Samsung Galaxy A31 Review (Big Battery MediaTek Helio Midrange Phone) By GSMDome

Hi guys this is json. com, and I'm here with the Samsung Galaxy a31, it's a mid-range handset from Samsung, which has a quad camera and a large battery inside it's basically a sort of battery phone, and in spite of the naming pattern, it's actually bigger and better spec than the galaxy a41 we tested recently launched in April 2020, it's priced at 230 dollars, and it's time to see what it can offer. This hue is called the prism crash. Black there's also prison crash blue out there, red and white. Of course, this is a plastic body here that catches the light in a rainbow pattern. It has some prisms here and this plastic is quite solidly built, which is what we come to expect from Samsung.

We have a pretty large chin here. We have the teardrop notch for the selfie camera and overall I would say that it's a reasonably built device with plastic buttons here and with decent measurements for a battery phone 8.6 millimeters in thickness, 185 grams. Okay, now we move further. The screen you are seeing here, which is quite vividly color, is of the super AMOLED variety. It's a 6.4 inches and the resolution is 2400 over 1080 pixels. The aspect is 20 to 9, and I think it's time to put it to the test, maybe watch a video and see what it can deliver.

Okay, so let's fill the screen, as you can see, uh this notch eats a bit of the display, but not very much, and the chin here is also rather large, but doesn't bother me. So we got a pretty bright screen. It's also rather crisp. We got vivid colors. The contrast was decent in the sunlight.

The blacks are pretty deep, and we also have some pretty wide view angles. Okay, so that's that that's the actual viewing experience- and I should probably mention that we put the skin under the microscope, and we found gentile matrix pixels. Now we went further and tested the brightness and achieved a level of 458 lux units, which means this phone is superior to the Huawei p40 light Motorola one vision and Redmi Note 8 pro, but inferior to the galaxy a41 galaxy a51 and the Xiaomi mi a3, this being a samsung, always caters to its users and provides quite a few tweaks and options for the display, starting off with the dark mode settings, adaptive, brightness, blue light filter and the modes vivid or natural white balance and the RGB sliders. That's only some examples. You also have the font style and size screen, zoom screen timeout and the easy mode.

Okay. So that's about it! Screen wise, I'm pretty happy with what you are getting here, and now it's time to address. Well other specs that we have on this handset. So I'm going to start off with the CPU, because it's a familiar one. It's a MediaTek, hello p65, 12, nanometer outscore.

You already saw it on the galaxy a41 this time it comes accompanied by either four or six gigs of ram, and also by 64 or 120 gigabytes of storage, plus micro SD dedicated card slot. I would say that the functioning is quite okay. Here I didn't encounter much lag. There is the usual lag when you first fire up the phone and perform the setup and every once in a while. If you do more intensive activities, there will be some lag, but definitely not as much as the galaxy a51.

So we also did a bunch of benchmarks. We have them here, and I'm going to start off with on two to seven because unto it wouldn't run so in an tutu. Seven. This is the result we achieved this places us above the Motorola one macro and the galaxy a41, but below the Xiaomi, mi a3 and the Nokia 7.2 well. Another relevant test is definitely geek bench.

Five, the multi-core one. This is the result. We got, as you can see, we're just one point above the galaxy a41, so pretty much on par about the cat s52 and the TCL Plex once again below the Nokia, 6.2 and 7.2, and then gamers are probably wondering how we're doing with the 3d mark slingshot extreme BS 3.1, and this is the score that we got here now, as you can see, we're beating the galaxy 41 again, the Motorola motor g8 power and Xiaomi a3, but we scored below the Motorola one macro, galaxy, a50 and the Nokia 7.2. So overall, I would go ahead and place this phone somewhere between the galaxy a50, maybe and the Nokia 7.2, or maybe between the Motorola one macro and the Nokia 7.2 okay. So we did other types of tests like the temperature test.

This is the benchmark temperature test, a pretty decent 35.9 degree Celsius, so no overheating and in games 37.9 degrees Celsius once again, not a trace of overheating. Here now we're off to the actual selling point of the phone. To be honest, it's the battery 5 000 million per hour unit, lithium, polymer, 15 watt fast charge and on paper, will promise up to 22 hours of video playback. Okay, so leaving aside the promises on paper, and we go to our actual test, this is the battery test that we did with an impressive 20 hours and 54 minutes achieved. It's definitely top 10 material.

