Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.
Looking at the Samsung Galaxy Fame, it is immediately obvious that media consumption was not at the fore of the designers' minds. The smaller screen being too small, with a lower resolution, makes it a poor choice for watching anything other than short YouTube clips.
Plus the tiny 1.95GB of storage available after Android and others have taken up a chunk of the 4GB memory is uninspiring, though it can be expanded via the phone's micro SD card slot or cloud storage via the Dropbox app.
Music
The Music app is again another basic affair, with some of Samsung's touches popping up. The most notable special touch is the Music Square.
This is a very peculiar piece of tech, one that we have seen before in other phones but that we have very high reservations about nevertheless.
In simple terms, the Samsung Galaxy Fame will sort your music by its mood, so that you can select the appropriate square to match the way you're feeling, and have the phone play songs to match.
Open the music player and you're greeted with a rather fancy stock Android player.
This also brings up a little bar in the notifications area, as it has on Samsung Galaxy phones for years. From here you can play/pause and skip tracks.
We were a little disappointed that plugging in headphones doesn't call up media options, however, given that it is something that we saw on the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Samsung S3 Mini.
Samsung's music player is relatively well equipped to play media, with more file types than you can shake a stick at being supported. Samsung list these as MP3, OGG, FLAC, 3GP, MP4, M4A, IMY, MIDI, AMR, AWB, WMA and AAC (ADTS).
There is also a widget to accompany it, which again we were glad to see. Our only slight disappointment was the inability to control it all directly from the lock screen.
Within the Samsung Galaxy Fame's music player are the usual shuffle, skip and repeat functions.
The music player also offers equaliser settings that have been put into a Sound Alive screen, which includes quite a long list of settings, such as Pop, Rock, Jazz through to Virtual 7.1 and Concert Hall. There's even a custom setting, should you really feel the need to go to town with it.
You'd hope that with all of these settings, then, that the Samsung Galaxy Fame would not have trouble with sound quality. We weren't left disappointed.
Sound out of the rear speaker is rather loud, although it can get a little tinny at the highest levels. Plug in a decent set of headphones and the sound quality goes up about five notches. Obviously the quality of your headphones will play a part, but Samsung has got the sound right with Fame.
Video
When it comes to video, we were a little shocked to find that the Samsung Galaxy Fame didn't wish to play our test video. We've found on a few of the lower end handsets that we are greeted with a warning on the desktop showing that the phone might not be able to play the video, but until now they have all managed it anyway.
Thankfully there is the option to convert it, however the estimated conversion time of the 90 minute video was around an hour. We left the video to convert, but in its new WMV format, the Samsung Galaxy Fame was still unable to play the file.
Samsung claims that the Galaxy Fame can play MPEG4, 3GPP, MKV and WebM file types, yet our test video was originally in MP4 format.
The video player itself is a basic affair, offering play, pause and manual selection of timing placements. Don't expect to see pop-up play on the Samsung Galaxy Fame, although with a screen that small we're not entirely surprised or bothered.
Radio and photos
Samsung has equipped the Galaxy Fame with an FM radio, however. We found that it had some trouble picking up some of the stations that we expected it to, which was a little disheartening. The app itself is well designed, again being perfectly functional.
The Gallery app is again another functional app.
Tiles show each folder, with the Samsung Galaxy Fame able to pull in our Picasa/Google+ photo albums, though not our Facebook shots.
Editing photos taken on the Samsung Galaxy Fame is, unfortunately, not possible.
