Samsung Galaxy A8S 2019 Review & Unboxing (English) By TechTablets

This right here is Samsung's Galaxy A8S, it's a new phone that was released only about a week ago in China, and it is Samsung's first phone to have a hole in the screen. So it's following that new trend has a 24 megapixel front-facing camera with an F 2.0 aperture the screen on. It is not one of those really high-end ones from Samsung, so it's not an AMOLED panel or Super AMOLED, it's just an IPS and overall it's an above-average screen when I compare it to the likes of, say the u-20 that I just reviewed this phone right here is powered by the Snapdragon 710. That's a mid-range chipset! My version has 6 gigabytes of RAM in 128 gigabytes of storage, non-expandable. So let's take a look at what you get in the box. You get a type C, 2, USB, cable in white.

You get some earphones say the budget kind of cheaper ones, but it does have a remote on it. At least so you can control the audio through that, and then we get a Qualcomm quick charge to charges. So it's 9 volts max. It's not the 12 volts 1.5 amps that you normally get with Qualcomm quick charge 3, which the chipset supports. Then we get a sim tool and also a case that case has another CPU, clear style one.

So it covers all the buttons protects, the camera and overall it will do the job as your first case straight out of the box. So the rear of the phone is made of glass. It is very slippery. That's probably why they included that case. In the box there we've got a rear, fingerprint reader, a dual tone, single tone, LED flash, actually I thought it was jewel, but on closer inspection it seems to only have just the single flash in there and a three camera set up on the rear.

So we have the main sensor, which is 24. That's the one with a blue around it and then the one at the top is the 10 megapixel sensor up the top of the phone you'll find the dual antenna Lions the frame the housing around. It feels a lot and looks a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S, a Samsung Galaxy S 9. It's this. The same kind of DNA, they're, sharing, they're, the same style and there's, of course, a secondary mic.

They're used for noise cancellation on the right hand, side. You will find the volume up and down and power buttons, they are made of metal, and they have a good feel to them, and they also do not rattle around. On the left side. Al Jul, NATO SIM tray. It does have a rubber gasket around it and then a button that is to Bixby and then along the bottom.

You can see the two antenna lines, a single loudspeaker, so the earpiece does not house a secondary loudspeaker in it. It doesn't have that function, the type C port and then our main microphone. So this is why Samsung included the type C headphones, because there is no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on this. Sadly, now with a keen eye, you would have noticed that the white isn't quite uniform here around the top of the bezels and, most importantly, around that camera too you'll notice that it's not perfect, it's not a perfect white, and when you have a solid color, you will see the difference there that it has this shadow around it. So it's slightly darker around the edges, and it's just not uniformed, but it's not as bad as, for example, the view Twenties screen, as you can see here so on the right of the screen, that is the a8 s, and now we have the honor of u-20 on the left.

You can see its even worse, and we get an added a little of light leakage right on that corner. Just there, you can see where it's extra bright, and you can clearly see here the difference in the bezels. So again on the left. It's the view 20 and the Samsung Galaxy a8 s is on the right of the screen with a larger top bezel and the border that is around that front facing camera is also quite a bit larger there. So to me, overall, this build quality is very good.

It's in fact better than the on up view.20 this one here, just a little more refined. The II just feel a little better in hand. Yes, it as a slippery phone, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be very fragile too, with that glass on the rear. So you should use that case really when you get it straight away out of the box to save yourself from any damage. Now the screen has larger bezels, as I pointed out versus the view 20.

When you have a look at them side-by-side, you can clearly see that the view 20 there. Yes, it does have slightly smaller bezels, but the better screen overall is actually the Samsung's here, and I'm, probably not a surprise to people but Venus ants on screen. It would be a little better slightly brighter it's about a hundred Lux brighter at 530 versus the 430. Approximately that you get on the honor view.20. The gamma is also much better here.

It's about 2.2, which is almost spot-on, maybe 2.1, but that is perfect. It's an IPS panel. So it doesn't quite look as good, of course, as the premium out there, which will have deeper blacks but the blacks on this. As you can see what I'm looking at and even what has been displayed on the video watching, they are quite deep. So this is good.

There's another positive of the screen, so over I feel it's not a bad screen that have gone with. Yes, it does have a little of that and uniformed color distribution with the whites with solid colors just around. You can see there and then, of course, as I pointed out around the camera, but besides that, it's really not a bad screen at all and a good brightness of that 530 Lux under display settings. You will also find this which I particularly like this is the screen zoom. So you can change the scaling and the font size to your own personal preference.

It's good to see a lot of manufacturers are now including this option, because we have many phones. You just never had this choice at the time of my review here. The phone is shipping with Android 8.1 I was really hoping that this was going to have Android 9 I'm, pretty sure it was advertised having Android Pi. It has a security patch level of December the first, so it's only a month out or so. So that's not bad at all.

It also comes with very few bloatware apps. Just this right here and a lot of people probably won't even consider this as bloat. So that's it, which is perfect. Considering most of the Chinese phones I review, they are crammed packed full of so many extras. You have to uninstall, but not here, so I've got a slightly different icon set here.