It beats several high performance phones, uh like, for example, let's see so the galaxy a31 is able to score past galaxy a70 Xperia 10, mark ii, Xiaomi a3 scores below the motor g7 power, which is a battery phone to be honest and the Xiaomi mi note 10. When it comes to PC mark, we have a very respectable 17 hours, 39 minutes. It places us on the fourth spot above Xiaomi mi, note, 10, lite and also any Samsung phone ever as well as the Xperia 10 mark ii, it's below the motor g7 power, which is the battery phone and the hunt titan p11000 pro, which is a gigantic battery phone now uh. The only bomber of the battery is the long charging two hours and 22 minutes and after one hour you're at 46 percent charge could have been better but still for the price tag and for the segment it's okay. Speaking of things that are okay, I would say that the speaker combo here is rather typical.

There's a singular speaker at the bottom, and we also have an audio jack here and well. There's Dolby Atmos technology and some tweaks for genre settings, 9, custom channels and adapt sound, ok. So, as usual, I'm going to resort to YouTube and listen to some copyright free music. So here we go so okay, so that was part of our testing. I would say that we're doing here with uh.

Well, if you turn the volume all the way to the max, and you listen to a rock tune, the sound is a bit broken and a bit distorted. The ideal experience here is at about 70 80 volume. To be honest, the bass didn't satisfy me. Neither did the high notes. The mid-notes were quite okay: rock songs are heard okay, but only if you take into account the conditions I mentioned before, like, for example, staying at a lower volume.

Okay, so we also use a decibel meter to measure the power of the volume, and we achieved 85.3 decibels by measuring the bottom of the phone and the typical acoustic sample. This value places us above the motor one action above the galaxy e50 below the galaxy 41 and the Redmi Note 8 pro in gaming. Actually, things get impressive with 102.9 decibels, it's quite loud above Nokia, 7.2 above Motorola, one macro, galaxy, 41 and basically, I would say uh hundreds of other devices. I think we got to the wrong page here: okay, let's go back volume and once again, 102.9 decibels, so above Nokia, 7.2 above Motorola and macro above galaxy 41 still at the same time below galaxy a40 and Huawei p40 lite in my book. That's still pretty impressive decibel wise, and you will not cover the speaker when gaming in landscape mode, because it's placed here on the edge, and it doesn't get in the way.

Now, on the camera front, you can already see the steer drop notch at the top side, which hosts a 20 megapixel camera for the selfies. While the back side, we have a quad camera combo. This is the LED flash and the camera go as follows: 48 megapixel main camera with face detection, autofocus, 8, megapixel, ultra-wide camera, there's a 5 megapixel macro camera in here and another 5 megapixel both camera, and we don't have 4k video capture. Keep that in mind. There's only full HD other features, we're mentioning augmented reality zone pro mode panorama, food mode, live focus and the AI scene optimizer.

Now I'm going to go to the gallery, we have about 200 shots here and let's first check out those taken during the day. Okay, so I think I'm going to start with one of my impressions, which I had throughout the capture. I feel that we're somewhere in between the galaxy 850 and the a51. Now this is a photo with a regular camera, and this is one with the ultrawide camera which catches a pretty decent color of the sky. Usually ultraviolet cameras will deform that.

So that's a good piece of news. We also tried out the HDR with some pretty good results and actually the ultraviolet camera isn't bad. As you can see here, it only slightly curves the objects on the side of the pictures, of course, not much detail, but pretty solid ultra-wide shots. Now something that I found, and it's a recurring thing on this handset well uh. Some shots taken with the main camera will feel a bit yellow, there's a yellow, tint to them, they're a bit more colorful and warmer than they should be, but in general the color calibration was decent when it comes to uh objects like those toys in the park.

Of course, the zoom is underwhelming, it's digital zoom. We don't have telephoto camera and anything like that. The texture of the object is satisfying, I would say, for a typical mid-range phone from Samsung. It does its job. Okay, the micro camera is possibly the best one, and it's not very far from what the galaxy a71 and a51 were offering.

