SAMSUNG GALAXY A72 (Full Review!) 2021 By Mike O'Brien

Hey guys welcome back to the channel. What we have right here is the brand new Samsung Galaxy a72, which is the Samsung phone you'd be buying if you wanted a high-end Samsung phone without paying over a thousand dollars. In fact, surprisingly, this one's less than half the price of the s21, and yet it packs many of the same features. We've got multiple cameras on here, big display, slim phone and an ip68 water resistance rating overall, a really impressive spec sheet for a mid-range phone. But in this video we're going to dive into this with a camera test, a speaker test and really figure out what this phone is all about to decide whether this phone is actually as good as it claims to be, or, as some mid-range phones do, if it is just all specs and doesn't actually translate to a good experience. So there's definitely a lot to talk about here, like I said, definitely a really impressive phone on paper and just holding it in my hand.

I could tell you it feels really nice, even though it's a plastic back phone, which is to be expected for mid-range phones. I really like how this phone feels it feels really slim and really solid, and as far as the back goes, I like that it's a matte back, it's definitely easier to film for one, but there are a bunch of different colors you can choose from. Obviously this is the white one. There's a violet of blue, and I'll show you guys on the screen right here, but the phone aesthetic overall, I think, Samsung really nailed it and did a great job. We see a lot of other phones around this price point, for example the iPhone SE that end up either having larger bezels or thicker phones or bigger camera bumps in one way or another.

They end up feeling less premium, or they feel more like a burden when you're using them. They have a giant bezel. Something like that. This phone, I really like how it feels, but let's actually get into a physical tour, and I'm going to talk more about what this phone has on the inside later on in the video, as well as the camera test. But just looking at the back of this phone, like I said we have the plastic back there.

We have four cameras, but it's like four cameras with little air coats around that because, as always, one of them is a macro camera. So really just three cameras that I would be using uh, and again we'll test those out in a second, but the camera bump is overall, relatively slim, maybe I'm being desensitized. Now, with all the flagships, like the me 11, like you, guys, just saw that came out or the s21 ultra like so many phones have massive camera bumps. It's a little refreshing to see such a slim camera bump on here. That seems, like they're, still able to fit everything in their other than that.

On the right side, we have our volume rocker and our power button. That's the same as we're seeing on the s21 and pretty much every other Samsung phone out there. The left side has absolutely nothing. Just a nice clean rail all the way down the top. We have our sim tray.

This has dual sim, and it has a micro, SD, expandable storage. You can expand this, I believe up to one terabyte, but it comes with 256 gigabytes in the phone already, so I really won't be needing to expand that regardless it's there. If you want it, we have a microphone next to that on the top. Obviously, on the front, we have our little earpiece speaker which, when you turn the screen on you can see. Yes, there is a visible bezel all the way around this phone, but it's really not an eyesore, and you can barely see the earpiece, the speaker on the top.

Of course, once I get into the test, you guys will see that it is surprisingly loud for how small it is on a mid-range phone uh, but going down to the bottom of this phone we'll get back to the screen in a second, the bottom of this phone. We have a headphone jack, I'm kind of wondering when Samsung is going to remove the headphone jack from the mid-range phones. For now, I'm really happy to see it. There I mean in the past. I noticed that I end up using so many Bluetooth, earbuds anyway, they're just more convenient that I don't use the headphone jack, but occasionally you get in a friend's car, and they have an aux cord and instead of like setting up the Bluetooth, it's just so much easier to do that, and it's still nice to see that on a phone of course, we have the other microphone there, a speaker on the bottom and an USB type-c port in the box.

You're going to like this in the box, this phone comes with a superfast 25 watt charger. So that's something that you're not even seeing in phones that are double- or you know even triple the price of this. So getting that charger in the box great to see that 25 watts is not the fastest out there right now, so I wouldn't call it superfast, but that's what Samsung calls it, and it can charge this phone up reasonably quickly, so it has five thousand William hour battery in this phone. Again, that's on par with a lot of flagships out there, and you're going to be getting a pretty solid battery life. I'll talk more about the internals in a second but charging it up.

I mean five thousand William hours, 25 watts you guys can do the math. It charges up reasonably quickly, but it's not going to be like a 30-minute charge. Obviously, now getting back to the front, I mentioned the front a couple of times already the part that you're looking at obviously of the phone you have a 6.7 inch display and in the world of mid-range phones we kind of have to choose like they pick and choose what they want to put in here. They can either make it a bulky phone a cheap, build, but give it like a good display or give it like what the pixel, 3a and 4a did just give it a good camera like there are different things you can do, and so Samsung it looks like is trying to do everything at once, but one of the things that they didn't max out that we're seeing some other mid-range phones do is the display. So it is a relatively bright display.