The way they've got it. Looking the UI, and I'm not to go into a lot of detail. You've got Samsung's Galaxy, sorry Samsung's, knocks on here Bixby their AI assistant, Samsung pay. You've got all that sort of stuff on there. If you like it, that's all been covered by many other people in so much detail.

Don't really need to go into that. What matters to me and probably you to its performance, does it perform well? Well, not really. It's very average that performance here and this kind of surprised me because I've used other phones with the Snapdragon, 710, and I found them to be ok, but this seems to just need a little more tweaking optimization I've got the 60 gigabytes of RAM version so with 8 gigabytes. That may be a little smoother, but you'll notice here, even recent apps, it's just not as smooth as it should be, it's running below at times, 30 frames per second, you just see a little of animation, stutters here and there, when you're going through your multitasking when you're exiting outer apps, it's not as fluid as it should be. For this chipset I know it's not a high-end chipset we're reaching its limits here.

When you do push it really heavy, you will see that, and even sometimes when I was installing an app at the same time and also using the keyboard I'm using Google's G board at the moment, I even noticed some lag with that which was really disappointing to see that should not be happening. So your answer to a score that comes out as expected for this chipset perfectly fine. There and same goes for the internal storage space. These are very good. Actually, almost 500 reads and 200.

Write, sequential and both the random reads and writes are also very good. Now GPS works. Ok, the reason why I say ok is I did notice, so when I was moving around that the accuracy would often jump up to 6, 7 and even 9 meters, and it wouldn't use all the satellites that were around now. Most mobile phones will not lock on to every single satellite, but this one just compared to other phones, seems to use a lot less and doesn't seem quite as accurate as it could or should be Wireless speeds and the range no issues here, it's performing as it should. It's quick.

The wireless and also the range is very good, no problems with that. You might have just seen when I swiped as well. Look at that animation stutter. That is actually pretty slow when it was doing that now it's better, but it is something that you'll often see with this phone is just that random sort of lag and stutter, and these are the LTE speeds there, so 21 up and down it all depends, of course, on your carrier, but no issues using this phone here in Spain good reception. This phone also has Google's Wide vine level one.

So this means Netflix will run in resolutions over standard definition. So this is good now I've been using the phone and plugging it in, and that keeps resetting my battery stats, of course, but it is looking very good and my testing I've been able to do, for example, one hour of Netflix or Amazon Prime streaming or YouTube, and you're only losing about 8% battery life. So just looking very good, that's looking like you'd be able to get at least over 10 hours of on-screen time with us, which is great now to fully charge this battery, which is the 3400 William hour battery you're. Looking at just over two and a half hours, I mean it's not the fastest, but it's still fine. The kind of speeds we are getting now to demonstrate the face, unlocking which is fast but not as fast as other phones, I'll just quickly demonstrate see how long that took.

So that was about a second or so it's not bad. Sometimes it can be a little slow. It all depends on I, guess the lighting conditions, or things like that. So overall, the performance of it is good. That's decent, it's just not going to be the fastest out there.

The same goes for the fingerprint reader, so the fingerprint reader on the rear. Here you need to just touch it, and it's always on. Then it unlocks that only takes about a sick, and so that is very quick, which is great. It's a deal, I just touched it, and it was one second or under one second, so about half a second audio quality, so no 3.5, millimeter, headphone jack. So for some people that's going to be a deal-breaker, but you can use Bluetooth, there's a way around it.

They do have that included headset in there now the voice call quality, I find to be excellent. It's good, no problems with it whatsoever. So that is fine. Now we've only got that single loudspeaker. Sadly, this does not double as a loudspeaker, which I feel is a bit of an error.

They could have made that a secondary loudspeaker, but they decided not to for whatever reason, cost saving. Probably now the speaker output from the downwards firing speaker here. It's fine I wish it was a little louder, but overall I think, depending on the content you're looking at the loudness is going to be okay, but here's that sample so gaming performance. We know the Snapdragon 710 is not a high-end flagship chipset, it's a mid-range her, but it's not a bad one. The GPU has got enough power to run all your latest games with fluid frame rates, and they're all going to be playable.

You can have no issues there, so this is pub key on the high frame rate setting the HD setting. Let's see how it runs motors to get a couple of kills without any issues and the frame rate is keeping up that you see a few little stutters and some occasional little lag as you expect, but with the HD setting the high frame rate, you can see that it is quite fluid. It's smooth and well. You can see a bit of lag. Just then see that little of starter comes into play, but overall this is very playable.

You could, of course, lower the settings if you're concerned about that lag and, of course, how could I not mention this. Look at this big massive border. We get on the left-hand side because of the camera. Now this seems to happen with just some games. Some games will fully stretch out, but a lot of content.