Now the selfie camera is a bit hit-and-miss. I don't like the way it focuses on. My face, sometimes it doesn't focus properly other times it's, I would say decent, but overall, it's a mixed bag and there are more dissatisfying photos than satisfying, so I've seen better. However, it feels just slightly better compared to the galaxy a50. This is a both shot.

Uh, it's managed to cut my head okay from the subject, even though a part of the toy behind me got caught behind my ear and was considered to be part of my ear. Okay and once again, one of the strong points of the handset is definitely the close up capture and this is actually one of the best ones, texture, wise and those are taken with a macro camera which does a fine job by the way in these scenarios. So I'm going to say it again: this camera fits somewhere between the galaxy a50 and the a51. It can be compared to the galaxy 41 one. So there's that okay, so these are daytime shots.

Let's go to the excuse me to the low light shots. We change the city to another one. So one thing that I noticed, and it's quite shocking- this camera captures quite a bit of light. It's light hungry the main camera shots are okay, I would say, but the ultra-wide ones aren't usable. I mean they deform the image, and they blur some parts of it.

The streetlight sources were big in all situations and with all cameras, the zoom was underwhelming, but if you're going to tweak the white balance and the exposure a bit with the main camera, I think you're going to get some pretty Facebook worthy and Instagram worthy results. As you can see here, powerful light sources are not handled. Okay, as you can see by this logo here. So if you turn down exporter a little, you may be happy with the result. Okay, so I think we're done with this.

I think we're done with the photos. Let's talk about videos, okay, so it's time to discuss the videos, which is why I'm going to switch app and go to another one uh. I think this one here should be okay, so we have a sum total of nine videos, one during the night, a during the day, I'll keep things simple and short. The camera is only able to shoot in full HD at 30 frames per second, as you can see, it blows up the sky a lot. The sky isn't blue.

Here, it's only white, so that's something you're going to encounter in all the videos. Now the colors of the objects are okay. I'm talking about your reds, your blues, your yellows, but vegetation is definitely overexposed. Somehow the zoom is, I would say, quite decent in these shots. There's a bit of shakiness, but I've seen worse- and this is the uh selfie video.

I would say it's not bad compared to my expectations, so there's that it's a bit shaky and the contrast is very strong, just like I noticed on the galaxy a51 and also on the galaxy a71. Okay, a pretty nice texture of this fountain here, even though, as you can see, there are still problems with the sky you're going to have to mess with the exposure meter to solve them, and this is the stabilization test. Zero expectations on account of the lack of is and, as you can see, things are a bit bumpy, but there's no refocus and no flicker, so maybe take that into account. Okay. So if you can handle the bumpiness, it's a decent experience, and we also have a focus test here now.

As far as full HD video goes, I would say, the experience is decent at best. Overall, the focus is fast. Obviously I would have liked 4k for more details, but that's what we got here, so I would say comparable with the Huawei p40 lite and that's the best that we can say, okay, and we also have the Lola capture which, even though you may think, it's a bit underwhelming to be honest, uh in spite of the mauve and the purple and the blue hues that we have here. To be frank, I would say that it's better than the galaxy a50. That's the best, I can say it's shaky.

I know, there's a lot of yellow the streetlight sources are quite okay. There are some reflections, but that's the best. I can do better than the galaxy a40 and a50, but definitely not something to write home about okay. So I hope you're satisfied with the camera test, keep in mind we're somewhere between the galaxy a50 and a40, and at times this feels like a pretty solid rival for the Huawei p40 light. Now on the front of the connectivity, you probably already saw the audio jack and the USB-C port.

Aside from that, we have dual sim card slots which are separated from the micro SD. We also have 4g LTE GPS glass, Galileo in bayou Wi-Fi, dual-band NFC, there is Wi-Fi direct Bluetooth 5.0 and the calls we made were pretty loud and clear. We also did a bunch of speed tests, which you can see here. So if we start off with the 4g ones, we got as high as uh 165 mega per second in download on 4g and 54 mega per second in upload, and when it comes to Wi-Fi 240 mega per second downloads over 24.3 mega per second uploads, I would say we're doing quite fine. Now it's actually down to me to talk to you about the boring experience of the software of the phone.