It's 800 nits for reference, a lot of flagships around like 1200 nits, so they definitely get brighter, but I mean I'm able to see this out in bright daylight with no issue. The color on here looks great Samsung. If there's one thing they're good at it is making bright colorful displays. So that was no concern. We do have a bezel all the way around.

Like I said I don't really care about that. I would rather have a slim bezel all the way around than what the iPhone has with the giant chunk on the top and bottom, but we do have a hole, punch camera on the top. It's a tiny hole punch, and if you look closely, you can actually see a small metal ring when your screen is off. It does kind of flash you occasionally. So I'm not sure why they add the little metal ring.

It's something that we saw last year in the series as well, but it's something that you definitely want to be aware of. I wish they didn't do that, but it's its going to be there and the display itself is full HD, plus 60hz display so pretty standard for a phone around this price range, but some nice things with this phone that they really advertised heavily at the launch were the eye saver for one the eye saver is supposed to be limiting the blue light. It's something I always turn on with my other phones, and it's nice that this phone actually does a pretty decent job of it. You'll see like something like the a02 or the a12, a lot of those phones like yeah. They sometimes have an eye saver mode or like a blue light filter mode, but it ends up making everything, look really distorted and brown.

This still looks pretty normal, pretty natural. The color balance is all perfect, even when you have that on. So I am impressed with that feature at first. When I read it, I thought: doesn't all the phones have that anyway, but I see what they were talking about. They did a decent job here and then.

The other thing I want to talk about on the display is actually the in-screen fingerprint sensor, as you can see on the bottom uh it's if you've noticed literally this entire video I've been signing in and turning it off, and I've been consistently getting in every single time no rejections, and so, even though it looks like the sensor is pretty small on the bottom, I'm impressed, I think overall, it does a decent job. I have no issues with that. The only thing is I wish it was a little higher up on the screen. I feel like I'm reaching my thumb down a little far for that, but maybe somebody who has smaller hands would have no problem with that and that might be a great spot um. So maybe my hands are the problem.

Maybe I'm the problem here, but I mean, like I said it's definitely fast and consistent. I really like how far Samsung came with the fingerprint sensors. They used to be a complete headache, especially on the series and something Samsung does especially well with the series. Are they try to give you everything you need, so the charger in the box is great. This also comes with a screen protector pre-installed, which is great.

You don't have to buy one and try to place it yourself with bubbles, it's great that they already did that and on top of that this year, the a72 now has a water resistance rating ip67, I mean don't try this, but it means you should be able to submerge this, and it should be fine, for. I think one meter underwater for 30 minutes or some something like that. Basically, what it means is, if you drop this in a puddle, it should be fine if it gets rained on it should be fine, like you, shouldn't, have to worry nearly as much about water damaging this phone now, of course, all of that sounds great, but there were a couple drawbacks. I noticed for one the haptics on this were not especially impressive. I found that they were relatively strong, but they felt a little cheap, at least from my experience here.

Okay, now I promised in the beginning of this video that I would do a camera test, so let's get into that, but something I want to mention first is that we have a five megapixel macro camera on here. I'm going to show you guys what it does, but of course it's a macro camera. I never get excited about those. We have a 12 megapixel ultrawide lens, a 64 megapixel main shooter. So your wide angle lens- and this actually has optical image stabilization, which should be great for night photos for videos for just holding your camera still and taking a day photo it's nice to have that, and then we also have an 8 megapixel telephoto lens, which again also has optical image, stabilization, which is even more important when you're zooming in on something.

If you don't have is, it is really hard to take a video or a photo. That's not either blurry or shaky. So taking a look at the photos. Honestly, the main camera does a fantastic job. If you give enough light, there's great color, great brightness, great sharpness, very true to life colors, and you can see this waterfall again looks really great.

The only thing is in lower light situations, sometimes the sticks or the trees get slightly over sharpened, but again that's really nitpicking there. Otherwise, it seems to look perfect. If you go in slightly lower light situations, I also notice that the dynamic range is not the best. The trees get a little silhouetted here, but otherwise the ultrawide lens again great color. On this one minimal distortion on the edges and even the 3x optical zoom lens.

Even though it's not the highest resolution, it still looks pretty good. You can see here again a small little waterfall, and we can zoom into 10x. Still a very usable photo a little more on the noisy side, but a quick, denoting filter would probably fix that and make it look decent. Even this waterfall, which is a fast moving subject, obviously looks decent at 10x. Zoom 30x zoom, obviously, is completely perceivable.

