Samsung Galaxy S20 FE (Fan Edition) 5G Review - Undercutting Their Own Flagships - Cloud Lavender By Shannon Morse

Samsung just undercut their own line of phones with a cheaper one. That does everything that the flagships do, and it's awesome, hey, s'mores, I'm Shannon Morse welcome to Morse code. I do tech reviews and tutorials. So if you are looking for in-depth tech and gadget content, you have come to the right place. Today. I am reviewing the brand new Samsung Galaxy s20 Fe 5g, a Fe stands for fan edition, and no, it does not stand for only fans.

This phone is available. Now it was released at stores on October 2nd, and it's already available at a discount. For example, the MSRP is 700, and I have seen them drop to 600 bucks so keep an eye out for deals, especially on like Amazon and Best Buy. I bought mine from Best Buy. There are six colors available.

It comes in cloud navy lavender, which is the one I have mint red, white or orange. I think the lavender one is much prettier in person. This is the only one I've seen in real life. It has depth. It has this nice transition of colors between this lighter pink to the light purple whenever it shifts in the sunlight, and it is so pretty.

Furthermore, it is really aesthetically pleasing, and it catches the eye because it's very different, and it's unique. If you missed my unboxing in the box, you get the phone, a data, cable, a travel adapter and a sim ejection pin tool the phone itself, measures 6.29 by 2.93 by 0.33 inches, and it weighs 6.67 ounces. It's quite lightweight for its size. Thanks to that plastic back, which also means that you're not going to get fingerprints, and it does handle scratches quite well. I have left this thing without a case on it, since I got it, which was on the day it released early October.

So it's been a couple of weeks when I've had it in my purse, with my keys and all sorts of things like that, and I have not had any issues which is great: it has a beautiful aluminum frame, wrap around it in the complementary colors which is super shiny. So, for example, this cloud lavender one also has a lavender colored aluminum frame and the screen which is gorilla, glass 3, is flat. It's not curved, so other than the color. I would say, the design is pretty understated. When you look at this phone as a consumer, there's nothing that really strikes you as being unique other than that color other than that.

It looks like most other smartphones out there, but the tech is pretty interesting. So for ports we have USB on the bottom, there's a sim slot, which also doubles as a micros card slot on the top, which is awesome, you can add a one terabyte card to increase the size which is 128 gigs for the US version. There is no headphone jack and the power and volume are on the side. It also has dual stereo speakers, which I think are loud and clear, and you can also enable Dolby Atmos in the settings which I highly suggest you do so. The s20 Fe is also ip68 dust and water resistant as well.

So, like I said it comes with all those specs that you would expect a flagship to come with. The display is a super AMOLED screen, it's 6.5 inches in size, and it's 2400 by 1080 resolution at 120 hertz. It ends up having about an 84.8 screen to body ratio and the dimensions are 20 by 9 for that aspect, ratio, and it hits about 407 pixels per inch. It is beautifully bright, especially in the sunlight. In fact, reports are showing that it hits over 650 nits, and it does have a very vivid display.

Of course, you can edit that in the settings, if you want to kind of make it less saturated, if you prefer, while that is a lower resolution screen, that's not really a problem. I think it's quite reasonable, and it's very easy to see the selfie camera on the front is a 32 megapixel, that's an upgrade. It's an f 2.0 aperture, 26, millimeter, wide angle, and it's 0.8 microns pixel size. It can do HDR along with 4k 30 or 60 videos in 1080p, 30 or 60 as well. The selfies are really bright, so it really brought out details in the shadows, but parts of my photos were a little blown out like white cars or the sky.

Behind me, the sky also looked oddly blue, almost aqua in some of my colors, with a bit of a green tint, which I thought was very odd. Portraits were pretty good, although the both was definitely not subtle. On the back, you get a triple lens setup, with a 12, megapixel, f, 1.8, aperture lens, that's a 26 millimeter wide 1.8, microns pixel size lens with dual pixel phase, detect autofocus and is. The second one is an 8 megapixel, f 2.0 aperture, it's 73 millimeters, and that one is a telephoto lens with 1.0 micron pixel size. That one also has the same thing autofocus and is, and it also has three times: optical zoom, which can do up to 30 times digital zoom.

Just like the flagship. The third one is a 12 megapixel, f, 2.2, aperture lens this one measures, 123 degrees field of view at 13, millimeters, ultra-wide angle. This one has a pixel size of 1.12 microns. You also get HDR panorama, 4k, 30 or 60, and 1080 30 or 60 video. Just like the front now, I really suggest turning on auto tracking focus in the settings on this phone or using pro mode, because you can do that too, because in auto moving subjects are very blurry.

They are hard to capture with clear details, especially if you're trying to take pictures of a puppy, for example, for stills with calm subjects. The photos look perfect with good lighting. Colors are very vibrant, with red hues being almost overly saturated, but it did not have trouble with lots of range in the shadows and in bright spots of the photos. HDR itself did a very, very good job. Now, notably, the sky is not a weird hue using the rear cameras, whether that's with the wide the ultra-wide or the normal lenses portraits like ones of these flowers, were decent.

