Samsung has done well in the smartphone segment. They more or less have been ahead in the game for the past couple of years but recent competition have made things a bit more challenging. The biggest reason behind it is the design. Samsung for the past couple of years has introduced some interesting smartphones, but it hasn’t really pushed the envelope in terms of innovativeness in designs. Most of their smartphones in the past have had the same design and build quality. Samsung has now started working towards offering better looking smartphones with sturdier designs.
A couple of weeks ago, we had a close look at the Galaxy Alpha, Samsung’s first attempt at their new design strategy and we were very impressed by the aluminium frame and the premium look. Well, Samsung just hasn’t stopped there. They recently launched two more smartphones that sport the new metal design. They are called the Galaxy A3 and the A5. We have the A5 with us today. Looking at its hardware, the phone comes across as a mid-range smartphone, which is priced around Rs. 25,500. We take a close look to see if the phone is worth its price.
Design and build
It's great to see Samsung finally move away from the same old plastic design that was featured on so many of their smartphones. The A5 is Samsung's first ever full metal smartphone. The A5 looks premium and sophisticated, no doubt it's sturdy as well. The design looks pretty similar to the Alpha that we had reviewed a couple of weeks back. The metal casing on the edges is smooth and also easy to hold. The thickness is a mere 6.7mm and that certainly adds to the elegance of the design.
The 5-inch screen has a thin bezel around it. That makes accessing the entire 5-inch screen easy, while using the phone in one hand. Besides that, not much has changed. You'll still see the same Home, Back and the Recent apps buttons below the screen. The speaker grill is also like the one seen on earlier phones. The power and the volume keys are also placed at the same spot. They are quite thin and have a tactile feel too.
The phone is really light weighing just 143g. The back panel cannot be removed. It is made of metal as well, with a matte finish on it. It's not very grippy and the phone might just slip if you have sweaty hands. On the other hand, it's sturdy enough to handle a few bumps and knocks.
Features
For its price, the Samsung Galaxy A5 features decent hardware. It comes with a 1.2GHz quad-core processor along with 2GB of RAM. The phone has 8GB of internal storage and can be extended to 64GB with a memory card.
The 5-inch screen sports a HD resolution of 1280 x 720. It looks vibrant and sharp, like many of the high-end Samsung phones we’ve seen before. You can also change the look of the interface to your liking. The phone comes with a few beautiful themes that accentuate its screen quality and the design of the phone. It also supports Samsung’s multi-window feature that lets you run two applications simultaneously on it. You can even adjust the proportion of the apps on the screen. It’s a pretty helpful feature but not all the apps are compatible with it. The apps that work are those that have a Multi-window tag on them, which you’ll be able to see while scrolling through the Recent apps.
The A5 comes with a 13MP back camera and a 5MP front-facing camera, both of which look good, compared on what other smartphones in the same price range carry. The camera here though gets its edge because of the software. Samsung’s camera app comes packed with plenty of features. The back camera comes with nine different modes, out which most looked pretty helpful to us. The Shot & More mode, for example, lets you take multiple shots and choose the best one. You can also add creative effects to them if you like.
The front camera on the other hand is equipped with tools that make it easy to take beautiful selfies. A feature of the phone and the app is that it allows you to take selfies by holding your palm in front of the camera briefly. You can also set the volume key as the shutterbutton for the camera or configure it to click just with a tap. The best part is that the front camera supports full HD video recording, which is pretty rare with cameras at this price point.
The A5 comes with Android KitKat. The OS is layered with Samsung’s Touchwiz UI. It’s not any different to the one we’ve seen on the Note 4 or the Alpha. It features very few Samsung apps.
Underneath the monolithic design, the A5 features a 2300mAh Lithium-ion battery, which is more than enough to run a whole day on a single charge. However, if you do run out of battery, then you have the back-up of Samsung’s Ultra Power Saving mode. Putting the phone on this mode shuts down all the unnecessary background apps, letting the phone last till you can connect it to a charger.
Performance
The Galaxy A5 isn’t as impressive as we thought it to be. We ran a couple of benchmarks on the device and got average scores on all of them. None of them however, are overwhelmingly good. We’ve certainly seen cheaper phones perform better on these tests. In the case of 3D mark gaming test, the scores were too low. We even noticed stuttering while running this benchmark.
Full HD videos look good. The picture is sharp and the black levels are great. Brightness levels are very good too and the transition in different lighting conditions is smooth and quite accurate. The only problem is with the colours. They turn out to be pretty gaudy in some cases. Nonetheless, the experience is still great, no matter if it's a photo, a video or just plain text you’re looking at.
The A5 might be average at gaming benchmarks, but it was able to run games like Fruit Ninja and Sub Surfer with ease. We even tried Asphalt Overdrive on it and were pretty impressed by its performance. The phone didn’t heat-up much and the touch performance was just great, a feature well demonstrated while playing Fruit Ninja.
The rear 13MP camera clicks sharp and vibrant images in broad daylight. It’s almost as good as the flagship Galaxy S5 phone. Image quality stays intact even under low-lighting conditions and the auto-white balance does a good job of taking subtle photos under different lighting scenarios. The photos are detailed enough to let you see every minute detail. This comes out really well while doing macro photography. Image stabilisation isn’t effective, so it’s hard to take capture sharp images even in moderately shaky situations. So taking clear photos with one hand might be a little tricky. The front-facing camera captures equally detailed images. The beauty mode is turned on by default and most of images clicked with its help look surprisingly natural. We’ve struggled to find similar performance with other smartphone cameras.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy A5 is a decent phone for Rs. 25,500*, but it doesn’t quite cut it. We like the changes made to the design, but unfortunately in terms of software, things are more or less the same. There are other phones in the market that might offer better performance for a lot less. Besides the design, the camera performance and the interface are the only two things that give the A5 the edge over its competition. All things said, we would’ve certainly liked it more if the Galaxy A5 came with a slightly lower price tag.