It will do this, so this is something that Samsung is going to have to address with software I'm sure they can just stretch it right out, like everyone else does, or perhaps because this phone currently is not supported by pub key looking now the stock camera app. So this is pretty straightforward. It's exactly like other Samsung phones, it's very similar to my Samsung Galaxy s.9 plus that I have is my main phone, but we've got this edit option here. So that's similar to when you swap over to the two x lens on the Samsung Galaxy s line plus, but they've just done it differently with the icon there, so you're showing you got like a wide shot, then the one that goes in. So it's a two time zoom it's using that 10 megapixel lens, and then I start off.

If you've seen x, 2, and then you are able to go and just zoom right up. If you want to now swiping up or down on the screen, you've got all the different modes here, so you've got the beauty modes, and you've got life, focus with the blurred backgrounds that you can change after you've already taken the shot pro mode, not a lot of settings in here at all, so we just got white balance and then ISO goes only up to 800. Now I find the cameras on this phone to be a little disappointing. The focus on the rear camera is very hit-and-miss of reminds me of the old Xiaomi phones. They should have gone with a sensor, I feel with dual-pixel phase detection and not just phase detection, but anyway, here are some samples from the camera.

Here's a sample from the front-facing camera. So we get a fixed focus here. There's no autofocus on it a little of a crop. In fact, no no crop really. With this.

It can shoot in an odd resolution with the screens 19 by 9 aspect ratio, something like twenty thirty-eight by ten eighty-eight max res, and you can see that there is no electronic image stabilization with the front-facing camera. So it's going to be a little rocky. The audio quality I find to be good and the image quality as well as good. It's fine I, don't really have too many complaints to find it. It's okay, it's not too soft.

Furthermore, it's not too sharp and having the fixed focus means we don't have that focus issue with it. Pulsing in and out, like I, do with my Galaxy S nine plus there's video. Now, with the a8 s- and you can see it does not have any electronic or optical image stabilization in 4k, if you turn on 1080p, then it is smoothed out quite nicely. It does an okay job. You will notice that the focus I have been having issues with it, that it hasn't really been that good.

It can be very slow. So it's not there. We go it's locked under my hand now, and sometimes it can be off like now, and there we go. It's got it again and overall, pretty disappointing quality here. If only they could really enable that electronic image stabilization here with 4k would make it a lot more usable.

They Mike's the whatever the mic slave feel is acceptable. It's fine! It's not bad! And overall, if you use a Steadicam or a gimbals or something like that, then you can get usable 4k quality from this. It's just that focus at times does annoy me and this at the front-facing camera in low lights. You can see it gets a lot more grain and the frame rate seems to be okay, the viewfinder that when you are using the front-facing camera, gets a huge amount of lag because it's constantly always trying to brighten things up low light, not amazing quality we're seeing a lot more green. As expected, this is very challenging conditions for any smartphone camera.

At least the frame rate is keeping up there. Okay guys, so we have a very decent build on this. It feels premium in hand, it's very similar to say the Samsung Galaxy S8 the build quality so good there. The screen is not perfect. It's an average screen.

It has IPs, and they've made some compromises really I feel with it and with the hole that they've put in there. Hopefully, when we have the flagships, we're going to have a much better screen than this one, but of course those from Samsung we'll be using their Super AMOLED panels, so the front-facing camera can produce in okay photo you get the portrait photos and things like that and overall it as good the face. Unlocking is fast for the most part. Just like the fingerprint, unlocking very quick there, it's running Android 8.1, it's not the latest version of Android, and it doesn't have the latest security patch either. So, hopefully, Samsung is going to up their game with that and release.

Some new patches bring us up to Android Pi, but also effects and improve the performance of this, which I find truly to be super disappointing on this, because I have used snapdragon, 17 mobile phones before this one is running choppy, you run into lag, and I've, even seen as far as lag with input when you're typing, so I want to put something in and Google search, and I was installing something. At the same time, there was a noticeable lag everything sort of froze up for a second and then the text all appeared again and that to me is completely unacceptable. Considering the price of this here, the camera quality is also a letdown and will often over expose on the rears. You sing with my photo of the camera. What the sorry, the clock tower there from the cameras that it overexposed it a little there.

The focus can be all over. The place it has very poor focus Samsung in my opinion, should have gone with one of their 12 megapixel, dual pixel phase, detection, autofocus cameras. This one has only phased, detection, autofocus and very hit-and-miss and video. It can be a real pain, the video quality, so we don't have in 4k any electronic image stabilization. The microphone quality is definitely good.

It's fine! It's a lot better than the likes of the honor view. Xx that I have only just recently reviewed, but I feel that if you're going to be spinning the same kind of amount of money that both of these phones cost that you probably want to go for the view xx pro so make sure you check out my review of that one which is right up here and let me know down in the comments. What do you prefer? Do you prefer a teardrop notch, a wide notch, normal, not CH? Or do you think that this is the way to go with the hole in the screen that we're starting to see now? Should we have more phones with holes in the screen? Is this the best option, or do you think pop-up cameras or sliders is the way to go? Let us know in the comments, and thank you so much for watching this review bye for now.

Source : TechTablets