At the end of last year, Samsung launched new Galaxy A7, Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A3 smartphones. Today we will review the Samsung Galaxy A5 smartphone and find out whether this Samsung smartphone is worth buying or not. What are the pros and cons of this new Samsung smartphone?
Look and design
As you might have seen in Samsung’s TV advertisement, the company has promoted the metal and glass design of Galaxy A5 and this is its special feature. Simply put, this Samsung smartphone gives the feel of a premium smartphone like Galaxy S6. This Samsung handset has curved Gorilla Glass 4 on the front and back, which makes it look and feel better than its previous generation phones.
Talking about the front of the phone, this smartphone has a 5.2 inch Full HD Super AMOLED display which looks great even in sunlight with vibrant colors. The edges of the A5 are very thin which gives it an edge-to-edge look.
Like every Samsung phone, the navigation buttons are in the same place. The fingerprint sensor works from the home button. But there is no LED in this smartphone for incoming alert. The headphone socket, micro-USB and speaker grill are given at the bottom.
The Galaxy A5 smartphone (codenamed A510FD) was launched in India with dual-SIM slot and microSD card. The SIM tray on the right side has a primary SIM and microSD slot while the secondary SIM slot is given on the top of the phone.
When you buy the Samsung Galaxy A5 smartphone, you get a 10 watt charger, a headset and a SIM ejector tool. Samsung has done a great job on the design and design of this smartphone, which makes it look like the flagship smartphone Galaxy S6. However, due to the glass on the back of the phone, it is a bit slippery to hold. The lack of LED notifications in the phone is quite annoying.
Specifications and software
Samsung has not only improved the design of the phone this time but also the performance. The Galaxy A5 (2016) sold in India has an octa-core Exynos 7580 processor. Samsung has recently used the same processor in its mid-range smartphone Galaxy J7. However, the processor given in the Galaxy A5 works with slight improvement (runs at 1.6 GHz and supports 6LTE).
While benchmarking the phone, we got decent results but the GPU figures were a bit low.
The phone has 16 GB of internal storage with 2 GB of RAM. The storage can be expanded up to 128 GB with the help of a microSD card. Apart from this, the phone has connectivity features like dual-band Wi-Fi B / G / N, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, FM radio and USB OTG. A5 supports 4G in both SIM slots, although the phone does not support VoLTE.
While it is a bit disappointing that the Galaxy A5 (2016) comes with Android Lollipop, it seems that Samsung was saving Marshmallow for its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S7.
Apps like Samsung’s S Health and My Galaxy come pre-installed in the handset. The Ultra Data Saving Mode given in the J-series is also present in the Galaxy A5. Apart from this, many popular apps from Microsoft and Google also come pre-installed in the phone.
Performance
The general performance of the phone is quite good. But if you keep many apps open in the background at the same time, then the phone becomes a bit slow. But apart from this, we never saw any problem in the phone. The phone does get hot while playing games and using the camera a lot, but it runs smoothly without any problem. We also did not see any problem in call quality on 4G network.
The fingerprint sensor works but it is not as fast as the sensors in many recently launched phones. Despite 16GB of internal storage, only 11GB is available for user use. But this is not a big problem as there is expandable storage.
The bright display makes the multimedia playback experience great. Full-HD videos and high bitrate files also play well. The sound quality of the phone is quite good due to the mono speaker.
With optical image stabilization and large aperture f/1.9, the phone’s 13-megapixel camera gives you excellent detailed landscape photos in daylight. The color reproduction of the photos is quite good. Photos taken in artificial and low light look decent even when zoomed in. Overall the camera quality is good.
Videos are also quite good in full-HD resolution. With the 5 megapixel camera of aperture f/1.9, detailed selfies can be taken even indoors. Pictures can be taken quickly from the phone but the focus is very slow. The same problem is seen in video recording as well. The lack of phase detection autofocus is clearly visible.
The camera on the Galaxy A5 smartphone is not as good as the camera on Samsung’s flagship smartphone.
battery life
The new Galaxy A5 has a powerful 2900mAh battery. Although this has increased the thickness and weight of the phone, it does not matter because in our video loop test, the battery of the phone lasted for 14 hours and 42 minutes continuously. During normal use, we were able to use the phone for one and a half days without charging. The phone has adaptive quick charging technology and we charged the battery from 0 to 50 percent in just half an hour.
Our verdict
Samsung has done a great job with the Galaxy A5 smartphone. With improvements in its build and design, the Galaxy A series has now come very close to the flagship S series. However, the company has priced the phone completely wrong, which makes this phone unrecommended for purchase. The retail price of the Galaxy A5 2016 is around Rs 28,500, which is quite high considering all its specifications.
Galaxy A5 will be successful only if Samsung improves its price. According to us, you will get many other better smartphones with all these specifications and features for a price of Rs 20,000. The build quality, design, display and battery life of Galaxy A5 are very good. We also liked the camera quality but the phone could have been designed in a better way. But we do not understand the reason for not providing notification LED in the phone.
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