The new Samsung Galaxy A5 is great for taking photos but may be a little too small for some tastes
Are you looking for a gorgeous, compact, selfie-centric phone? Samsung has one for you in the new Galaxy A5.
This phone is extremely pearly, light and thin. It's only 6.7mm thick and weighs in at 123g. Not as thin as the world-thinnest phone, Oppo R5, but pretty close.
This phone is very selfie-centric and it's not shy in bombarding you with assortments of selfie-friendly functions and features to take with its 5MP front camera. For instance, there is voice control for easy selfie taking by saying a special word without the need to move your thumb to touch a button. Furthermore, the wide angle lens gets more people into your panoramic selfie, there is animated gifs for moving photos and even an ability to take selfies with the rear camera for better photo quality. Selfie addicts will love this phone for sure.
Its 5-inch Super AMOLED (720P) screen can emit very detailed and extremely vibrant visuals. It might not come with a Quad HD (1440P) screen like its big brother, the Galaxy Note 4, but having a smaller screen means that the dots on it are closer to each other, making the visuals more detailed.
It seems that Samsung is going for the over-colourful and over-saturated look. If you prefer bright colours to realistic dull colours, the screen on this thing will please you greatly. My kids and I love the over the top saturation which makes YouTube videos look very lively and colourful.
The back of the phone has a pearly finish, which gives a glowy matted shine. This design may prove very alluring for women, but maybe not so much for men (who normally prefer dull black plastic things). This phone is part of Samsung's A series and follows its few-months-old bigger brother, the Galaxy Alpha, by ditching Samsung's most looked down on design aspect (namely: cheap plastic look) and goes with a premium metallic unibody design instead. This phone is built with mostly aluminium, apart from the front touch screen, that feels sturdy and not too slippery.
The looks are fine, but does it pack a punch in the speed department? Yes, it's good for most things though its CPU can't really keep up with graphics-intense games. So keep away from this if you like to play games with hundreds of moving objects on screen at once.
Samsung has toned down its highly customised Touchwiz user interface by giving less bloatware and having more visual themes and audio tunes than any other Samsung phones to date. But, strangely, it's still on Android KitKat (4.4.4). I'm not sure why a new phone like this is not on Android Lollipop, since some of Samsung's models last year already have the newer version. But KitKat is still adequate.
Seeing a test machine that had already been handled by my many others, I could really see that the aluminium unibody is prone to scratches, which show quiet significantly on the corners. If you're getting it I would recommend that you buy a nice case or are gentle with it.
I find its backfiring speakers to be a bummer. Why would you want the person who sits in front of you to hear the sound of your phone louder than yourself? HTC's approach of having front-facing speakers is still the best, in my opinion.
Other things worth noting are that this phone is 4G enabled, not too difficult to Root (for further customisation and bloatware removal), and the battery is above average.
A technology guru once said "once you go big, you'll never go back", which I totally agree with. I have recently upgraded my old (broken) 4-inch phone to a 5.7-inch one and did not feel too impressed with the bigger screen at first. But when I came back to a 5-inch phone, like the A5, I started to miss the better readability of a bigger screen. Only a couple of years ago, a 5-inch phone like this was considered huge, now it's considered small. Weird!
So, if you're accustomed to a phablet or a big phone, I don't really recommend a smaller phone like this. But if you value elegance and mobility above all else, this phone could be right up your street.
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