The Samsung Galaxy Star Duos GT-S5282 is the cheapest device in the Samsung Galaxy series, and that's not all its the cheapest Android 4.1 Jelly Bean device available in the market. If you look at Micromax, most of its entry-level handsets run Android 2.3 Gingerbread, also all of them have larger displays than the Galaxy Star. We have benchmarked the Galaxy Star Duos on a variety of tools including Quadrant, AnTuTu as well as NenaMark2. The benchmarking video of the Galaxy Star GT-S5282 is embedded after the hardware overview section, then there are the detailed scores of the various benchmarks.
Hardware Overview
The Galaxy Star GT-S5282 has a 1GHz single-core ARMv& based processor, with 512MB RAM out of which only 469MB is available to user apps, rest is locked by the system. There's 4GB of internal storage out of which 2GB is available to the user. The graphics of the Samsung Galaxy Star are powered by Mali 300 GPU, which is a decent performer. The phone also has a 2MP primary camera, which lacks AutoFocus as well as Flash.
The Galaxy Star has a 3-inch QVGA display (240x320 pixels) which simply doesn't cut it. Although the colors are strictly okay but the paltry resolution makes everything look muddled and hazy. The display is simply not upto par. In terms of sensors, there's just the orientation sensor to auto rotate the display. But something needs to be said about the build quality of the device, the plastics used in the device are of great quality and the phone seems quite solid. Given that the Galaxy Star Duos (GT-S5282) is just an entry-level device, Samsung has not cut corners in the build quality, but possibly that required other compromises such as the display.
Benchmarks
Quadrant
Quadrant is a benchmark for rating the CPU, I/O and 3D graphics of a smartphone, and the Galaxy Star Duos scored a 1535 on the benchmark. Although the graph shows it at the bottom of the table, but we must remember this an entry-level device.
The Galaxy Star (GT-S5282) got a CPU score of 1718, Memory 1760, I/O 1859, 2D score of 772 and 3D 1564. Although there are several budget and entry-level android smartphones available in the price range of the Galaxy Star, but they are not comparable in terms of performance.
AnTuTu 3.3.1
AnTuTu is a comprehensive benchmark which practically tests the entire hardware of the smartphone, including CPU, RAM, GPU as well as storage cards.
The Samsung Galaxy Star (GT-S5282) got a total score of 4301 on AnTuTu and the bifurcation of the scores are:
- CPU: 998
- GPU: 2136
- RAM: 541
- I/O: 626
These scores are pretty entry-level to say the least, but if you look at the graph above you can see that the Samsung Galaxy Star comes above the original Galaxy S, which is noteworthy. Although that is primarily due to the low resolution display, which resulted in better framerates in 2D and 3D benchmarks.
NenaMark2
NenaMark is generally used to test the graphics prowess of a device, and provides a framerate which indicates how smooth gameplay will be on the device.
So the Galaxy Star Duos (GT-S5282) scored 33.2 FPS, which is a decent playable framerate given the demographic the phone is catering to.
MultiTouch Test
We tested the Galaxy Star Duos on the Multi-Touch test app, and found that the display supports 2 points of touch. Therefore, the display is able to detect 2 individual points of touch simultaneously.
Conclusion
In our observations the Galaxy Star (GT-S5282) is a decent buy for Rs. 4990, but there are better options from the likes of Micromax and Karbonn in the same price range which have better displays, but do not perform as well. Therefore, if Samsung would've just invested a bit more in the display the Galaxy Star would have been the go to entry-level device, due to its great build quality and better-than-average performance. We'll upload the camera samples and then the final review soon. Till then, stay tuned.