Although the edges of the photos were all over the place when it comes to focus the red flowers that I took a picture of looked a lot better in indirect sunlight as opposed to direct sunlight. The red petals were kind of muddied together whenever it was too bright for the picture. So you really lose a lot of that detail. Nighttime shots of rookie were surprisingly good, like these, where she's sitting on the stairs as it was still able to capture details in her fur videos, looked very good. The stabilization was excellent, and the audio was acceptable for regular videos that you would share on social media.

So here's an example of one of those videos come on come leave. Its good girl. This phone comes with a Qualcomm, snapdragon 865. It also has six gigs of ram for the US version. International versions will vary.

It is pretty fast, although it is not as zippy as the fold two which I am also currently reviewing, but that one comes with 12 gigs of ram or the s20 plus, but those are both more expensive phones as well. My 3d mark test score was 7144 in slingshot extreme. This matches very, very close with my scores on the OnePlus 8 pairs of phones. I have not checked out the OnePlus 8t yet, however, I will be doing a review on that. One as well as soon as it gets here, the gaming performance on this and my gaming experience was pretty fun.

Now I will say, though, with performance tests and with gaming, the back does get rather warm, but the games do not lag or buffer. They look smooth. The experience is really great, but just keep in mind that it does get warm whenever you are using heavy processing, this phone ships with android 10 and Samsung's, one UI, which is their user interface, just like other Samsung devices and galaxy devices. This one also has the same skin, so they use their own skin and use their own products for everything down to the keyboard and Bixby. But of course you can still customize everything in the settings like I prefer swift key.

So I immediately installed swift key on this phone. There is bloatware. Yes, there is some. There are Samsung apps, but you also get some fun features like Samsung DEX, to cast to TVs, link to windows, to send texts or get notifications on your desktop. You also get Samsung's security and privacy, so they are promising up to android 13 updates.

So, given that android 11 just came out, we should say updates for about the next two years or so, given the current trend of releases for android face unlock is very smooth, it's very fast, and it uses the front camera in order to be able to do that. The fingerprint reader to unlock your phone is found in the screen and even though it's somewhat fast, it's very bright at night annoyingly. So it looks like a flash of white light, and it is slower than the ultrasonic ones. So that is a step-down, but it is accurate. So that's a plus.

You also get Samsung Knox and that's about it for security and privacy. Now connectivity, I had perfect audio quality. Whenever I was on calls, I had no distortion or issues on Google 5 5g here in Denver. Although note that your own carrier, your location and proximity to towers may present differing experiences, so always keep that in mind with product reviews. This one does have a couple of 5g variants: there's sub 6, gigahertz, 5g and Verizon comes with millimeter wave.

You also have Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0. The battery on here is a big boy. It is 4 500 William per hour, so plenty of screens on time. You also get fast charging with 25 watts, but the included charger is only 15 watts, but you can use third-party ones as well. The wireless charging is also at 15 watts, and it does have reverse wireless charging for power share, which is great.

Now, with my normal usage, I was able to get it down to about 25 battery in the evening with about five hours of screen on time, and this is for a very normal scenario. I feel like this may change over time, as I've only had the phone for a few weeks since the beginning of October, but so far so good. So this is an impressive phone other than losing some ram and adding the plastic backing. Instead, you get practically everything else that you would get in the more expensive s20 lineup to the point that I really think Samsung is undercutting themselves, but I'm okay with it because for 600 bucks this is such a good buy. It's a flagship for half the price.

In fact, I spent on the s20 plus closer to around 1100 or 1200. How much was that phone? It was way too expensive if you're in the market, for a new phone- and you don't want to spend 1 000 USD plus for a note, which is also an amazing device for 2020, I would say: skip the s20s that came out earlier this year and get the Fe model. Instead, the fan edition- or you may want a pixel 5 instead, because that one is also competition against the s20 Fe. But this is a really amazing phone. So would I recommend it? Yes, I would.

The price is perfect. The tech and the experience are excellent, although it does come with Samsung's UI and I prefer vanilla android. This is an android phone that I could recommend to my family and I do recommend it to you all. I'm a lot more comfortable saying buy this than I would be saying about like the Samsung z fold 2, which is a very, very expensive, 2 000 luxury devices. This one is great for a consumer market because it gives you everything that you would expect and everything you want out of a 20 20 phones for half the price I mean what's not to like, so I think that's about it for the s20 Fe.

I love it. If that wasn't obvious, if you are new here subscribe comment below, let me know if you are planning to grab one of these or, if you have any questions that I did not cover in this review. I could totally address those in the comments below. Thank you again to my s'mores for watching I'm Shannon Morse, and I will see you soon. Bye, you all.

Source : Shannon Morse