Prestigio MultiPhone 5550 Duo

Prestigio might not be a name you have heard in the mobile space before, but sometimes the hidden gems are the best ones.. maybe. The 5550 Duo features a

Budget phones are a brilliant way to break into the market, but it often means compromising on certain features in order to hit that price point. Prestigio have released their MultiPhone 5550 DUO and we took a look to see just how it stacks up. Sporting a 5.5-inch IPS display at 1280x720, the 5550 DUO has a vibrant screen and great colours, even if the resolution is on the lower side. It is built using Gorilla Glass 3 so is very strong and resists some of the lighter scratches. Under the hood is a 1.3GHz Quad-Core MediaTek MTK6582 CPU with 1GB of RAM and a MALI-400MP GPU. The performance of the device was good and I didn't notice any stutters when multitasking or photo editing. The device did begin to struggle under graphically demanding games but for the most part it ran everything without too much issue. It comes with 8GB of internal memory, although only around 4GB of this was usable so an expandable memory card will be essential. The Prestigio MultiPhone 5550 DUO comes with a 13-Megapixel camera with a Sony IMX179 sensor which yields suitably satisfying photos. It's not going to replace your DSLR, but for a budget device it certainly does the job. The big feature here is the dual-SIM slot that is offered by the 5550 DUO which is brilliant if you need to run two plans, for work and personal for example. The supported bands are GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800, GSM 1900, WCDMA 900, WCDMA 2100. The 5550 DUO runs Android 4.4 KitKat and comes with a number of pre-installed applications from Prestigio themselves. Think of it as Samsung but without the TouchWiz - their applications are actually really useful and contain some nice content. The Prestigio 5550 DUO comes in navy blue, gunmetal, and graphite black and is available for £119 (around $170) from Prestigio.