You really can't even tell what these photos are like this one's a waterfall, and you could maybe tell that it's like abstract art, really the selfie lens. I was a little less impressed with it kind of over softened my face, especially when you go into live focus mode, and it missed the edges quite a bit, but it yeah. So it wasn't really that great uh the rear, light focus mode, however, was much, much better fantastic edge detection and then, of course, we get to the macro lens, which is completely useless. I'm really not even going to talk much about this. It doesn't have autofocus, so I don't like it all right.

So this is the test with the video. This is shooting 4k 30 right now, and you can see it's definitely trying to stabilize as I walk it walks a little bumpier than this, so that is the optical image, stabilization, uh, otherwise, you're going to see that we have really nice bright greens in the grass here, very vibrant colors, pretty good dynamic range this way, but if we start including the sky up there, I mean it is pretty early in the morning, but still the trees are a little silhouetted. Otherwise, we can switch between lenses. I believe we can. If we zoom out, we seamlessly switch to the ultrawide, which again looks perfect.

Dynamic range is slightly less powerful here. Actually, no I'd say it's about the same, just more skies in it. There still great color great sharpness everywhere, and we can zoom into the telephoto lens. Now, let's go look at that thing over there as we zoom in again pretty seamless with the zoom. It still looks perfect, consistent, color, consistent lighting, the lenses overall, I'm very impressed with that.

We can also zoom into 12 times and again. The telephoto lens also has the optical image. Stabilization so even at 12x zoom, I'm able to pretty easily hold that pipe in the middle of the frame, so zooming back out to the standard lens. This is what it sounds like if a subject is talking in front of the camera, as I am right now, so you guys can leave a comment and let me know how this sounds to you and then this is the selfie camera again shooting in 4k 30 right now, I'm just walking around. So you guys can leave a comment and let me know how this looks and sounds, and that pretty much concludes our video test.

Okay, let's get into a speaker test and you guys will see that it's a relatively loud phone. It does a pretty good job and I really don't have any complaints. I'm not really expecting the best audio quality out of this, but I was still impressed just 10 miles. South of Yellowstone is Grand Teton national park and although the two parks are side by side, they honestly couldn't be more different. So honestly, pretty good speakers.

As far as the internals of this phone go, it's kind of a mixed bag, so we have 256 gigabytes of storage, uh, eight gigabytes of ram up to a terabyte of expandable storage, 25 watt fast charging, 5000 William hour battery. You can use it as a mobile hotspot, it has NFC and the list goes on. It does a lot of great things, but there were a couple drawbacks. One of them is that this phone only has LTE it's not a 5g version right now, which I know whenever it is 5g I say, don't worry about 5g, but it is kind of a drawback in that it's a little less future-proof that you don't have 5g on here. Realistically, I have no problem using LTE and most carriers right now, most locations are only using LTE if they're using 5g- it's not even millimeter wave anyway.

So I wouldn't worry about that. But it's just something that I have to point out that, if you're making a phone in 2021 without 5g, technically that has to check off as a drawback and unfortunately, the other drawback with the internals of this phone is the processor it's not especially fast, and you can really notice this when you start to go into the search function and if you're looking for a certain app a lot of times, it'll take some time like a substantial amount of time before it actually shows you what you're looking for so definitely not the fastest phone out there. I was a little disappointed with the speed on this one, but again you have to cut costs somewhere, so for anybody who doesn't care about if you're, not playing games, you're, not doing anything like that. This phone could be a fantastic phone to buy so overall pros and cons for this phone. Starting off with the pros.

I really like how it feels a nice slim phone very long battery life on here overall, pretty decent display, a pretty solid package and a nice balance of everything you're looking for to make it feel like a perfect mid-range phone, like you know that it's not a flagship, but it still has that water resistance rating still has a good rear camera good battery, like everything that you really be looking for is there, and on top of that, it even comes with some stuff that flagships don't come with like a charger in the box, a headphone jack, expandable storage and a pre-installed screen protector. But of course there are a couple drawbacks. Like I said, the haptic feedback is not the best on here. The haptic motors are a little cheap, and they feel that way when you're using it- and I mean you're- going to have some bezel around the phone and really the big one is that the processor is not the fastest out there. It's not it's by no means slow, but you're definitely going to use it and know that you're not using a flagship.

So guys, that's what I have to say about the Samsung Galaxy a72. If those drawbacks are not concerning to you, then I would highly recommend getting this phone. It's less than half the price of the s21, and it delivers a lot of what I wanted to see. So I was happy with this, but you guys can leave a comment and let me know what you think of the a72 down below in the comments section I'll, be there hearing what you guys have to say and if you enjoyed this video, definitely click that subscribe button and the bell icon, because I will be releasing many more videos, just like this one about the a52, a comparison, video and a bunch of other videos like that. So guys.

Thank you all for watching this video. I'm mike o'brain I'll, see you next time.

Source : Mike O'Brien