Samsung Galaxy A51 review
Our Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy A51 offers a nice design and bonny OLED display, merely information technology'south hamstrung by middling performance, cameras that underperform in low lite and relatively short battery life.
For
- First-class display
- Sleek design
- Versatile quad-lens camera
- Low price
- 128GB of storage
Against
- Underwhelming performance
- Camera struggles in low lite
- Battery life could be better
- Fingerprint sensor occasionally frustrates
Tom'due south Guide Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy A51 offers a nice design and bonny OLED display, just it's hamstrung by middling functioning, cameras that underperform in low lite and relatively short battery life.
Pros
- +
Excellent display
- +
Sleek design
- +
Versatile quad-lens camera
- +
Low price
- +
128GB of storage
Cons
- -
Underwhelming performance
- -
Camera struggles in depression calorie-free
- -
Battery life could be ameliorate
- -
Fingerprint sensor occasionally frustrates
Samsung Galaxy A51 specs
Price: $399
Os: Android 10 with Ane UI
Display: 6.v-inch OLED (2400x1080)
CPU: Exynos 9611
RAM: 4GB
Storage: 128GB; expandable up to 512GB
Rear camera: Quad-lens: 48MP wide (ƒ/ii.0), 12MP ultrawide (ƒ/2.2), 5MP depth (ƒ/2.2), 5MP macro (ƒ/ii.4)
Front photographic camera: 32MP (ƒ/2.2)
Battery: 4,000 mAh
Size: 6.24 x 2.90 x 0.31 inches
Weight: half dozen.07 ounces
Ane look at the $399 Samsung Galaxy A51 and its laundry list of features, and you might wonder why anyone needs a $1,000 Milky way S20. You get a 6.5-inch OLED display, four rear cameras and a big 4,000 mAh battery for a very reasonable price.
In that location's merely one problem: Samsung may accept stepped up its midrange telephone game, but then too has the competition. And while the Galaxy A51 tin can claim a few advantages over the similarly-priced iPhone SE 2020 and Google Pixel 3a, information technology however suffers from occasionally subpar performance, low-light photography that ofttimes fails to impress, and battery life that's only decent.
Indeed, this is one of the all-time inexpensive phones around; though, every bit yous'll find in our Samsung Milky way A51 review, it's more of a jack of all trades than a principal of one.
Samsung Milky way A51 review: Pricing and availability
The $399 Samsung Galaxy A51 released on April 9. You tin can buy it unlocked direct from Samsung, or through a variety of carriers, including Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and Xfinity Mobile. Amazon is also selling the unlocked version.
There's simply i configuration of the Galaxy A51 available in the U.S., and it comes with 4GB of RAM and a generous 128GB of storage. If you need even more infinite, you lot can add a microSD card up to 512GB in size.
While $399 is a reasonable price for a telephone with all the features the Galaxy A51 boasts, Samsung is running a number of promotions to get in an even meliorate bargain. The company is offering up to $220 in credit toward a Galaxy A51 if you lot trade in a Galaxy S9, Note nine or older; iPhone X or older; or Pixel iii, 3 XL or 3a. With an eligible merchandise-in, you lot can also pay off an unlocked Milky way A51 over 24 months with zero-percent interest, at $fourteen.58 a calendar month. For a limited fourth dimension, Samsung is even throwing in a free pair of kickoff-generation Galaxy Buds with every A51 purchase.
One word of communication for shoppers: Be wary of alternate Galaxy A51 models circulating around retailers across the spider web. If the price seems to good to be true, chances are you're probably looking at the Latin American or international variant, rather than the U.S. edition tuned for domestic networks.
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Design
Lots of phone makers similar to tout how their flagship designs trickle down into more affordable midrange models, and Samsung is making similar noises about the Galaxy A51. Nonetheless, in a shocking twist, I've found I actually adopt the A51'southward look and feel to its Milky way S20 extended family.
In that location are several reasons for that. First, the A51 is calorie-free — really light. Samsung has always washed a good job of building featherweight phones that notwithstanding experience well made, and the A51 is indicative of that. Its vi.5-inch brandish is nearly 2 inches larger than the 4.vii-inch panel within Apple's new iPhone SE, and yet the A51 only tips the scales at 0.eight ounces heavier. Holding them each in ane hand, y'all can tell the Galaxy is a smidge heftier, but not by nigh as much every bit y'all might assume.
Second, the A51's brandish is flat, which is actually a breath of fresh air from the curved panels inescapable in every modern premium handset. It'south hard to put my finger on, but a flat screen simply feels simpler to apply and easier to alive with. Some curved panels look weird caput-on (e.g., Motorola Edge Plus) while others are magnets for unintentional taps, made worse by poor palm-rejection software (east.g., OnePlus 8 Pro). Simply the A51 is attractive, with its super-slim bezels and a display that perfectly follows the silhouette of the body. Those aspects in particular truly make information technology feel like a pricier phone than it is.
