Galaxy A31 Review - Making Sense of Samsung’s Choices!!! By C4ETech

The galaxy a series might slip under the radar for smartphone enthusiasts, like you and me, but there's no denying the fact that Samsung sells a ton of these smartphones through their offline stores. So that's why I decided to take a closer look at the galaxy a31 find out what the average offline consumer can expect from a smartphone in 2020. Hey guys, Marty here from c4etech, and if you do end up enjoying this review, then please consider subscribing and turning on notifications by hitting that bell icon. Let's now get started, design wise, the series hasn't really changed much. We still have the plastic back with the gradient pattern with the a31. We now have a dual dome finish on top of it, there's a rectangular camera pump to the left now with quad cameras and, of course, the prominent Samsung branding near the bottom up front.

Furthermore, we have a large 6.4-inch screen complete with an u-shaped notch. Up top Samsung calls this the infinity u panel and in my opinion this is a standout feature of this phone. It's a full HD, plus AMOLED display and in true Samsung fashion. We have deep inky blacks, combined with vibrant punchy. Colors content on this screen looks gorgeous in my time with the a31.

I binge-watched a season of dark on Netflix, and this AMOLED panel really brought those gloomy scenes to life. The bezel surrounding the 20s to 9 display is pretty thin, giving us an immersive experience. My only complaint here would be that bottom firing speaker. It sounds a bit tinny. I wish it had a bit more depth to it.

The 3.5 mm headphone jack, though, sounds great. Now moving over from the display to the performance section. We have a MediaTek, hello, p65 chipset in here, along with six gigs of ram and 128 gigs of storage. We even have room for expandable storage via this dedicated micro SD card slot. Now, if you were to compare the hello p65 to a snapdragon chip, I'd say it's in the same ballpark as a snapdragon, 710 or 712.

So, even though the hello p65 was launched back in 2019, the benchmark numbers puts it on par with a mid-range ship from almost two years back. Basically, what I'm trying to say here is that the a31 can scroll through emails or serve social media just fine, but don't expect it to feel fast and snappy. There are no visible, lags or frame drops, but the combination of a 12 nanometer chip, eMMC 5.1 storage, with Samsung's one UI 2.0- means that things take their own sweet time. Taking a look at gaming, we have the Mali g52 dual-core GPU in here. Interestingly, this is the same GPU as the one on the real mean RSO 10, but it does come with a lower clock speed.

As far as gaming goes, we were able to get up to ultra frame rates at the smooth graphics setting in PUBG. The gameplay was quite smooth, no pun intended, and I didn't feel any lags or frame drops. However, once we turned the detail level up to HD, then we could only get the frame rate up to high and the gameplay had the occasionally jerky frames here and there. Well. The performance here is quite a big upgrade from the Enos 7904 found on the Samsung Galaxy a30s.

I still wouldn't recommend the a31 for gaming or CPU intensive workloads moving on to software. Next, we did mention that we have one UI 2.0 running here, that's on top of android 10. We have the usual Samsung features so always on display edge screen a dark mode. That looks fantastic thanks to this AMOLED panel heck. We even have a truncated version of Samsung pay.

This is Samsung pay mini, which allows NFC transactions as well as online wallet based payments, so no magnetic strip here, which means no loading, debit or credit cards onto the a31. As far as biometric security goes, we have an in-display fingerprint sensor in here, and this is where Samsung has made a big leap forward. The sensor is much faster and way more accurate compared to the ones on previous mid-range a-series devices like the a70, for example. We also have faced unlock in here and in our time with the phone it worked quite well when it comes to battery life. We have a 5 000 William hour unit, and it had no problems getting us through a day of moderate to heavy usage.

