At first glance, the Samsung Galaxy A5 is a beauty and when I picked it up, I noticed that for its size, it was pretty light. Plus its metal frame supplemented its sleek design with a more premium feel.
However, I wasn’t about to let beauty alone be the deciding factor on whether the Galaxy A5 was a heavyweight in the never-ending battle of phones and gadgets. I gave it a go and here’s what I thought.
1. Long lasting battery.
Nothing sucks more than having your phone battery die on you without even lasting the entire day. We’ve all been there before, and it’s nice to see that the Galaxy A5 did last till its next feeding time when I charged it much later in the evening. It probably isn’t advisable to use a phone whilst it is charging, but while a hot surface would be a deterrent, I found that the phone did not have such problems. Even whilst it is charging away, I could still use it sparingly without my fingertips getting charred.
It has a 2,300mAh capacity which is an average capacity, considering the other giants out there such as the Samsung Galaxy S4 which has a strong 17-hour capacity. However, with light to average usage throughout the day, the Samsung Galaxy A5 managed to pull through for 24 hours.
2. Sounds good to me.
Playing music from the device is fun because it does its job and doesn’t produce muffled or low quality sounds. I didn’t even need to crank the volume up real high. Sometimes, we aren’t in the same room as our devices even whilst we are playing a YouTube video or our favourite television series. Hence, it’s nice to still be able to listen to videos and songs from another room without needing to max up on the volume key.
3. Concaved screen makes it difficult for long usage.
As much as I’ve praised the A5 for being pretty, the way that the phone is designed itself makes the visuals pop up even more. As such, it felt like I was using a magnifying glass when I am looking at the phone. It might be due to the fact that a Corning Gorilla Glass 4 is used but regardless, the concave design which is said to be better for users due to making the screen more readable in ambient light, gave me a headache instead. But then again, it may be just me.
4. Camera lives up to its megapixels.
Most people are in with me on this, but we use our phone’s front-facing camera as a portable mirror when we are on the go to check out little things such as if we have something stuck in between our teeth. The 5MP front-facing camera didn’t feel like it was lying to me as it felt truly high definition and I could see everything, and I mean everything—even imperfections I wish they wouldn’t make that clear. The back-facing camera was equally as clear and that was a good thing because that meant that it would even rival its big brother, the A6 in terms of quality.
We could zoom the image out to 100% and it didn’t have much noise, and that could be attributed to its 13MP’s sharp quality. Megapixels may not be the only definition to a picture’s clarity but as the phone came in such a high one, it would have been disappointing if the pictures did not come out good—so thankfully it did not.
5. It has good looks.
I’ve said it and I’ll say it again—the Samsung Galaxy A5 is a beauty. It isn’t as flashy as the new S7 Edge and to others, it might look pretty basic. Yet to me, its simplistic sophistication makes the phone stand out even more. As for performance, the Galaxy A5 does stand as a contender, not by being the winner, but at the very least, it would be one of the finalists of a phone pageant, if there ever was one. Plus, its price tag that’s just slightly over RM1k makes it quite an affordable one in comparison to the higher end flagship phones.