But it gets better: the A51 has a headphone jack — something yous won't find on Apple'south inexpensive new iPhone. Unfortunately, though, it'southward non IP-rated water resistant; in fairness, that's a rarity at this toll betoken.
I accept but two small criticisms of the A51'due south blueprint. Outset, while the iPhone SE and Pixel 3a both pack stereo speakers mounted in the earpiece and the bottom of the frame, the A51 routes all audio through the latter. It'south not a dealbreaker at this price, though it does lead to that archetype problem of muffling sound when cradling the phone in your hands sideways as yous play a game.
2nd, the materials that comprise the A51 don't experience cheap, though they're no replacement for the glass-and-metallic iPhone SE, or the partially matte-textured Pixel 3a.
Samsung really has a name for what it uses on the back — it'south officially known as "glastic" — and I'm pleased to say it feels more than like actual glass than that groan-eliciting proper name might atomic number 82 you lot to believe. I don't even listen the subtle iridescence of our Prism Crush Black review unit. Ordinarily, that sort of thing registers equally gaudy to me, though the A51 doesn't take hold of lite in an obnoxious way. Withal, I could do without the frivolous lines and triangular designs on the back, as it'south a constant reminder of the phone's budget roots.
Samsung Milky way A51 review: Display
One of the best things nearly last year's Galaxy A50 was its AMOLED display — a luxury typically reserved for more premium devices. The new Galaxy A51 retains that dazzling panel, except this fourth dimension it measures six.5 inches from corner to corner, while keeping a full-Hard disk drive resolution.
All OLED panels are not created the aforementioned, and and so the Milky way A51'south screen tin can't quite match the astronomical peak brightness or high dynamic range of the displays in the Galaxy S20 series. The A51 tops out at 565 nits of full-screen brightness, which is quite high — though you'll simply see that kind of luminosity outdoors, under harsh sunlight. Ordinarily, the highest manual setting leaves yous at about 353 nits, which is a lot dimmer than the iPhone SE's 653 nits maximum.
Merely and then, of course, the iPhone SE'southward brandish isn't OLED — it's LCD. And because the iPhone'southward screen is LCD, it can't deliver the robust hues and deep blacks that the A51 routinely churns out.
Watching Ken Miles' epic final laps in the film Ford v Ferrari on the Galaxy A51, I was impressed by the sunlight breaking through the trees lining Le Mans' Arnage corner, bathing the treetops in a warm glow while leaving the forest depths suitably murky. I've become used to observing that kind of contrast in flagship telephone panels, but it'south not something I ever expect to meet from devices equally inexpensive as this Milky way.
On its default Bright setting — which is extremely saturated, it has to be said — the A51 rendered 212.2% of the sRGB colour space, compared to the iPhone SE's 111.ii% and the Pixel 3a'due south 182.3%. The A51's Delta-Due east colour accuracy takes a hit nether the Brilliant profile as well, as Samsung's telephone registered a Delta-E score of 0.30 nether our light meter, compared to the respective 0.20 and 0.18 scores of Apple and Google's upkeep handsets. (Numbers closer to zilch are better in the Delta-E test.)
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Camera
Yous might look 1 or ii cameras from a $400 phone, just the Galaxy A51 has a whopping four on the back: a 48-megapixel, ƒ/2.0 wide-bending primary shooter, supported by 12MP ultrawide, 5MP depth and 5MP macro optics. A 32MP sensor serves selfie duties on the forepart.
That's a whole lot of megapixels, and when conditions are favorable, the A51 tin pull in a lot of particular, and churn out shots that compare favorably against the iPhone SE's best work. Samsung'southward Live Focus way isn't restricted to people, similar Apple'southward Portrait Style is, so you lot tin get shallow depth-of-field shots of anything — fifty-fifty this lantern. Overall, the iPhone's white balance and lighting is more realistic here, though I do like the A51'due south depth furnishings, even if some details on the fringes of the lantern are blurred erroneously.
That ultrawide shooter shines when the sun does, too. The iPhone SE lacks a lens with a similarly all-encompassing perspective, and so iPhone owners are at a loss to capture shots like this ane of a lawn the A51 delivered. Apple's device besides went for a strangely warm cast here, which doesn't band true given the conditions. The shot from the Galaxy device isn't perfect — the shed on the right is totally blown out, for example — though in that location's a surprising level of detail overall in Samsung's shot, and good dynamic range as you move from the shadows to daylight.
