Author: Hanzen Mendoza
Rating: 5
Review: Battery life is outstanding! The screen is brilliant! Currently using it and it hasn't failed me once! Completely affordable! Lovely size for my tiny hands, not too big, not too small (might be a tad small for someone who's got big hands), this phone has been my rock! I would recommend!
Author: antom
Rating: 3
Review: I recently replaced my three-year old other-brand Android phone with this similar price-band new Samsung phone. I chose this phone because of the many great reviews it has received. After using it for a few weeks, here is my review. Battery - Reasonable The battery life is okay, rather than spectacular. With moderate use I can easily get a full day from the battery with 20% or more to spare. However, to achieve this I have reduced the screen refresh rate from 120Hz to 60Hz. Camera – Disappointing Overall, I rate the camera as disappointing. While it can take occasional great shots, and the optics and sensor seem good, with some shots revelling good clarity and detail, in practice it is inferior to the camera on my old phone. Don’t get me wrong, the camera is capable of some good shots, particularly from still scenes in good light. But it is hit and miss in many situations. I find the camera slow to focus and adjust, so I frequently miss dynamic photo opportunities. Shots are often out of focus or have poor colour tone, with reds being over-vibrant or skies and backgrounds being over exposed and whitened. The camera is not great at photographing people in anything but bright light. Shots that look decent when shown small on the phone's screen show some hideous tone corrections and mottling when blown up slightly. As already mentioned, the focusing is often slightly off, resulting in blur. The camera has the usual manual control and pro mode options. However whereas my old phone had a max exposure of 30 seconds, allowing me to get some good shots of the night sky including meteors and satellite trails, the Samsung only offers a max of 10 seconds. Whereas my previous phone continuously took photos that impressed, so far this Samsung phone has occasionally impressed, but too often has been a let down. Screen and inbuilt speakers - Good The sound from the inbuilt speakers is pretty good for a phone. And the screen itself gives a clear, vibrant picture. Cast audio quality – Mediocre I like to listen to audio through high quality Bluetooth earphones or external speakers. Although this Samsung phone has features such as Dolby Atmos, I find the sound broadcast quality mediocre - not bad, but a tad inferior to my previous phone, which gave a richer, more pleasurable, sound. No matter how many tweaks I make to the system settings or adjustments to the system equaliser, music sounds a bit flat. This is most noticeable with high-end connected Bluetooth headphones. Storage - Reasonable The ability to extend storage with an SD card is a good feature. I have added a Samsung 500GB card without problem. The phone allows this to be encrypted for security. One thing to note here is that some apps will not be able to use external storage, so, whilst adding an SD card gives you extra storage for some situations, it does not totally prevent the internal phone storage from filling. Operation - Reasonable Whilst I have not encountered any major failures with the operation and the Samsung interface, it has quite a few frustrations. Samsung preinstall quite a few if their own apps, some of these seem pretuned for pop up notifications. The first couple of weeks of using the phone was a frustrating experience of reactively trying to turn these off. Sometimes (in addition to other annoyances such as the camera shutter sound) turning things on and off has proved more complicated that merely adjusting notification settings in the Settings > Apps menu. So far I have not encountered any difficulties in using the in-screen fingerprint reader. It is a little slower than the reader on my old phone, but the speed is still adequate. Phone call quality is okay. Bizarrely, the ringer loudness and call speaker loudness were set to low when I first used the phone. I missed a couple of call as a result. Fixing these wasn’t straightforward initially, but after digging around in the on-line help pages I managed to fix things. Overall - Disappointing Overall, Samsung has a good reputation for lengthy support for software and security updates, so hopefully this phone should offer some future proofing. I like the expandable storage, and the screen is good. However, I value a good camera and music casting. And on this phone both of these are disappointing in use. Whether these are things that Samsung will be able to improve with future software updates remains to be seen. However, at present, having used this phone for a few weeks, I don’t feel it is one that I would recommend.