Samsung Galaxy Fame review: In the spotlight

Stock gallery with a pinch of TouchWiz

The Samsung Galaxy Fame comes with the default Jelly Bean Gallery which, as you'd imagine, has been treated to some TouchWiz flavor. It opens up in Album view, where rather than the familiar stacks, the app uses a grid of photos, two to a line.

Besides Album view, photos can also be sorted by Location and Time.

The Gallery app

Getting inside an album displays all the photos in a rectangular grid, which is horizontally scrollable. When you try to scroll past the last image, the photo thumbnails will tilt to indicate that you're at the end of the list.

When viewing a single photo, you'll find several sharing shortcuts and a delete button above the photo, while below is a line of small thumbnails of all other photos in the album. You can tap those small thumbnails to move to other images or you can just swipe sideways.

Viewing a single photo • Simple editing options

The Gallery also supports highly customizable slideshows with several effects to choose from, as well as customizable music and speed. You can also highlight specific images to be included in the slideshow.

Music player with SoundAlive

The Galaxy Fame employs the same TouchWiz-ed music player as the Galaxy S III. Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing SoundAlive technology, which features 7.1 channel virtualization. The company also uses SoundAlive in some of their MP3 and Android-powered media players.

SoundAlive offers an extensive list of presets • creating a custom preset

The music is sorted into various categories and one of the options, called Music square, is quite similar to the SensMe feature of Sony Ericsson phones. It automatically rates a song as exciting or calm, passionate or joyful and places those tracks on a square (hence the name).

Music square creates automatic playlists based on your mood

From here, you can highlight an area of the square and the phone will automatically build a playlist of songs that matches your selection.

The music player benefits greatly from the TouchWiz UI

You can swipe the album art left and right to skip songs. You can also put the phone face down to mute the sound or place your palm over the screen to pause playback.

If you've enabled the Motion gestures, you can mute and pause a track by placing the phone face down.

Stripped-down video player with poor codec support

Samsung has put its very good default video player on the Samsung Galaxy Fame. It offers several view modes - thumbnail grid, list, and folders.The grid view shows static video thumbnails (unlike the handset's more powerful siblings, which animate the thumbnails).

Browsing the video gallery

The video player lets you choose between three view modes for how the video fits the screen (fit to screen, fill screen, 100% resolution). The SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology is available here too.

The video player has a simple interface but is quite capable

Unfortunately the video player has poor codec support, and wasn't able to play DivX and XviD files, nor anything above 480p resolution. For the files it does play, however, the video player lets you Auto play the next video, as well as enable SoundAlive.

Unfortunately, subtitle support was also missing, likely another sacrifice due to the weak chipset.

Tweaking the video playback

FM Radio with RDS, broadcast recording

The Galaxy Fame is equipped with an FM radio with RDS too. The interface is simple - there's a tuning dial and you can save as many as 12 stations as favorites. You can also play on the loudspeaker, but the headset is still needed as it acts as the antenna. You can record radio broadcasts as well.

The FM radio app

Decent audio quality

The Samsung Galaxy Fame did quite well in our audio quality test. The smartphone couldn't impress us with its volume levels in either of the test parts, but it had a decently clean output, which is more than good enough in this price range.

When connected to an active external amplifier the Fame managed excellent scores for signal-to-noise, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk, while IMD and frequency response were average. Total harmonic distortion was pretty good, though.

When we plugged in a pair of headphones, stereo crosstalk increased quite rapidly but the rest of the readings remained virtually unchanged. The volume levels were still low though, though.

Here are the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy Fame	+0.11, -1.11	-87.8	88.9	0.0033	0.130	-88.5
Samsung Galaxy Fame (headphones attached)	+0.15, -0.96	-87.6	88.8	0.064	0.160	-48.4
Samsung Galaxy Express	+0.37, -0.27	-82.5	82.3	0.0094	0.023	-82.0
Samsung Galaxy Express (headphones attached)	+0.49, -0.35	-81.6	81.5	0.028	0.089	-44.3
Sony Xperia E	+0.38, -2.08	-81.4	81.1	0.037	0.102	-80.5
Sony Xperia E (headphones attached)	+0.30, -0.94	-81.6	81.1	0.030	0.196	-56.2

Samsung Galaxy Fame frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.