I was even impressed by the A51's macro photographic camera — an optic that's easy to overlook, given the quantity on this device. I was able to get astonishingly close to these lilies, and the result was more crisp and simultaneously less noisy than I predictable. If I take one gripe, though, the macro lens does take a habit of bleeding color out of scenes, because both this and another paradigm I captured of lavender suffered from slightly drab, undersaturated hues despite the sun shining outside.
Past now though, yous may accept noticed the qualifier that keeps popping upwards with every comparing: the A51 needs platonic lighting to take decent shots. Instance in bespeak, the example you see below, which was captured at dusk.
Beginning off, I have to stress how poor the A51 is at focusing in low light; while the iPhone SE easily locked onto the plant without me having to elevator a finger, the A51 made no attempt to adjust its gaze, and tap-to-focus didn't work either. I had to proceed moving the Galaxy back and forth to ascertain whatever kind of lock, and when I did, I ended up with the shot you meet higher up.
I was also able to get much closer to the flowers with Apple tree's device. While the A51 has that aforementioned macro shooter, it only works at a distance of millimeters; conversely, if I tried to draw whatsoever closer with the principal lens, the shot yous run into above would have turned out blurrier than a Monet painting. I'll concede that the A51's photo is obviously brighter, but if y'all look closely, it's marred past absurdly bold colors that don't mesh with the bodily lighting exterior, also every bit excessive grain. Neither of those problems plagued the iPhone'south rendition.
What about night shots? Well, yous'd think the A51 would exist improve equipped for such scenarios, because information technology has a night mode — something Apple'south cheapest iPhone lacks. As I discovered though, it'southward not very useful. In complete darkness, the shots it captures are totally unusable — smeary globs of grays that comprise provender for horror films. In other instances, similar the instance above, the Night Manner just doesn't make much of a difference.
Even without a like setting, the iPhone SE turned in a sharper shot, with more natural color that didn't render the shadows a dim blueish. There's slightly more visibility overall from the A51'southward version of things, and the light effulgent outdoors from the window is brighter, but as a tradeoff, you actually lose some particular in the pink curtains.
Indoors, things didn't get better for the A51. Its rendition of various things atop my desk was washed out next to the iPhone'southward more-precise, less-noisy take. The imperial book has a distinct texture that the Milky way totally fails to convey, and every last drop of color has been squeezed out of its cover. Instead of several mediocre cameras, perhaps Samsung would have been meliorate off giving the A51 one or two very good ones.
Finally, we turn to the selfie side-by-side, which once again illustrates that while the A51 is capable of producing sharp photos, it also has a tendency to practise strange things with color. Not but is the entire frame oddly cool, but my chapeau is the wrong color, and the trees in the background seem to accept lost near of their needles against the diddled-out sky.
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Operation
Rather than using one of Qualcomm's midrange 600- or 700-series chipsets, the Galaxy A51 derives its power from Samsung's own Exynos 9611 CPU and 4GB of RAM. The 9611 is an x-nanometer, octa-core processor, and its closest competitor is probably the Snapdragon 665, which happens to feature in the just-launched Moto G Power.
Mid-tier silicon like the 9611 should suffice to handle all but the well-nigh demanding games, and perhaps y'all might wait it to be flustered by frequent app switching when a lot of tasks are going on concurrently. Strangely though, the A51 seems to excel at games — for a budget handset, anyhow — while struggling with the simple stuff, like opening apps and rotating orientation when moving in and out of videos.
While Cobblestone nine Legends doesn't run quite every bit smoothly on the A51 equally it does on one of Samsung's flagships, and while you will observe a slight hit to the resolution and anti-aliasing, it'due south not every bit drastic a slump as you'd think. I was notwithstanding able to take out competitors and drift to victory, even despite some dropped frames here and there. PUBG Mobile also looks crisp and fluid in motion on the A51, and I was surprised to see the boxing royale shooter default to high settings the commencement time I tried information technology out on this device.
But and then, you'll become to do something routine on the Galaxy A51, like open up Chrome or swipe up to reveal the app drawer, and there volition be a delay, or an animation that stutters unexpectedly. Scrolling through eatery listings in Google Maps feels sluggish at times, and the camera typically hesitates to launch unless information technology's recently been opened.
Some of these annoyances accept been typical of inexpensive phones in the by, but they're harder to excuse given the recent competition in the segment. The new iPhone SE feels every bit equally responsive as an iPhone 11 Pro, given that it utilizes the same A13 Bionic processor. Yous can meet more details in our Galaxy A51 vs. iPhone SE confront-off. Meanwhile, the Pixel 3a's user experience is comparable with that of Google'southward flagships. Using the A51, I couldn't help but retrieve that a $400 Galaxy phone should be snappier than this.
The benchmarks illustrate the problem. The Galaxy A51 managed a score of just 1,293 in the multicore Geekbench 5 test. The Pixel 3a from last year beats information technology, at ane,336, while the $249 Moto K Power turned in a respectable 1,387. (It's almost unfair to highlight the iPhone SE's result here, but if you're curious, it was 3,226.)
