Design, Features, and Quality Call
Although it is not a "mini" in the name, LTE will prevail easily pass for a miniaturized version of the Samsung Galaxy S5. It's a good size for one-handed use, but relatively squat 5.16 by 2.68 by 0.35 inches and 4.94 ounces. Actually I prefer the matte finish and plastic-covered metal edge to fake bandage-like texture fake-S5 and glitzy chrome.
The 4.5-inch, 800-by-480-pixel TFT LCD seem both dull and muted adjacent sharper, punchier 960-by-540 LCD Moto E that. Rather than the over-the-top color saturation we're used to from Samsung, all appear a bit washed out. Sites of text-heavy look somewhat pixelated, but not significantly more so than the LG tribute. Maximum brightness is at the low end, though, making it difficult to use outdoors.
Boost phones connect to the nationwide Sprint network, and supports both 3G CDMA (800/850 / 1900MHz) and Tri-band Spark Sprint LTE (850/1900 / 2500MHz) prevail. That's great if you live in an area with strong Sprint LTE coverage. If not, expect your downloads to slow down to a crawl over the outdated CDMA network. Call quality is about average in my testing. The earpiece can not stand to be louder, while transmitting through the mic is mostly clean, with some occasional static on the line. The speakerphone is not quite strong enough for noisier environments, and the maximum number of items to be a chaotic mess. Noise cancellation is hit or miss, dispensing with lower gibberish, but struggling with random noises of the street.
In areas without LTE coverage, you'll want to stay with 802.11b / g / n Wi-Fi, but even stuck with the slower 2.4GHz band. Rounding out the connectivity options are Bluetooth 4.0 and GPS radios, who both worked fine.
Like Moto E, 64-bit prevail processor Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 user, clocked at 1.2GHz with 1GB of RAM. Benchmarks are in line with Moto E, while scores graphics get a slight boost thanks to a lower resolution. Everything moves along at a reasonable clip, but overdrawn animation Samsung may stutter sometimes, and jumping between multiple apps running will also slow things down.
Prevail runs Android 4.4.2, with Samsung TouchWiz UI on top. It is the older, more swollen skin that is not familiar with S5 users, rather than the slimmed down, more stylish TouchWiz Galaxy seen S6 $ 679.92 on T-Mobile. That's to be expected, though, and even with relatively dated design elements, Samsung adds enough useful functions to make things of value. Ultra Power Saving mode, for example, makes its way from S5 to prevail, which offers extended battery life through the skin down to the basic functionality apps.
8GB of built-in storage, 4.95GB is available to users outside of the box. That's actually more than you get in Moto E Boost, which runs a near-stock version of Android, so kudos to Samsung for the maintenance of the software load small. You still get a large helping of Boost and third-party bloatware, but most of the worst offenders can uninstall, leaving the small number of apps that can only disable.
On a battery rundown test, in which we streamed a video on YouTube over LTE with the screen brightness set to max, the triumph lasted 5 hours, 37 minutes. Compare with 6 hours of Moto E, 7 minutes in the same test.