We announced earlier in the month that the Samsung Galaxy Core Prime, model reference SM-G360H/DS, started selling in Indian retail stores earlier this month for 9,599 rupees, about $150 or £100 and we’ve news today that the device is now officially being carried by Samsung’s India eStore but at the slightly higher price of 9,700 rupees. For your money, Samsung will give you a mid-range device based around a 4.5-inch screen with a rather low 480 by 800 pixel resolution. There’s a quad core 1.2 GHz processor equipped with 1 GB of RAM and the device comes with 8 GB of on-board memory, so customers won’t need to fill that MicroSD slot (which supports cards of up to 64 GB capacity) if they’re to make use of the device’s 5 MP rear camera, or 2 MP front facing unit. The Core Prime is a 3G-only, dual-SIM device and doesn’t support any 4G LTE networking at all, but does come with a FM radio including RDS plus WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and GLONASS. There’s a 2,000 mAh battery, which given the low specification of the device, should provide solid battery life. The Core Prime runs Android 4.4 KitKat under Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay and is available in Charcoal Grey, White and Silver colors. Samsung have also tailored the device for India as it supports fourteen Indian languages out of the box.
The Core Prime offers customers a much cheaper way into the Galaxy range and they’ve taken the right shortcuts. Many customers won’t find the 4.5-inch, 480 by 800 resolution display pixelated (it’s probably no coincidence that this is similar to Android One’s screen size and resolution) and in any case, Samsung have a habit of keeping color saturation high, which makes the display vibrant in the hand. Having a relatively low screen resolution also helps battery life, because the processor and GPU have much less work to do moving pixels around. The Galaxy Core is similar in some respects to Samsung’s flagship 2011 handsets but with a bigger battery and more modern internals. We’ve no word on when the Galaxy Core Prime might be updated to Android 5.0 Lollipop, which could bring about further improvements to battery life. But over to our readers: what do you think to Samsung’s new low end handset for the Indian market? Are you interested in one? If you are not in India, would you be interested in the Core Prime in your home market? Let us know in the comments below.