Samsung Galaxy A51 Review - The Best Selling Android Phone Is BACK! By Hardware Canucks

This is the Samsung Galaxy a51 the company's answer to the mid-range smartphone market in 2020. Now, if you recall last year right about the same time, I got the chance to check out the Galaxy a50, which was this fellas' predecessor. It had a beautiful display. The battery life was also perfect and, most importantly, it was priced at 350 dollars. In some cases you were able to pick it up for $300, which was a steal. In my opinion.

In fact, the a50 was one of the top-selling smartphones around the world, competing against Apple's iPhones that conveys a strong message. Most people just don't care about having the fastest flagship smartphone, because you know they just want something basic. They don't want a million features that brands use as marketing points to sell their $1000 phones. The launch price of the a51 is 399 dollars, so it's a $50 premium compared to the Galaxy a50 when it was launched, but these phones can be picked up for less depending on sales events and all that kind of stuff. So watch out for that.

That being said, compromises had to be made by these brands to hit that price point, and that certainly affects the overall user experience. Some of the issues I had with the a50 was the lackluster performance, the cameras wearing the greatest, especially when compared to the Pixel 3a, which was right up its alley in that price range so has Samson addressed or happy at least tried to improve some of those issues from the a50 with the a51. Let's find out after this, of course, their dark core RGB Pro is a mouse for every type of gamer, with 50 million braided armor on switches, lighting, blink, 2 side grips for better comfort, a type-c connector with 50-hour battery life and a three-way operation mode. With course, there's a slipstream hyper fast wireless technology check it out below alright. So from a physical aspect, they haven't made any major changes, you're still getting a plastic back with metal side railings, just like the a50.

So it's not a scratch proof as glass backs, but it's less here to crack like glass, which is a benefit. If I were you I, just Rock a case just to be safe, the display has received a bit of an upgrade I mean it's not substantial, but they made it. Look like a modern flagship, smartphone, so they've expanded the screen by 0.1 inches eliminated the notch on the a50 and when with an infinity o design, or in other words you get a punch, hole. Camera they're, also using the same AMOLED display on the a50 rocking the same resolution. I'll, be you get extra pixels vertically because of that screen expansion and that's it.

Does it have a high refresh rate? No, does it have support for HDR 10 Plus video? No! Does it even look good? Yes, absolutely guys, it's still a beautiful screen with great color vibrancy and deeper blacks. It looks just as good as a flash. Your smartphone and I appreciate the fact that it's still a flat screen without any curves look. The display is the most important factor of any smartphone, and I'm glad Samsung hasn't cut any corners here. Unfortunately, Samsung has still kept the single mono speaker at the bottom, which can easily be blocked with your finger when you're holding it in landscape mode.

It sounds okay, it certainly doesn't get any louder. I would have preferred a dual speaker setup on the a51 that would've been a nice upgrade over the a50, but we're not getting that with this phone. But on the positive side we still get a headphone jack yeah. Remember that guy the 3.5 millimeter thingy I'm glad that they've still camped it. The in display, fingerprint sensor is still here.

Unfortunately, just like the a50 I haven't had the best luck when it comes to unlocking the device successfully, it refuses for like four times and then the fifth time. It works odd, just fine. In some cases it locks me out- and it asked me to try in 30 seconds, so I have to force myself to use the swipe pattern, which is the second way of unlocking the device I mean it's I have had better luck with the Pixel 3a and, of course, the s20, which is much more expensive smartphone. But I really want to know your thoughts about this. Would you rather prefer having a display or an in display fingerprint sensor on a cheap smartphone instead of a dedicated one at the back, that's actually easily accessible and something that actually works most of the time because I feel like this is certainly one of the areas that is like a hit or miss on a lot of mid-range, smart, but I'm, curious to know about your thoughts in the comments ask for the rest of features? Well, there isn't anything new compared to the a50.

They've still kept a micros card slot for storage expansion, which I'm sure a lot of you would appreciate. There's no support for wireless charging, nor does it even have an official IP rating, which all makes sense, because those certifications and tech costs money. The specs are also pretty similar for the most part compared to the a50. So it has an X notes.96 11 versus the X notes, 96 10, but these SOC s are essentially the same, except for the fact that you can record high resolution video. They also have the same amount of RAM.

Do note that in some regions, Samsung is offering six to eight gigabytes of RAM, which should significantly help with performance storage also remains the same battery size hasn't changed either. Perhaps my biggest frustration with this phone is the performance. Now I need to be completely transparent with you guys as a content. Creator, I am fortunate to get my hands on the recent latest flagship smartphones featuring the fastest specs and all the bells and whistles that come with the package I'm, also to an extent spoiled by the displays that come with high refresh rate, more RAM, fast s who sees etc. , and so the switch to the a51 almost felt like I, had to trade a Lamborghini for eight Toyota Paris.

That makes sense basic things like launching Gmail Spotify YouTube Instagram takes at least two to three seconds to load that might not sound like a lot, but I mean coming from a flash smartphone. It is a lot to me personally. The animations are jittery scrolling through Twitter, and my Instagram feed was really not that smooth, as the page took a few seconds to catch up. If you use Google Maps extensively, you have to be really patient with the content to load up. Multitasking performance is also not the greatest, and there is a good reason for that.

