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The Galaxy Y packs a 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery which can provide a quoted standby time of 540 hours (3G) and 6 hour 20 mins (3G) talk time.
We found after a days moderate use we still had some battery left, but a nightly charge is required if you're surfing the web and playing music frequently, due to the small nature of the juice pack.
Connectivity wise the Samsung Galaxy Y covers all the main bases which is impressive for a low-end phone; with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, A-GPS, Bluetooth 3.0 and a microUSB port all on board. It will even let you use it as a wireless hotspot, allowing you to use the phone network to browse the web on a laptop or another Wi-Fi enabled device.
Samsung's own desktop software Kies allows you to easily pull information on and off the Galaxy Y and the update to version 2.0 of the software has seen it become more stable and relatively user friendly. Kies allows you to easily see what content is on your phone and computer and transfer between the two without fuss.
There are very little in the way of additional apps pre-loaded onto the Galaxy Y, you don't even get Facebook and Twitter on a phone that sells itself to the youth of today.
What you do get is a bit of Samsung bloat-ware like the totally pointless Samsung Apps app – which is a greatly reduced Android Market - and the slightly more useful Social Hub and voice recorder and search apps.
Quickoffice finds its way on board allowing you to view and edit Word, Excel, Powerpoint and PDF documents; however on such a small screen you may not want to bother.
As with all Android devices the Galaxy Y comes with Google Maps pre-loaded and it is really the only map solution you need. Thanks to the A-GPS on board your Galaxy Y can also be your sat-nav, with Google's free turn by turn navigation also included. The small screen size can make it hard to view the directions on screen while driving, but it's not bad for a budget phone.
However the under-powered processor comes back to haunt you as maps are slow to load and the Galaxy Y takes a while to find your location - around 20 seconds in our test.
