Samsung Galaxy A50 Review A Premium Mid Ranger

For the longest time, Samsung has stuck to its ideals. The Korean giant has often been rebuked for selling smartphones with sub-par internals at heftier prices but it seems the growing presence of Chinese phone makers in India has finally got the better of it. And while Samsung is already pitting its Galaxy M series against the likes of Xiaomi, Realme, and others in the budget segment, their new Galaxy A series is here to take on the assault in the mid-range segment.

To get you started, we’ve listed the complete specifications of the Galaxy A50 right here:

Galaxy A50: What’s in The Box

Unlike the feeble contents of the Galaxy M-series packaging, which received a ton of flak from the community, Samsung has now decided to pack everything a user expects in the Galaxy A50 box, which includes a case and add-on accessories.

Galaxy A50: Design and Build

Samsung is falling in line with the times with its recent releases and the Galaxy A50 has turned out to be one of the best examples of the same. The Galaxy A50 has a striking prismatic rear panel that will catch your eye right off the bat and you won’t be able to give up on playing around with it. That’s the beauty of gradient phones.

Though we have the black variant of the Galaxy A50, it seems more like a deep gray and can mostly be found covered in rainbow hues. The rear panel, which touts a 3D “glasstic” design (a mix of polycarbonate and glass) doesn’t actually feel cheap and reflects light at different angles, making the back panel look gorgeous. I absolutely love it and find myself playing with the device to see if I can click pictures like this:

In-display Fingerprint Sensor

This is the first Samsung smartphone to feature an in-display optical fingerprint sensor – not the same as the ultrasonic sensor on the Galaxy S10 and S10+. Yeah, the Korean giant has finally given into the hype, but its implementation isn’t up to the mark. It’s super slow and using it gets frustrating after a while.

As is the case with most in-display fingerprint sensor-laden smartphones, the registration process is still rather sluggish but it’s something I have become used to after trying out a few devices over the previous year. And I didn’t really mind it on the Galaxy A50 either. The thing that I’m pretty unsatisfied with, however, is the unlocking speed of the device here.

The in-display fingerprint scanner on Galaxy A50 comes as a major disappointment

Samsung Galaxy A50 takes around a couple of seconds to unlock and open up the home screen, which is especially delayed as compared to other phones with an in-display fingerprint sensor, like the OnePlus 6T or the recently launched Vivo V15 Pro. The ripple animation, similar to the one seen on the Galaxy S10, makes it look even more sluggish and jitters are common here.

The sensor is also highly unreliable and pops up an error saying ‘keep your finger on the sensor a little longer’ every so often and it gets irritating after a while. You need to really hold down your finger on the optical in-display fingerprint sensor hard and long to unlock the phone successfully. You can even unlock the device from the always-on display, but be ready to wait a little longer.

It was a frustrating experience for me and I started relying on the less-secure face unlock onboard for my unlocking needs.

Galaxy A50 features a tall 6.4-inch Full-HD+ Super AMOLED display, with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio and display resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels. It has a pixel density of 404ppi and is one of the best panels in its price category- nothing even comes close. If you have ever used a Samsung device in your life, you would know how good its panels always are and the tradition continues.

The Galaxy A50 is powered by Samsung’s in-house octa-core Exynos 9610 chipset, which includes 4 Cortex-A73 cores clocked at 2.3 GHz and 4 Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.7 GHz. I know, the processor has been dubbed the Exynos 9610, which may make you think that it’s among the ranks of the high-end processor found in the Galaxy S10, but it actually is an Exynos 7-series chipset. Only the nomenclature is such to attract (read as make-believe) users by implying that it’s a flagship chipset – but it isn’t.

Galaxy A50: Benchmarks

The real-world performance of the Galaxy A50 has been pretty snappy, but if you’re one who needs benchmark figures as proof then we’ve got you covered. The single and multi-core Geekbench 4 score of the device stands at around 1700 and 5300 respectively. And the Exynos 9610 receives an overall rating of over 144,500 on AnTuTu.

Samsung boarded the multi-camera bandwagon with the Galaxy A7 earlier last year and the trend continues with the Galaxy A50, but has been refined to offer users much more flexibility. The triple camera setup on board here includes a 25MP (f/1.7) sensor, coupled with an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra wide-angle lens and third 5MP (f/2.2) depth sensor. It’s quite similar to the Galaxy A7, for those wondering.

Before we take a look and talk about the camera samples, the camera app on the Galaxy A50 packs a number of cool features and let’s explore them. You get a Live Focus (bokeh mode), Pro mode, along with slow motion and hyperlapse video recording options as well.

