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| The Samsung Galaxy Alpha that we reviewed earlier, was one of the first flagship devices to come built with a premium metal build. While both customers and critics alike loved the device, its price was a little on the higher side. Continuing the trend, Samsung recently launched the more affordable line of devices, which includes the likes of Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5 and the Galaxy A7. |
| Combining a decent mix of hardware and software, these devices are priced in the sub-Rs. 20,000 to Rs. 30,000 price range. Selling at roughly Rs. 20,500, does the metal clad Samsung Galaxy A3 make a decent purchase? Let’s find out in our detailed review. |
Design and Build
| The Galaxy A3 is really impressive, right from the very first second you hold it. It’s sleek, lightweight and perfectly crafted. The diamond cut finish that we’ve seen in devices such as the iPhone, HTC One M7 and Galaxy Alpha is also present in the Galaxy A3. The premium metal frame with the unibody design adds to the aesthetic, pleasing look of the device. |
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| The design language and button layout is similar to other Samsung devices with some minor changes. The 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port, both are now placed at the bottom. The volume rocker on the left and the power / sleep button on the right, both are easily accessible. All thanks to its perfect screen size, the Galaxy A5 perfectly fits in one hand, making single-handed operation easier. |
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| On the right panel, you have two SIM card slots, where the second SIM card tray can either be used as a microSD card or a Nano SIM slot. Overall, we like the way Samsung has designed the Galaxy A3, every bit of it flaunts the rich and premium feel. |
Features
| Targeted towards the mid-range buyers, Samsung has ensured that the Galaxy A3 offers the best of both – premium design and good performance. You get a 4.7-inch Super AMOLED display running a resolution of 540 x 960 pixels. It’s protected with a layer of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 4 to keep scratches away. While the screen has good colour reproduction, we noticed the tone is a bit on the warmer side. Video clips and movies look really good on the screen. The whites are slightly yellowish, but the black levels are really deep. |
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| To run the show, the Galaxy A3 is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor, clocked at 1.2GHz. It’s got 1 GB of RAM and an Adreno 306 GPU, decent enough to run Android smoothly. The onboard storage on the device is a good 16GB with an option to add microSD cards up to 64GB. |
| Photography lovers will be pleased with the 8MP rear-facing camera along with an LED flash and a front-facing 5 MP unit, perfect for taking selfies and for making video calls. Usual set of connectivity options such as Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11n, FM Radio and A-GPS are present in the handset. Powered by a non-removable 1,900 mAh battery, Samsung claims the A3 can run for up to 12 hours on 3G networks. |
Performance
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| Irrespective of the hardware that a smartphone runs on, it’s the real world performance that really matters. After spending a couple of hours with the Galaxy A3, we were quite impressed. It ships with Android 4.4.4 (KitKat) out of the box and as usual, Samsung’s over-the-top customizations in the form of TouchWiz UI makes for a good OS and firmware combination. We liked that Samsung hasn’t added much bloatware as seen in some other devices. Screen Mirroring and Ultra Power Saving mode are among the prominent ones present here. The Galaxy A3 comes pre-installed with Google Play Music app which supports playback of MP3, AAC, WMA and FLAC files. The audio output on the handset’s speaker and on the headphones is suitably loud. While there is no equalizer to tweaks the music levels, the audio output is clear and detailed. |
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| The video player app supports full HD playback, which has become quite mainstream now. We didn’t face any issues playing full HD clips that we transferred on the device. Videos look good and vibrant on the screen. Gaming performance on the Galaxy A3 was super smooth. Right from casual games such as Subway Surfers and Temple Run 2, to the graphics-heavy Asphalt 8: Airborne, they ran without any hiccups. Heating has been the major problem that we’ve noticed in many smartphones, especially when recording videos or playing games. In the case of Galaxy A3, there was barely any heat, even after continuously playing for 10 minutes or more. Thumbs up to Samsung for that. We were impressed with the 8MP camera on the Samsung Galaxy A3. We clicked several photos and a couple of videos to test its performance. It does a good job in taking photos that are sharp, detailed and captures accurate colours. However, at 100 per cent crop, we noticed slight amount of graininess. Also, inside a well-lit room, the auto-white balance is a bit erratic at times. |
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| The front-facing camera is also pretty impressive. If you are someone one who takes a lot of selfies and make video calls, you’ll be pleased with its quality. It also supports photo capturing with gestures using your palm. It supports 1080p video recording. The clips that we recorded had good detail, both in terms of audio and picture quality. It’s perfect for recording casual videos at parties, events or when on a holiday. We tested the Galaxy A3’s performance by running some synthetic benchmarks, such as SunSpider JavaScript Benchmarking tool and AndroBench to gauge the read-write speeds of the internal storage. We also ran Antutu to check the overall performance and Quadrant Benchmark to determine its 3D graphics performance. |
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| As you can see in the above image, the scores are pretty good. We compared it with the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime which runs on the same hardware. In terms of performance, the Galaxy A3 shows some marginal improvements. |
Verdict
| Selling for around Rs. 20,500*, the Samsung Galaxy A3 is accurately priced, considering its hardware, software and build quality. The premium metal construction and unibody design adds to the luxury look and feel, while the performance is good enough to enjoy your smartphone experience. If you’re looking for a good Android smartphone in the Rs. 21,000 range, we’ll recommend the Samsung Galaxy A3. |