The A51's showing in 3DMark's Sling Shot OpenGL ES 3.1 graphics test was a bit better. At that place, Samsung'south device totaled two,057 points, near splitting the Moto G Power's 1,734 and the Pixel 3a's 2,543 scores. Ultimately, this budget Galaxy's functioning isn't poor enough to be a dealbreaker, though prospective buyers should note that some other phones in this cost range don't force you to compromise in the aforementioned way.
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Battery life
Samsung has shoehorned a 4,000-mAh battery into the Milky way A51, which seems quite large considering how slender this device is. That large bombardment, plus the A51's hardware being optimized more for efficiency than all-out power, should guarantee exceptional battery life — or so you'd think.
However the A51 averaged but 9 hours and 16 minutes in our custom bombardment test, where devices endlessly load webpages while set to 150 nits of screen brightness, until they eventually run out of juice. The handsets on our best phone battery life list top 10 hours.
The A51's runtime is beneath average for smartphones these days, though it happens to exist in line with the new iPhone SE, which endured two minutes longer in the same test. Still, even that's not very encouraging, one time you consider that the iPhone's bombardment is less than one-half the capacity of the A51's.
The bombardment story gets worse equally yous brainstorm comparison the A51 to its Android contemporaries. The Pixel 3a lasted eleven:59, while the new Moto G Ability turned in a whopping 16:10 with its 5,000-mAh bombardment. This Galaxy's longevity isn't awful, though, much like its general operation, it's non nearly as impressive equally yous'd promise it to be.
Samsung packs a fast charger in with this phone, but given the size of the bombardment and the brick's xv-watt speed beingness rather inadequate to push all that juice, information technology's really fast in proper name simply. Over the course of a one-half 60 minutes, our review unit went from zero to but 31% — once more, a pretty unremarkable result.
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Software and special features
The Galaxy A51 comes out of the box with Android 10 installed, and on top of that you go Samsung's One UI. Although I've never been one for telephone makers' user interface tweaks to Android, One UI is a pretty comprehensive parcel that is more than merely a reskin, calculation useful features that you don't oftentimes see in phones as inexpensive every bit this, like the ability to capture scrolling screenshots and store media in secure, password-protected folders.
Rather than use a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, the A51 incorporates an in-display optical scanner that works well nearly of the time — though information technology requires a petty patience. It'southward non immediate like the capacitive sensors of old, and information technology can be a little finicky, especially if y'all've merely washed your hands. Optical sensors tin't bargain with moisture, and so the A51'due south isn't unusual in that regard. Yet, even if you lot've dried your hands well, the A51'due south sensor seems to be peculiarly sensitive to even the slightest caste of dampness.
Samsung has committed to two years of software updates and support for the Galaxy A51, and plans to effect security patches on a quarterly schedule, different the monthly basis of its premium Galaxy South- and Note-serial devices. That's actually better than what about Android telephone makers typically do for their lower-cost models, though information technology doesn't quite equal the three years of updates Google provides for its Pixel devices — let lone Apple'south unparalleled support timetable for its handsets.
Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Verdict
On paper, the Samsung Galaxy A51 would seem similar the best cheap phone $400 tin get you. It has a phenomenal display for the money; a gigantic bombardment; a processor that seems fast enough; and a quad-lens camera system that gives you more versatility in shooting than its unmarried-lens rivals from Apple and Google.
Merely once you dig by the spec sheet, the flaws commencement to reveal themselves. The A51'south display is pretty, but not bright; its battery is big, merely doesn't last equally long as the large batteries in other phones; its processor gets randomly flummoxed by basic tasks; and all those camera lenses provide many perspectives, but not a whole lot of quality.
Thus, our Samsung Milky way A51 review plant a generally good phone, but a difficult one to recommend when the competition offers more.
Sure, the iPhone SE looks positively dated side by side to Samsung'south offer, but information technology'southward difficult to argue with all the power in Apple tree's device, and the impressive photos it can churn out. The same can be said of the Pixel 3a'south camera; Google's phone also lasts longer on a charge than the A51, and will soon be replaced by a successor that will probably be fifty-fifty better overall. And if it's battery life you want, well, you tin can't do improve than the $249 Moto G Ability right now, which features a processor that actually compares impressively to the one inside the A51.
That leaves this Milky way in a tough spot. The A51 is a phone I wanted to beloved — I was impressed by its design from the moment I took it out of the box, and it's encouraging that nosotros're reaching a point where you can go such a large OLED screen and 128GB of storage in a device for less than $400. Still, every bit solid equally it is, y'all become the sense something'due south missing here.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/samsung-galaxy-a51
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