Daylight Camera Samples

The camera setup on the Galaxy A50 manages to capture some good and crisp shots. The hight dyanmic range, even if these images are a bit on the warmer side, coupled with the details and the good color reproduction results in some of the best shots I have seen on a Samsung mid-range smartphone. The low-light segment is where Galaxy A50 falls short. While the pictures turn out good at times, with ample light and detail at times, the noise and lacking highlights make them look all but lackluster. You can check out samples right here:

Daylight Camera Samples

Low-light Camera Samples
Selfies/ Portraits

The Galaxy A50 captures some stunning selfies and even better portraits, especially once you turn off the beauty mode that will soften your skin and make you unrecognizable. I’ve included some “beauty mode” samples here to give you a better idea for how pictures should turn out. The portrait mode pictures have natural background blur (adjustable even after picture is clicked), can recognize more than one human subject, and is pretty decent.

Low-light Camera Samples

Selfies/ Portraits

Wide-angle Camera Samples

Galaxy A50 is able to capture more detailed photos with an enhanced color profile with its standard wide-angle lens, however, the same appears to be missing from the ultra wide-angle photos seen below. The latter doesn’t really focus on the colors and details but has instead been marketed as giving a new perspective to your pictures and that’s obviously true.

Wide-angle Camera Samples

Galaxy A50: Camera Comparison

In the camera samples attached above, you can clearly see that the performance of the Galaxy A50 and the Poco F1 are closely comparable. I found that Samsung Galaxy A50, in most cases, is able to capture more detail and vivid colors in broad daylight and during night time as well. Samsung and Xiaomi both are known to bump the saturation, delivering social media ready and pleasing images but the former is still the king – but it now seems to be a hit and miss in front of Poco F1.

The Galaxy A50 supports video recording up to 1080p (Full-HD) resolution from both the front and rear cameras. Neither there’s 4K video recording, nor does the device feature a 60fps option and that’s really disappointing for someone planning to buy this phone simply because of the cameras.

Galaxy A50: Software

Apart from the hardware specs, Samsung appears to have figured the software side of things with One UI and Galaxy A50 is one of the handful of devices backed by the same out of the box. One UI has a cleaner and refined software experience, based on Android 9 Pie (now with March security patch), and supersedes the Oreo-based Experience UI from the company we saw running on the Galaxy A7 and Galaxy A9 last year.

Samsung has also provided you with a bulk of features including dual messenger, games launcher, and a device care section that automatically boots up each day to free storage, optimize battery performance and more. The one thing which I don’t like about One UI is the addition of unnecessary animations, sluggish transitions, and splash screens for apps.

Face Unlock

The in-display fingerprint recognition on the Galaxy A50 may be a major letdown, but we have face unlock to kind of compensate for that disaster. The device, however, only relies on the selfie camera for the face unlock feature, meaning it’s not the most secure, but it works decently. It operates nicely in daylight, is snappy, but low-light takes a toll on the performance. You can check out my experience with face unlock on the Galaxy A50 right here:

Widevine L1 & Camera2 API Support

Widevine L1 & Camera2 API Support

However, this excitement of yours will be dulled by the lack of Camera2 API support, but don’t worry, we’ve got a handy guide on how to enable the same and install Google Camera mods to click some awesome pictures.

The Galaxy A50 features a single bottom-firing speaker, as can be expected from most smartphones these days, and it gets pretty loud. You can use the A50 to show off any content or listen to music with your peers easily, but the sound is tinny and lacks that depth at higher volumes. Still, the huge AMOLED screen, coupled with a loud speaker makes this a great media and entertainment machine.

The Galaxy A50 carries all of the necessary connectivity features you expect to find in a decent mid-range smartphone. It packs a triple slot SIM tray, where you can use two VoLTE-enabled SIM cards and expand internal storage up to 256GB using the dedicated microSD card slot simultaneously. This is a blessing for power users, who will need more storage on their device down the road.

The battery has proven to be one of the highlights of the Galaxy A50 during my tests. It includes a huge 4,000mAh battery pack and it easily lasted me a complete day on a single charge. This was usually the case as I had about 10-20 percent battery remaining when I returned back home from work.

The Galaxy A50 extends you good 6-odd hours of screen-on time for low to medium use, which in my case, usually means a lot of music streaming, scrolling through Twitter, reading latest updates on Chrome and other work-related apps. You can only sneak in a game or two of PUBG Mobile, else the screen-on time would take a hit.

Samsung has not been able to deliver a truly good mid-range smartphone for sometime and they have mostly been average. This led to the Korean gaint losing its brand trust to competitors who were able to offer better specs and features for a better price. However, Samsung is now back in the game and the Galaxy A50 is a solid attempt to gain back its dominance in the premium mid-range segment.

However, if you are looking for more raw power and can compromise on innovation and build, well, the Poco F1 (starts at Rs 19,999) is the perfect coice for you. It has a great camera setup, IR Face Unlock (which is faster and more secure than Samsung’s) and a physical fingerprint sensor that’ll surely be faster than the in-display one on the Galaxy A50. There’s also the Nokia 7.1 (Rs 19,999) if you would prefer a premium glass build, stock Android, and even better cameras.

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