When I say boring, I don't mean the actual experience. I mean the fact that it's probably the seventh or maybe tenth time, I'm showing android 10 and one UI 2.1 on a phone this year. So you probably know it by now. Anyway, once again, android 10 one UI 2.1. We have the Samsung daily aggregator on the leftmost home screen.

You can put here uh. Basically everything you want. You can change the cards from here. You can aggregate stuff from Flipboard, instant games, GP, galaxy store and more, and then you have the multitasking like this, which is a carousel of horizontally scrolling windows, of course, with the option of let's see here, split screen and a pop-up view as well pinch. The screen- and you got your typical widgets from one UI which are transparent and white, and one UI itself, is all about one hand, usage, and you can replace the virtual buttons here with gestures, swipe down, and you're treated to the notifications and quick settings which reveal some typical one, UI 2.0 options link to windows. It's here, quick share, there's also music share, Dolby, Atmos, Samsung, kids, dark mode and a focus mode.

Some of them were present before one UI 2.1 just wanted to point them out. Okay, so, let's see what else we missed here, if you want security, there's a fingerprint scanner in the screen- and it's triggered like this. As you can see it's a bit slow, but the accuracy is, I would say, spot on, there's also the face unlock with the front camera, but it's not the most accurate and most secure in the world. Now the pre-installed apps, it's a pretty straightforward package. You got your smart things.

You got your Samsung health, you got your AR zone, you got your Google package, and you got your Microsoft package here. Office, OneDrive and outlook, as well as Samsung, pay for some reason. There's the galaxy store. There's Facebook. There is also game launcher and YouTube music, several more apps here which are available in Eastern Europe.

Okay, if you want to go to the settings, things are pretty straightforward and similar to what you've seen before we have the connections, sound display themes, biometrics privacy, advanced feature, related to motion, gestures, one hand mode and dual messenger and so forth, plus, of course, we have digital well-being and parental control in order to stave off the addiction to the handset. I think we're about done here. This is the Samsung Galaxy a31 and, oddly enough, it feels like the galaxy a41 plus. Now, let's talk about the pros and the cones related to the phone, and before we do that since we're here at jsonloan. com, let us show you our website, okay, so new tab and GSM, though also a good way of showing you the virtual keyboard.

Now, on the pro side of this handset, it's got a very generous battery. So when it comes to the video, playback and continuous usage, I'm very happy with the results. It's got a bright screen with pretty vivid colors, and it's also pretty crisp. The speaker at the bottom is quite loud. The phone doesn't have problems with overheating and there's no lag.

There's no persistent lag better said. I would say that it's comfy to use in spite of being a rather on paper, large battery phone, one UI is always a plus. The pictures and videos are okay for the segment it stands in, and I feel that the connectivity is fast and what else macros are solid. Stabilization is decent. So that's about it and remember my verdict: the camera is between galaxy a50 and a51.

So those were the pros on the cons. We have the mixed selfie behavior. The videos are only full HD, and they're, not exactly impressive they're overexposed, the fingerprint scanner is slow, the charging is long. The bottom speaker lacks bass and also high notes and uh. Well, we also have a poor ultra white capture during the nighttime, mixed both, even with the back camera and the plastic build, may build, may bring on some scratches and lint around the camera area.

So that's about. It definitely calls this a galaxy a41 plus or pro, maybe on account of the larger screen and the larger battery. It's definitely a battery phone. Furthermore, it's going to compete with the Huawei p40 light, it's going to compete with the motor g8 power, and it beats the Moto G power overall as a package. Furthermore, it's excellent for watching videos playing some minimal, really minimal games and listening to some music watching YouTube all day scrolling on Facebook, so the basic tasks it can really last one day or maybe two days or maybe two and a half days since it has such a solid battery you're going to buy it for the battery for the video on the super AMOLED screen and maybe for the macro shots and the decent main camera shots.

This is from us a solid rival for the Huawei p40 light and the motor g8 power bye, bye.

Source : GSMDome