Samsung Galaxy Young

The Galaxy Young is one of the cheapest Android phones we've seen. At £90 on O2 prepay, it's not quite as much of a bargain as the ZTE Kis, which is currently £45 on Virgin prepay from Argos, but it's certainly the cheapest phone we've seen SIM-free.

You get a good-looking phone for your money, which feels well made. We like the soft-touch plastic on the rear, which is similar to that of the Galaxy S3 and S4, and the silver sides manage to make the phone look classy rather than tacky. The Young is a compact handset, with a small 3.3in screen, but is a relatively chunky 12mm thick. We liked the extra thickness, as it meant we could keep a firm grip on the handset despite its small width and height.

Like many budget phones, the Young has a 320x480-pixel screen. For Android to look its razor-sharp best we like to see a minimum of 480x800 pixels, and the Galaxy Young's text is slightly on the blurry side. There's also a significant amount of grain, but the screen is certainly usable.

The Young runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. We’re used to the latest versions of Android running as smooth as silk, and the operating system runs well on the Galaxy Young - at least on the surface. The app tray comes up quickly and the animation to flick between app trays is smooth, but it's when you open an app that the limitations of the phone's single-core 1GHz processor start to show.

In the Chrome web browser, the BBC News website took nine seconds to render, while most dual-core smartphones can render the page in five. Scrolling around pages is far jerkier than we're used to, and there's a second or so delay between tapping in the address box and the keyboard appearing. The Maps app is also especially slow, especially when new tiles are loading, which makes scrolling around a chore.

The slow performance is backed up the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark; the phone completed the test in a very slow 3,203ms. The phone's slow speed does give it one particular advantage; good battery life. In our continuous video playback test, we saw nearly nine hours from the Young's 1,300mAh battery.

Core phone functions such as messaging are less of a problem. There is a bit of a delay between pressing a key on the on-screen keyboard and the letter appearing, but accurate typing is helped by the keyboard's sensible design; each key is small but spaced far apart from the others, so fat fingers don’t struggle with the screen's low resolution.

We were impressed with the phone's five-megapixel camera, which managed to resolve a surprising amount of detail from its three megapixels in outdoor shots, and compared favourably with the Samsung Galaxy S3's camera, which we tend to use for our reference. However, like the S3, the Galaxy Young struggles with exposure in bright conditions, meaning that the sky is more likely to be a bleached-out white than something with texture and clouds. Photos taken in low light show plenty of noise, but again, are reasonably impressive considering the phone's low price.

Not bad on the detail front, but the camera struggles with exposure in bright conditions

The phone's slow speed does give it one particular advantage; good battery life. In our continuous video playback test, we saw nearly nine hours from the Young's 1,300mAh battery.

It's difficult to rate the Galaxy Young. On the one hand, you won’t find a fully-featured Android 4.1 phone for less SIM-free. On the other, it's slow to the point of frustration at times. We'd recommend picking your carrier in advance, then buying a better handset with a prepay subsidy, such as the great-value Vodafone Smart III.