Hello dear members,
I think it's high time I post a review about my Samsung Galaxy A50.I've been using this phone for 5 months and now,and these are my thoughts regarding the same...
Design:
After a long time,Samsung finally managed to design a great mid-range phone...Now I'm of the opinion that the most of the J series devices design sucked because it was too old,But with Galaxy A50,Samsung really designed it well...For instance,the phone has excellent weight distribution so it simply doesn't feel as heavy for a phone which has a 4,000 mah battery...A part of the same can also be contributed to the fact that the device is built predominantly out of plastic, which is good as far as durability is concerned as plastic is more resistant to drops than glass...And as a famous Youtuber puts it,Glass is glass and glass can break....Im also proud of the fact that Galaxy A50 passed the infamous durability test conducted by Jerryrigeverythin....However,using the phone without a case is out of question as it can get smudged up pretty fast...
The Type-C port is great as there is no wrong way to insert the plug into it...
I also liked the fact that you're getting a fast charger in the box along with the case which is great,but what **bleep** is the fact that earphones bundled are just awful...It feels out of place inside the box of a phone costing ₹21,490...Samsung should have bundled proper in-ear earphones.....
Display:
The 6.4 inch Super-AMOLED display is one of the show stopper hear and it really is stunning and great to look at....Once you start using a phone with a good quality AMOLED display,its painful to go back to LCD screens...The display on the Galaxy A50 is bright and contrasty and you have various options for your preferred screen mode...Also,there's Always On Display,which is the cherry on the cake...
Always On Display:
That awesome screen:
Performance and battery life:
A quick disclaimer:My A50 is the 6GB RAM variant,so the opinion might vary for those using the 4GB RAM variant...
The Galaxy A50 is powered by the Octa-core Exynos 9610 processor.It has 4 Cortex A73 cores clocked at 2.3 Ghz and 4 Cortex A53 cores clocked at 1.6 Ghz.The GPU is an ARM Mali G72 MP3...So performance shouldn't be much of an issue....However,using the A50 in its default settings can lead to slowdown due to the animations...So I suggest to enable the developer mode and reduce the animation scale to 1x to 0.5x.Also,enabling the reduce animations toggle in the settings will even increase the snappiness of the device..In terms of RAM management I didn't face any issues...The phone also handled games pretty well...I didn't test with PUBG,but I ran Real Racing 3,and it ran without any issues...The phone got warm near the earpiece when playing high end games,but that's about it....Also idle battery drain was very low,thanks to the optimisation between the SoC and the software...
The 4,000 mah battery can easily last a working day with heavy usage-the phone's connected to mobile data only and apps are allowed to run in the background.However,battery life has sort of deteriorated after the November update...I think it might have interfered with the battery algorithms and hopefully,Samsung will correct the same with a software update....In terms of charging time,it took the phone 1 hour and 50 minutes to get from 1% to 100% which is not bad for a 4,000 mah battery with a 15 watt Adaptive Fast Charger....
Elephant in the room:the fingerprint sensor
The in-display fingerprint sensor is highly inconsistent in the Galaxy A50....When I brought the device on back July,it took like about 2 seconds to unlock the phone...It got a lot better after the software update in August,which improved the speed and accuracy of the fingerprint sensor....However the November update messed it up royally and it's a pain to re-register the fingerprints...It takes like 20 to 30 attempts to complete the enrollment of fingerprints and honestly its tiring....Samsung really screwed up the fingerprint sensor....Big time...And frankly its disappointing...For everybody's information, I'm using a tempered glass on my A50 since the time I brought it,and it has never interfered in registration of fingerprints till the November update....I'm sad that Samsung didn't test the update properly.....
Software:
My Galaxy A50 is running in the version listed below:
In layman's terms, its One UI 1.1 based on Android 9...Typical of Samsung, there's a whole lot of customisation options available and you can tweak the phone exactly to your liking...There's Bixby,Samsung Pay Mini and so on....The night mode is really cool,so is the Goodlock app...The software is really built for One-handed use and there is a sense of cohesiveness and sophistication which is not present in most [f the Chinese OEMs.....Till now,security patches have been delivered almost regularly and there have been no major issues for me,other than the ones stated before...In short,Samsung really pulled a rabbit out of the hat with One UI...I do wish options like Edge panels,edge lighting etc come to A50 wIth One UI 2.0....
Cameras:
An excellent pair/trifecta of cameras are an important factor on a smartphone...And the Galaxy A50 is armed with 3 rear camera-A 25 megapixel main camera (Sony IMX 576 sensor) with f 1.7 aperture,an 8 megapixel ultra wide camera having 123⁰ FOV with f 2.2 aperture and a 5 megapixel depth sensor with f 2.2 aperture.The front camera is a 25 megapixel camera (SAMSUNG ISOCELL S5K2X5 sensor) with f 2.0 aperture.The full specs are given below:
Suffice to say,the Galaxy A50 performs really well in favourable lighting....HDR works well and images look true-to-life.They also pack in a lot of details..The macro shots,especially has a nice background blur,thanks to f 1.7 aperture.
Low light performance is fine but not great...There's some grains visible on zooming in....However the Night mode which was introduced in July update helps to brighten up the scenes well...
Selfies also look great thanks to the 25 megapixel front camera...Its wide to disable the beauty mode,though as it makes you look artificial and quite a bit of details are lost.
Verdict:
The Galaxy A50 is a great mid-range phone and Samsung has really stepped up its game in 2019...Hope it continues even in 2020...The A50 has the might of Samsung's brand power as well as,for the first time,a really good software too...A50 is a phone for those who are not heavy gamers wanting a great software experience with the after sales support of Samsung....Trust me,this is a no-brainer purchase....
Please like my post if you feel it has helped you and I'm looking forward for suggestions to improve.
(P.S:The sample images have been taken from Munnar)
(I'll be putting the sample of night time shots in a separate post as ive exceeded my limit of 10 images per post...)
Jerryrigeverything's durability test of Samsung Galaxy A50: https://youtu.be/PLRhzJ-jlKI
Tear down video:https://youtu.be/J5AFoS5KXrc
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