Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 review: Double vision

The usual gallery

When viewing an album's contents, a right swipe will reveal a bar that lets you browse images in split-screen mode. You can also use a pinch gesture to adjust the size of the thumbnails.

The gallery naturally supports full-res images which results in a pleasant viewing experience thanks to the ample screen and sharp colors. There's even an Adobe RGB screen more for even more accurate color rendering.

The Gallery • Viewing an image

You can easily edit photos right in the Gallery itself. The photo editor gives you options like crop, rotate, color and effects, and even lets you write a note over the picture.

Editing an image • Slideshow options

The Gallery supports slideshows too, with several transition effects to choose from and customizable music and speed.

Editing an image • Slideshow options

A familiar TouchWiz music player with Adapt Sound

The TouchWiz music player is jam-packed with features and supports a wide variety of file formats, including .FLAC, .WAV, etc.

Music is sorted by the usual Artist, Album, Playlist, etc. but there's also Folder support that's quite handy as it saves you the need to sort songs into playlists like on so many other players. It can also search for content on other devices like PCs on the same network via its DLNA functionality.

Samsung Music player

The Now playing screen gives you the usual options as well lyrics support, and an AllShare shortcut for streaming content to other devices.

While listening to a song you can find music controls in the notification area and the lockscreen.

Music player options • controls in the notification area and lockscreen

Samsung has implemented several audio-enhancement features. The equalizer presets (called SoundAlive) are cleverly organized into a square similar to the Music Square. The presets balance between Treble and Bass, Vocals and Instrumental. You can also just tap the Auto toggle or enable a Tube amp effect.

The advanced view of the equalizer gives you a proper seven band equalizer you can tune manually and enable additional effects like 3D, Bass and Clarity.

Audio features don't end here. The Adapt sound is also available - it tests the performance of your headphones and tunes the equalizer based on that.

SoundAlive equalizer and Music Square options

The Galaxy Grand 2 comes equipped with an FM Radio with RDS. 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.

FM Radio

No DivX and AC3 codecs for the video player

The video player on the Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 features a thumbnail view by default, which on more advanced Samsung phones would be animated but on the Grand 2 are static.

The video player UI

The Samsung Galaxy Grand 2 offered a list of subtitles and let us pick. It scans all available subtitle files, so the file doesn't even have to have the same name as the video file as before.

Playing a video with subtitles

The video player is capable enough outside the glaring omission of the DivX video codec support and the AC3 audio codec support, both of which are subject to license fees so we guess they were scrapped out of economical reasoning.