Samsung Galaxy A50s review
What is it?
The half-yearly upgrade to the very popular Samsung A50 from earlier this year.
Design & Construction
- The most obvious difference on the Samsung A50s over the A50 is its new diamond-cut finish on the rear panel. This combined with the gradient colour scheme looks quite eye-catching.
- The overall constriction of this phone is still glossy plastic though, so while it’s very durable, it’s prone to scratches and fingerprints at the very same time.
- At the front, the A50s has a U-shaped notched and a rather larger bottom bezel.
Display
- The star of the show on the Samsung A50s remains its 6.4-inch Infinity-U display. It is carried over from the A50 and is a Super AMOLED panel with FHD+ resolution and 19.5:9 aspect ratio.
- The colours produced by this panel are extremely punchy and saturated. Its viewing angles and sunlight legibility are also great, and in fact, the display quality is brilliant for a lower mid-range phone.
User Interface & Performance
- Powering the Samsung A50s is a new octa-core Exynos 9611 SoC which is mated with 4GB/ 6GB of RAM. On the software front, it runs on Android 9 Pie with Samsung One UI on top.
- Performance, as a whole, is disappointing! One UI is not very well optimised on the A50s which means that the overall UI is on the slower side. Animations and transitions aren’t always smooth either.
- As far as the Mali-G72 MP3 GPU is concerned, it’s no match for the Adreno 618 on the Redmi K20. We tested Call Of Duty on the A50s and it ran on medium graphic settings. The gameplay was OK, but there were noticeable frame drops.
Cameras
- The phone has 3 rear cameras – 48MP f/2.0 primary, 8MP f/2.2 ultra-wide-angle, and 5MP depth sensor. The selfie camera here is a 32MP sensor with an f/2.0 lens. Both, the 48MP main and 32MP selfie cameras are new on the A50s. the other two are carried over from the A50.
- The 48MP primary camera can take well-detailed pics in good lighting conditions. Colours are over-saturated but they look good nonetheless.
- The low-light performance isn’t that great, however. The A50s has a night mode to brighten up low light shots, but it does require your hand to be quite stable. So, the pics turn out to be blurry.
- Videos from this camera are underwhelming. The colours look muted and there isn’t much detail in the footage. The ‘Super Steady’ EIS mode works pretty well in filtering out shakiness, but weirdly enough, videos taken with this mode on are also more saturated.
- The 8MP ultra-wide-angle camera can take pretty dramatic shots thanks to its wide field-of-view. There is barrel distortion here but it’s acceptable. Night-time shots, however, are quite noisy.
- The third 5MP depth sensor helps with bokeh and edge detection in bokeh photos, though not perfect, is pretty fine for the segment.
- The new 32MP f/2.0 selfie camera takes 8MP pixel-binned photographs. The quality of images is pretty decent, but we have seen better selfie cameras in this class.
Check out the camera samples from the Galaxy A50s:
Battery Life
- In terms of battery performance, the 4,000mAh cell on the Samsung A50s fairs pretty well. It can give around 5-6 hours of screen on time based on medium-to-heavy usage, which is impressive.
- The phone comes with a 15W fast charger inside the box. It can fully recharge from 0-100 per cent in around 90 minutes.
What else?
- The optical under-display fingerprint scanner on the Galaxy A50s is quite slow and not very consistent.
- The phone has a 3.5 mm headphone jack. There are no stereo speakers on this phone, the single bottom-firing speaker is loud and clear.
Verdict
- At the time of writing this review, the Samsung Galaxy A50s starts at Rs 20,999 for the 4GB RAM variant, while the 6GB variant costs Rs 2,000 extra. At this price, it is quite hard to recommend!
- The A50s has a gorgeous display and a good design, but its slow software and underpowered chipset do spoil all the fun.
Unless there is a significant price drop, you can avoid the A50s and instead take a look at the Redmi K20. Also, Xiaomi, Vivo and Realme have some similarly spec’d phone on offer at much more affordable prices!
Watch our Samsung Galaxy A50s video review:
Samsung Galaxy A50s
Rs 20,999-22,999 (as tested)
7.4
Pros
- Gorgeous display
- Good design
Cons
- Slow & clunky software
- Overpriced
;){kind=link}