We really like the Samsung Galaxy Y Pro Android-powered smartphone for one simple reason: its price. Although it is incredibly cheap at just R1 499, it doesn’t have the nastiness that so often accompanies budget handsets. For the price you get a physical keyboard, combined with a full-colour touch display.

With its physical Qwerty keyboard, the Galaxy Y Pro looks distinctly like a BlackBerry, no doubt a deliberate move considering its youthful target audience.

Running version 2.3 of Google’s mobile operating system — commonly known as Gingerbread — the Galaxy Y Pro offers all of the functionality of a far more expensive Android device, albeit with lesser hardware.

Sure, the camera is only 3,1 megapixels and there’s no front-facing camera on offer, the processor is a mere 832MHz, and the puny 160MB of internal storage means you can’t even take or download a picture without first inserting a microSD card, but in actual use these are minor gripes. Really, the Galaxy Y Pro does just about everything you’d expect from an Android smartphone.

With 320×240 pixels of resolution and a pixel density of roughly 154 pixels per inch, the Galaxy Y Pro’s 2.6-inch screen isn’t the brightest or sharpest on the market by any measure, but it makes up for this by having a capacitive-touch screen.

Touch-screen functionality, combined with an optical trackpad, make it incredibly easy to use, and the accelerometer — which allows the screen to rotate automatically — makes reading longer blocks of text or browsing Web pages far easier.

Like most new phones, the Galaxy Y Pro connects to devices and charges via microUSB, and it includes other standard features you’d expect on a phone of its class, including an FM radio, support for major video and audio file formats and a free document and image viewer and editor. There are also a few features you’d wouldn’t expect on a device cost this much, including a GPS and Google’s voice search and voice command support.

One of the key features of the Galaxy Y Pro is its Qwerty keyboard. There’s a small gap between each key, the keys are evenly spaced and, with the exception of some of the bottom row of keys that house things like the spacebar and alt keys, they’re all the same size.

The keys are plastic and make a faint clicking sound when pressed that is unlikely to bother anyone accustomed to physical keyboards. The keyboard is also backlit, but turns off when unused so that if one is browsing a Web page or reading an e-mail, battery life is conserved as much as possible.

In normal usage, with both Wi-Fi and 3G turned, on the Galaxy Y Pro easily lasts two days and, at just under 109g, it’s also not going to weigh down your pocket.

The resemblance it bears to the BlackBerry, and particularly the BlackBerry Curve, is striking. And it’s in a similar price bracket, even though it offers a touch screen, which its BlackBerry equivalent does not.

Overall, the Galaxy Y Pro is a phenomenal device simply because it manages to pack so much functionality into such a cheap package without too many compromises. Frankly, for the price, it’s almost unbeatable. — Craig Wilson, TechCentral