The mid-range smartphone segment is where everything’s happening. It’s one of the fastest-growing segments in South Africa and companies are doubling down to bring the customers the best in technology at a reasonable price (reasonable in this context being between R7 000 - R10 000).
Huawei is chugging along as usual, Apple is reportedly gearing up to launch another budget iPhone, and Samsung, we have the new entries into their Galaxy A-Series.
The phones in question are the A71 and it’s baby brother and my review unit, the A51, decked out in Prism Crush Blue (it’s also available in a very suave black).
For R6 999 you get quite a bit of phone. The 6.5-inch Super AMOLED Infinity-O display dominates the whole front face of the device and thanks to a 1080x2400 resolution, the shapes are refined and the colours are vivid.
This is a phone size that will fit comfortably in most hands and the rounded edges help a lot in that regard. Samsung opting to continue offering mid-tier phones with a headphone jack is smart and practical, something which they are starting to not do with their higher-end devices.
The practicality continues after you’ve logged in. Samsung has made impressive improvements to their operating system and the Samsung One UI is very easy to get a grasp on.
The 48MP Rear Quad camera setup is great during the day, less so during the night. Photo: Supplied
Everything is where you expect it to be and there’s a couple of intuitive software additions. Edge Panels and Lighting allows for you to access your favourite apps and a few clever functions by just one swipe, and your notifications have a bit more flare to them with some colourful animations. 128 gigs internal storage is typical in this range, and carrying over from their flagship devices is the fingerprint sensor located beneath the display. As someone who grew to hate drawing a pattern every time I wanted to check my Whatsapp, this is a great feature, and it’s pretty reliable.
That all said, 4 gigs of RAM is not proving to be enough with this phone’s user performance. Everything from waking it up from sleep mode to swiping left and right seems to be a tiny bit slow. It just doesn’t respond as quickly as you may expect it to. If this is something that really bothers you, rather swing for the 6 gigs in the Galaxy A71.
The camera is perfectly fine. Mid-tier phones will always have their limitations and in the case of the A51, it’s when you’re zooming in on something that they’ll start to show.
The 48MP Rear Quad camera setup is especially good when in normal and pro settings, and it takes exceptionally good panorama shots. Same goes for the 32MP selfie camera. The ability to shoot 4K video helps the argument that Samsung phones are a great option for content creators, but then darkness falls and decent pictures of the night are limited to wide shots.
A photo taken during the day in Pro setting. Photo: Sam Spiller
A picture taken at night in Night setting. Photo: Sam Spiller
Proving to be the biggest downfall of the A51, apart from the stunted performance, is the battery. A full charge only lasted a maximum of 36 hours for me. A variety of factors may contribute to this such as the display and the CPU, but it can be problematic for those on the move such as myself. The A51 is equipped with Fast Charging, meaning that said battery can be pumped up relatively quickly within an hour, but the power usage remains a letdown.
Flushed with so many features comes the result that the Galaxy A51 doesn’t necessarily excel at anything specific. A lot of essential components have been reduced to mediocrity in the pursuit of packing everything in. The biggest headline is the display, along with the OS which continues to be one of the most user-friendly and customisable.
@samuelspiller