This paper concerns with faster positioning of one degree-of-freedom (1DOF) mechanical systems with friction and actuator saturation. A very simple but quite effective saturated relay proportional-derivative (PD) control is proposed. The proposed control is conceived within the framework of nonlinear PD methodology. It is accomplished by adding a relay position error for friction compensation to the saturated PD control law. For faster transient with bounded input, a saturated nonlinear function is introduced. Lyapunov's direct method is employed to prove global asymptotic positioning. The appealing advantages of the proposed control are that it is fairly easy to construct without involvement of any modeling parameter and has the ability to avoid the actuator saturation. Numerical example and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and improved performance of the proposed approach.