Samsung launched as many as nine Galaxy phones last year. This includes the Galaxy A50, Note 10 and Note 10 Plus, along with the Galaxy S10, S10 Plus, S10E, S10 5G and the Galaxy Fold. Out of them all, the A50 device seems to be the most affordable one. It is a great competitor to the Motorola Moto G7 model which is an all-time favourite budget phone. While the A50 cannot shoot 4K videos, it does offer an excellent camera, a long battery life, and a trendy design. While the A50 can obviously not compare with the flagship Galaxy S phones like the Galaxy S10 and S10+, it is actually great if you consider it on its own merits.
Design and Display
The Galaxy A50 features a sleek design. The rear supports a flatter camera, thanks to which you will not have any noticeable bump. The phone comes with an on-screen camera notch for the front-facing camera. It is considerably smaller making less obstructive when you are using the device. The A50 has an in-screen fingerprint scanner, which means no outwards scanner, leading to a seamless look. The design of the Galaxy A50 is quite perfect, but it doesn’t come with water protection if that sort of thing is important to you. The Galaxy A50 has an AMOLED display. The screen is reported to be brighter, featuring rich colours and more details. The colour shift is not very severe with the A50 which means the screen will not appear dimmer at particular angles.
A Quick Look at the Specs
The Samsung Galaxy A50 has an in-display fingerprint reader, but no water-resistance or stereo speakers. Designed as a budget smartphone, the A50 has all the features necessary to capture this market. Besides the must-have features, it also has a couple of things that most phones in this range don’t have. This includes the in-display fingerprint reader and the dual rear cameras. Look-wise, the Galaxy A50 looks pretty similar to Motorola’s G7 model. Both phones are known to have a selfie camera that nestles at the central notch. The screen has a bezel-less and rounded display.
The A50 is especially known for its slim bezels, slimmer chin, and a 6.4-inch 2340 x 1080 OLED screen. This means that the A50 has a larger screen featuring colourful and brighter content. The phone comes with microSD card slots for expandable storage and headphone jacks. With regards to the material used here, it is mainly plastic. However, Samsung calls it glasstic, since it looks and feels like glass, but is, in fact, plastic.
The Galaxy A50 has mono speakers, which offer decent quality audio. While the in-screen fingerprint sensor could do with an update, the phone comes with plenty of awesome specs. The issue with the fingerprint sensor is that it is not very accurate, although the company deserves credit for adding it even in a budget phone like this. An improvement update for the fingerprint sensor would be an excellent upgrade.
Performance and Battery
With regards to performance, the Galaxy A50 has a 64GB of internal storage. It is expandable up to 512GB using a MicroSD card. While it doesn’t feature wireless charging, it does come with fast charging capabilities. The phone will be powered by Samsung’s own Exynos 9610 processor. There is not a lot of difference between this and the Snapdragon 600 series chips. The phone has a 4GB RAM which is enough to give it stable performance, even if it is not particularly swift. The Exynos 9610 can easily handle lightweight tasks including multitasking and switching between apps. The device runs on Samsung’s Android Pie-based One UI.
The OS features gesture navigation, a nice UI, and of course, better speed and optimization. You might like to see the live icons for the Clock and Calendar icons and mess around with the dark mode as well. However, these are still not as great upgrades as better speed. Thanks to this, the graphics and animations load fast and hardly feel like its loading. The gesture navigation takes no time either. These are great additions for a device at this price. Coming to the battery, the Samsung Galaxy A50 will have a 4,000mAh battery which is large enough to accommodate a day’s use and more. You can improve its capacity by making use of One UI’s adaptive power saving. The phone also has 15W fast charging capabilities so charging it is no issue either.
Camera Review
The Galaxy A50 features a nice enough camera for this price range. As discussed earlier, the camera bump on the A50 is less prominent when compared to other models. If you don’t mind losing out on 4K video, you might actually enjoy using the higher-quality A50 camera. In an ideal situation, the camera can take clear, bright, and detailed images. Sharper pictures point out other details in the fine print. Even in low light, the camera tends to pick out the details and brighten up the colours. Most phones in this range have a camera that produces hazy photos in low light surroundings.
The A50 has a wider dynamic range as well. While the HDR effect may look unrealistic at times, it is not really that bad. The smartphone also comes with a second wide-angle camera that works out well for capturing landscapes and scenery. The consistent camera quality of the smartphone offers colour saturation, better sharpness, and excellent low-light performance. Unfortunately, the A50 doesn’t have a dedicated night mode which makes the night images taken on this phone not as great as the others.
Verdict
The Galaxy A50 is a wonderful budget flagship by Samsung. Besides the fingerprint scanner that could do with some improvement, there is very little that the lacks. With a huge battery, a competent camera, and decent performance, the A50 is a perfect budget model. If you are looking for phones that can last you through the day as you click superior photos, this is the one for you.
