Review: Samsung Galaxy Mega 5.8 Duos

In case you’re on a holiday or spending a weekend away, you have the option of switching off one of the two SIMs that you have loaded on to your phone. The sync feature on the Galaxy Mega 5.8 works just like it did with the Grand - connecting Facebook and both your SIM cards when it comes to contacts. So basically, your Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook contacts can all be merged into one entry. You can merge up to five contacts together to make sure there are no unnecessary repeats on your list. Clicking on any name, gives you the option of calling, SMSing or video-calling that person. So, those used to one-touch calling will have to get used to always picking from these options, whenever they want to get in touch with someone.

The problem – which we are increasingly encountering with big phones – is that you can’t access the Home button with a comfortable, natural extension of the thumb. I almost always ended up moving my hand down to access any of the physical buttons built into the handset.

Although, the phone didn’t exactly lag during use, there were times when it took just a couple of seconds extra to open an app – launching the camera or switching from the live camera to the photo gallery. These niggles don’t really annoy you much though. We tried applications ranging from the TouristEye to StumbleUpon to Skype almost everyday and in about a week, the handset froze on us just once. The smartphone runs on a 1.4GHz Cortex A9 Dual Core Processor, the likes of which were used in the previous-gen Galaxy S3 and it is a tell-all in the performance benchmarking test that the Galaxy 5.8 Duos scored about 3,779 points, way below the likes of the one-year old HTC One X that scored about 4,897 points.

The camera on the Galaxy Mega 5.8 Duos is an 8-megger which gave us pretty decent results most of the time. The pics taken in fairly-lit conditions were almost completely devoid of grain. Pics snapped outdoors too turned out pretty life-like. Those of you looking for a decent camera on a smartphone won’t be disappointed.

                                

I streamed a bunch of new HD movie trailers on IMDb and YouTube and the sound quality on the smartphone turned out to be pretty impressive. You might not need speakers if it’s just you and another person sitting and watching a movie or listening to some music to distract yourselves.

The thing with the Samsung Galaxy Mega 5.8 is that it’s way too reminiscent of the recently-launched Galaxy Grand Duos. That might not be a problem for first-time budget-Galaxy users, but on a larger scale it just comes across as a bigger, newer, slightly pricier version of the Grand. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing, considering it sports a good mobile camera, bigger screen, and a fast processor at a decent price tag. Make sure you buy a nice, protective case to go with it!

Priced At 24500/-