One thing that I did feel, though, was that compared to other devices with similar five thousand William hour batteries, the idle drain on the a31 was a bit on the higher side. This may be due to the older 12 nanometer MediaTek chip, but the fact that I had always on display turned on all the time in. In the case, it's not really a dealbreaker, just something I thought I'd mentioned in the review. As far as charging speeds go, we still have the same 15 watt, fast charger from the a30s, but the 25 bigger battery size means we get more hours out of the a31. Bigger battery does mean more weight, but Samsung has still managed to keep the weight down to 185 grams.

That's largely thanks to the polycarbonate build. The six plus inch screen does mean that most people would end up using this device two-handed, but the power button is nice and easy to reach the volume rocker, though not quite as much speaking of volume, I did mention the speaker and the headphone jack before, but I forgot to talk about call quality well audio through the earpiece was nice and clear, and the person at the other end had no trouble hearing us either. Speaking of audio, we also have Bluetooth 5.0 on board. Samsung is one of the last brands to still include a pair of basic earphones with their devices. They sound ok about what you would expect from cheap earphones and there's support for FM radio on board too.

We also get NFC support, thanks to Samsung p mini done with the sunrise. Let's quickly move on to the optics, we have a 48 megapixel primary camera in here with an f 2.0 lens. It takes some lovely looking 12 megapixel shots on broad daylight. The colors are a bit on the punchiest side, but other than that we had good details and the dynamic range is well-preserved in shadows as well as highlights. Switching to the 48 megapixel mode does get a sharper photos like we can better see the details on the hubcap of this car, but we do miss out on the dynamic range like the sky here appears totally washed out, and the details in the shadows of these leaves have been crushed.

Samsung has skipped on a dedicated night mode in here, which means low light pictures turned out to be quite disappointing. We have grainy images with washed out colors, and we need at least some sort of indirect light source to get usable low light images out of the a31. As far as the 8 megapixel ultrawide snapper goes, we have good-looking photos, but they seem to have a slightly warmer tone compared to the snaps taken by the primary camera. Samsung also lets us take full HD video using the wide angle lens. Now we have a quad camera setup in here, which means that the last two sensors are a 5 megapixel macro and a 5 megapixel depth sensor.

The latter lets us take live focus shots like other Samsung phones. We have a slider for the blur strength, and we can even change the blur type as well as strength in post. As far as macros go well for a five megapixel snapper, it pulls up some pretty decent. Looking shots. This one of the knots with the heavily baked out background is one of my favorites.

Of course, we have to talk about them, selfies. Well, the 20 megapixel snapper takes 8 megapixel shots by default. Up close, we can see that they kind of look soft. We can up the details by going full 20 megapixels, but we lose out on HDR. That means we can end up with fully blown out backgrounds.

We also have a portrait selfie mode thrown in one thing I must give Samsung credit for is that they have a single button to turn off all beauty modes. That's super convenient as far as videos go. We can capture up to 1080p 30 frames per second, it's usable footage, but there's a bit of shake and the details aren't the best. There's no 4k capture in here, since that's a limitation of the p65 chip, but hey Samsung, does include a very cut down version of their pro mode. It's only for photos, so not videos.

So, overall, once again, the quad cameras here are quite a big step up from the a30s, but I feel like Samsung could have done a bit more here at least added a night mode into the mix. Now there are two ways we can look at the a31 one is to compare it to other phones in the online market. Well, let me be clear: that's not one where 8th a31 stands any chance. Heck Samsung's own m31 offers much of the same specs at a significantly lower price point. But if we look at the offline market, which is what this phone is originally marketed towards, well then the a31 improves on the a30s on almost every aspect and at 22 000 rupees offers a very well-rounded device from a tier one brand like Samsung.

So that's been my two cents on the galaxy a31 now I want to know what you guys think also if there are any of you who still prefer buying phones from the offline market, what do you guys think of the a31? Are you tempted in picking one up for around 22 000 rupees? Let us know by the comments below, as always as share subscribe and oh turn on notifications by hitting that bell icon. If you haven't yet thanks a lot for watching till the end, guys have a good one cheers.

Source : C4ETech