Samsung Galaxy A5 — Review

Design

The look is unmistakably Samsung, thats the first thing that crossed my mind when I unboxed the Galaxy A5. The device is ridiculously thin, but that comes at a cost; it feels a bit bendy, I’m not getting onboard bendgate because that annoys me beyond belief but it’s not the most solid phone I’ve ever used.

Having been a Samsung phone user in the past, the behaviour of this phone was very familiar as soon as I dumped my SIM in it and fired it up. The physical home button, the power button position and (perhaps unfortunately) the position of the volume rocker. Being right handed, I found myself (as I did with my old S3 and S4) turning the volume down in call all the time which is very frustrating but I’m assured by people in the know that I’m holding it wrong.

The other thing that really stuck out for me on the design front for the Galaxy A5 was the near comically sized bezel. The technology is there, the ability is there when you look at other recent Samsung devices; why the extra deep & large bezel? Not really sure, but as it turns out it wasn’t a massive negative on the overall usability or user experience with the device.

Hardware

One of the issues I have had in the past when reviewing devices is that the natural instinct is to compare it to the top end devices and if it’s not up to par, bag it rather than looking at the merits of the device in the apparent target market. When it comes to the guts of the device, it’s not desperately far behind the flagships on spec. Samsung have included a Quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A53 running 2GB RAM and 16GB of storage (Don’t expect 16GB to be available when you fire it up though, I had just under 9GB free on first boot) with what is a pretty low resolution screen. That being said, the lower resolution and ppi screen put less load on the GPU to render images on screen which lowers the demand on the battery which plays into the strength of this device; battery life.

The Galaxy A5 has a 5 inch display which is going to make it a reasonably large device, impressively though despite the size of the device it’s not chunky. The phone runs at 139.3 x 69.7 x 6.7 mm in size which isn’t bad at all, particularly at 6.7mm thin it’s got a nice feel to it. The power button is on the right edge near the top which is a natural feeling position for a right handed user, the volume rocker in a similar position on the left edge which caused me some issues as I’ve already mentioned.

Screen

The screen that Samsung have included on the A5 is surprisingly good when considering the price of the device, but certainly not up to the standard that they can deliver when compared to some of their top end devices. The 5” Super AMOLED screen runs at 720 x 1280 resolution at 294 ppi which on paper at least, doesn’t stack up against a 3 generation old phone such as the Galaxy S4.

Having just told you that the screen isn’t any good, I’m now going to give it a big accolade. During the review time I had with the Galaxy A5 I found myself reflecting on the target market for the device, thinking “what is important” and how the device is likely to be used by that market. I handed the phone over several times to average users who were all pretty impressed by the screen siting vibrant colours, nice and bright, very responsive and easy to read. To be honest, I have to agree with each of those statements whole heartedly, in fact one of these people compared it favourably to their HTC One (M7) which is pretty big praise given that was (in its day) a flagship device.

It’s not until you look at HD video you start to see flaws in the screen quality where it’s simply not up to the job, but putting it bluntly I don’t think someone who would be watching full HD videos is going to purchase a device in this range; they’re going to shoot higher.

Battery life

The battery life that you get from any mobile device is going to be subjective on how and how much you use it throughout the day. I’m a pretty heavy user of mobile phones; with the State Emergency Service I get a lot of calls, messages and email throughout the day. With Ausdroid I use messaging and email quite heavily. For work I have email running and receive calls and (believe it or not) I also have time for a personal life where I receive calls, messages across various medium and emails.

Even with all of that, on one of my heaviest use days of continual phone calls, messages and emails the battery (which is a relatively low capacity battery at only 2300mAh) life I got from the Galaxy A5 was very impressive at a whisker over 18 hours with 10% battery left when I plugged it back in for the night.

Out of curiosity, I decided to try out some of the power saving options, and ultra power saving mode blew me away. I let the battery run down on Friday at work and didn’t plug the phone in to charge overnight. Starting the day on 20% battery is never going to work, or is it?

The ultra power saving mode essentially turns down your backlight to the lowest level, makes your screen monochrome and disables all background data. This is configurable to allow specific apps to have data, but as a default nothing gets through unless you open the app and request data. To my complete amazement, the battery lasted from 8 am until 4pm before going critical and shutting down the phone; it’s not an option you’d use as a first choice but if you did get caught out without any of the failsafes that are around nowadays you could easily get through the rest of the day.

Camera

The 13MP camera is really capable in variety of conditions, everything from full daylight to dubious (at best) fluorescent lit areas. If you’ve got a steady hand you’re going to get some pretty acceptable results on anything you take a photo of.

If you’re in poor light conditions and need to use the flash, you’ll need to be aware that the colour will wash out quite significantly; unfortunately there’ not a lot that can be done about that.

The front facing selfie cam is 5MP and takes selfies, there’s not a lot else to say about it. In ideal light conditions the results are going to be (for a selfie cam) really good, but if you are in a dim lit area like a pub, nightclub or outdoors after dark you’re going to get some grainy & washed out results.

Connectivity

Like any other phone worth looking at these days, the Samsung Galaxy A5 has all of the connectivity that you’d expect from a device. The 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi is quick, really quick! Transferring files (particularly videos) over Wifi was seamless.

Bluetooth 4.0 including A2DP is very much an expectation of devices now, its much more battery friendly than early Bluetooth and the quality of audio is so much higher than it was in the early days.

I did find that the Bluetooth range was a little restrictive if you are streaming to a Bluetooth device with dropouts occurring as soon as there is a physical divider between you and the device you’re connected to. Perhaps a bit disappointing, but I can handle that as a trade off to maintain battery life while streaming.

LTE Cellular is an absolute must for me personally, I wouldn’t even look at a device that doesn’t support it which the Galaxy A5 does. I found the signal strength was very good right through the metro and fringe areas, but when the signal wasn’t good the battery depletion was disturbingly quick.

Sound

Being into good quality sound can often jade my opinion of mobile phone audio quality. I find myself wanting to really whack the manufacturer but then remember that the speaker is about the size of my little fingernail.

There’s no bass and the high range sound is a bit shrill, which makes music playback on the external speaker something you’ll only do for background noise. Unfortunately that’s a trade off for having a reasonable quality mid range (voice range) of sound that can be put up to a good volume on speakerphone without causing echo or distortion.

The other issue with playback was that the power output on the headphone jack was quite low. My Sennheiser headphones were flat until I really cranked it up. Clearly the output is designed intended for the supplied earbuds, not a power hungry set of headphones; not a deal breaker but certainly something to keep in mind if you’re looking at this phone and listen to a lot of music.

Performance

When you take into account the market that this device is aimed at and particularly the cost involved, the performance of the Galaxy A5 is possibly the most impressive area for this phone. While I had the phone there were only two occasions where I detected any significantly noticeable lag in the device. On both occasions I’d recently had a number of apps open and had been switching between them rapidly, so they were likely still memory resident.

Right throughout my testing of the Galaxy A5, there was no point in time (aside from HD videos, but that’s more a screen limitation than performance) where I thought that I’d be disappointed with its performance if I had purchased the device. The menu navigation is snappy, the app switching is really quick and in app performance is really impressive.