720p video.
SOFTWARE:
The S Duos 2 comes with Android 4.2.2 JellyBean with Samsung's TouchWiz UI. There is no news on an update, and most likely there will not be any. The UI navigation is fluid thanks to the Dual Core CPU.
CONNECTIVITY:
The S Duos 2 has 2 SIM card slots, with both supporting 2G+3G. Other connectivity options include FM Radio, Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS with GLONASS.
BATTERY:
The 1500mAh battery is another let down. An average user still has to charge at the end of the day, and if you play games, you need to charge more often.
VERDICT:
Overall, the S Duos 2 is a very nice device, probably the best under 10000 INR. The hardware is good, the camera is excellent (again, for this price range), the screen is average, and other features are above-average too. For 9500 INR, you can get it here.
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