My sample comes with 4 gigabytes of RAM and my average usage is around 3 gigabytes, which really pushes the limits on this phone. Now there are a few workarounds to this. You could enable developer options through the settings and then reduce the animation speeds or completely turn it off, which should help the absolute instantly, and it should take away the jitteriness that you'll experience with this phone when you set it up out of the box. Let's keep in mind that content still takes time to load up, and it also doesn't help with memory management, either now as much as I'd love to say that specs, don't matter on phones these days it kind of does on the a51, because this phone is running Android 10 with Samsung's one UI, and it's the exact same software experience as what you'll get with the S 20s twenty plus and the s 20 ultra Samsung hasn't made any software enhancements to make sure that the operating system runs efficiently on this little speck hardware. Think of it as a gamer.

If you're looking to play the most demanding titles and the best highest possible frame rates to get a smooth experience, you would invest in an expensive GPU. That's 500, perhaps even $1000, but if you play those most demanding titles on 100 to $150 GPU, the mean you get. The point. I really think that software is the bottleneck on the a51. Perhaps a lighter version of Android, that's less resource hungry would yield a better experience.

I would actually recommend picking up the six key byte or a key buy variant if you can find one, because that should significantly help with a performance or multitasking performance on this phone and the positive side battery life has been phenomenal on the a51 I had a great experience with the a50 same story continues with this smartphone. You shouldn't worry about battery life whatsoever. You can easily push this to maybe 2 days worth of use and that's me is a win-win. The last thing that I want to cover here is the camera performance. The fifty-one comes with a quad camera set.

However, the only two cameras you'd actually care about is the 12 megapixel ultra wide-angle and the 48 megapixel standard wide-angle. You don't get a telephoto lens, but there is a 5 megapixel depth sensor for portrait mode and a 5 megapixel and macro camera. Let's start with the ultra-wide something that you need to be aware of. They said: there's absolutely no focus control. When you use this lens, which is disappointing.

Thankfully, you can still adjust exposure and the images coming out of the sensor. Look pretty good, mostly images, lack detail and Samson applies that smoothing filter in post keep in mind. I have seen optimizer turned off, and everything you're seeing here is shot in auto mode with HDR turned on. I also noticed that the shutter lag was way too long, so trying to take a photo. You have to stay stable for at least three seconds for to process it can get really annoying.

Sometimes HDR is a hit or miss. In some cases it works out really well, but I need to point out that the color science is completely out of whack. The tone shifts a lot towards magenta and the lower performance is well, let's just say, for a phone, a telephone don't expect too much. The main 48 megapixel light sensor is noticeably better on the one found on the a50. There is good detail, dynamic range and contrast, but, like I said earlier, the colors are just not true to life.

For the most part. In some cases it tends to overexpose shots, but if you're patient enough with trial and error, you can end up with some pretty good results. I've also noticed that Samsung has toned down the saturation on the recent phones and I appreciate that here's an example of the weird colors it captures. So this is the charging cable for OnePlus devices. If you own an OnePlus device, you know for a fact that it's a vibrant red cable, but this phone for some reason things that it's pink I shot the same subject on my pixel for comparison to show you what it actually looks like hope.

You were able to take away something from that portrait mode or live focus is okay, I mean don't expect to be blown away, because once again, this sensor just can't process colors accurately the 5 megapixel macro camera was surprisingly perfect. You can be really creative with this lens. If you give it more light, it's way better than the 2 megapixel sensor, we're seeing on other phones these days. This is the front-facing camera test on the galaxy a50. Now one of the cool things about the Enos 96 11 CPU is that it can allow the camera to shoot at a high resolution and process that so, as you can see, this is what it looks like dynamic range is pretty terrible.

It's obviously not close to what you'll get with the s20 phones, but it is passable. Alright, so I switched over to the rear camera on the a51, and it can shoot 4k, which is nice, and you can also use the wide-angle lens to shoot video, there's, obviously no image. Stabilization footage is definitely going to be a little jerky. The dynamic range is pretty good I'm impressed for what this phone can offer, especially for the price point: I'm, also surprised by the microphone quality as well. It's its surprisingly better than some flagships out there.

But let me know what you guys think about the video quality in the comments. So here's the takeaway with the galaxy a51 I think the only improvement I see over the a50 is the slightly improved camera performance. But you still have to be very patient with that, because if you like, having the flexibility to switch between ultra-wide and wide angle- and if you absolutely don't care about colors detail- contrast low-light performance, then this phone meets that criteria and, let's not forget, if you value display the most on a smartphone, the a51 should be on the top of your list because it is a gorgeous display for the price I'm, so blown away by that this is a basic phone that gets some of the essentials right and for most people, that's a selling feature. Unfortunately, when you look at the rest of picture, things do tend to fall apart, because the cameras are not that great and the performance is one, my biggest issues with the smartphone, especially when you compared to the Pixel 3a, which is about the same price. It's a year old, and it still has phenomenal camera software support and a perfect display, there's also the iPhone SC, which is the same price as the a51, and it has a great camera.

The performance is rock-solid and, most importantly, you get software updates for at least five years. Lastly, I should mention that the pixel forays right around the corner, and it is rumored to be priced around $350. If you're in the market for a mid-range smartphone, you should probably take out a piece of paper and write down these five major factors that make a smartphone display, camera performance, software and battery life and then narrow them down to your preference, because there are great options out there. Folks, on that note, thank you so much for watching I hope you were able to take away something from this video stay safe. It's been responsibly, my friends, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.

Source : Hardware Canucks