Samsung has a clear goal this year to win back some of the market share that has been lost thanks to emerging Chinese competitors like Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo. To that end, the company launched the affordable Galaxy M series in January, and now, we have the first set of 2019 Galaxy A-series phones. Samsung announced the Galaxy A30 and A50 smartphones in India on Monday.
Surely enough, Samsung is very much looking to make its Galaxy A-series phones look and feel as close to the flagship Galaxy S-series as possible. The new Galaxy A30 and A50 come with Infinity-U waterdrop displays and unique glasstic designs, and one of them even gets triple cameras and an in-display fingerprint sensor as well. While the Galaxy A30 and A50 are yet to go on sale in India, I did find them casually being displayed at MWC 2019, and I happened to check them out for a bit. Here's what I thought.
The Galaxy A30 and A50 look quite similar to each other, especially from the front. Both sport droplet notches thanks to Samsung's new Infinity-U display. There's a tiny notch on top, while the bezel around it and on the sides are noticeably thin. The chin, however, is noticeable and not quite as thing as the chin on the Galaxy S10. The rest of the front is all screen, and they look really good, at least on first glance.
Both the devices offer 6.4-inch FHD+ Super AMOLED displays and these do look big. The phones in general are pretty large and may not be easy for one-handed use, had they been running on the old Experience UI. But the Galaxy A30 and A50 run on the latest One UI based on Android Pie, which is great to see. One UI is all about making it easier to use large phones, and the new Galaxy phones are proof of that. As most action buttons are on the bottom half of the display, reaching the keys was not difficult. The displays on the Galaxy A30 and A50 look vibrant and rich with colours. One UI offers redesigned icons with new colour palettes. The displays do look good for watching videos, at least from the few quick videos I was able to watch on YouTube. We would be able to say more on the displays one the devices go on sale in India.
There are a few key differences between the two devices. For one things, the Galaxy A30 comes with dual cameras, while the A50 gets a triple camera setup. The A30 gets a rest-mounted fingerprint sensor, while the A50 gets an optical in-display sensor. Beyond that, bother these phones are largely the same. The also come in some attractive colours like black, white, blue and coral or red, which reminds me of the iPhone XR. I checked out the Galaxy A30 in black and it shimmered quite a lot depending on how you view it under light. The A50 also comes in black but it gets a rainbow-coloured shimmer on the back. Bothie the phones come with a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is nice to see, and a USB Type-C port. Both the devices also house a beefy 4,000mAh battery, which should offer a full day of battery life, but we cannot comment on that just yet. Notably, the Galaxy A30 and A50 both support 15W fast charging.
Both the Galaxy A30 and A50 tout impressive cameras. The A30 gets a dual camera system that includes a 16MP f/1.7 sensor and a 5MP ultra wide-angle camera. Meanwhile, the Galaxy A50 gets a 25MP f/1.7 sensor along with a 5MP depth and 8MP ultra wide-angle cameras. I was only able to capture a few photos indoors and average lighting, but the cameras seem to do a good job at capturing detail. The Galaxy A50 offers more ways to capture a scene, and it also adds that the phones will support Live Focus mode. The Galaxy A30 is powered by the 1.8GHz Exynos 7904 chipset, which is the same processor that powers the Galaxy M20 as well. It comes in two variants - 3GB/32GB and 4GB/64GB. The Galaxy A50 gets a 2.3GHz Exynos 9610 SoC and it also gets two variants - 4GB/64GB and 6GB/128GB. In my limited time with the devices, I found the user interface smooth on both the devices app load time was pretty fast as well. We will have a better idea about the performance in our in-depth review so do stay tuned for that.
