"The Galaxy M10 feels incredibly light in the hand as the phone's body is primarily made out of plastic"
It has been some time since Samsung last introduced a new smartphone series, but to start off 2019 with a defining statement, the South Korean brand has now unveiled not one, but two handsets from its brand new 'Galaxy M' range. In this review, we'll be going over the more affordable variant out of the two - the Galaxy M10, and let you know whether the company is ready to take on the likes of Xiaomi and Realme in this price range or not.
Table of Contents
Just two years ago, we would have been extremely liberal with our evaluation of a smartphone's design in the budget price bracket. However, handsets launched in the affordable price range last year raised the bar for this category. Coming to the Galaxy M10, one of the key design highlights is the fact that it utilises an Infiniti V display, which is Samsung's term for a waterdrop notch. The brand seems to have skipped the notch display bandwagon entirely, and directly jumped onto this latest fad. The phone's body is primarily made out of plastic, which looks good but does attract a few scuffs after regular use. We liked the build quality of the phone and can vouch for the fact that it does not look cheap.
The most notable difference as compared to the M20 is that the back of the Galaxy M10 does not feature a fingerprint sensor. Now, admittedly, the lack of a fingerprint sensor might prove to be a dealbreaker for some users but to compensate for this, the brand is offering a face unlock feature. We will discuss the performance of this security feature in detail later on.
The Samsung Galaxy M10 comes with a dual camera setup at the back, consisting of a primary 13MP snapper with f/1.9 aperture and a wide-angle 5MP sensor with f/2.2 aperture. At the front, the phone packs an 8MP unit for clicking selfies and video-calling. Before we dive into the camera performance, we'd like to give you a brief overview of the default camera app. Here, you get the option to click pictures in either regular mode or the wide-angle mode.
Samsung has also included the Live Focus mode, which essentially lets you click pictures with bokeh effect. It should be kept in mind that this mode only works for human subjects, when the phone is able to recognise a face in the frame. The Galaxy M10 struggles to detect the outlines well but gets the work done on most occasions. You can also choose to click pictures in Panorama, with stickers, or in beauty mode. If you like to adjust the ISO level and white balance before clicking pictures, there is a Pro mode that will let you do just that.
The Samsung Mall app is also integrated into the camera app and users can either click pictures of the product they want to search and purchase, or choose an image from the gallery to start shopping. After using this feature for some time, we can say that slightly distinctive products definitely produce good search results but in many cases, the app is not able to recognise the brands and the specific products reliably.
If we talk about the images taken in low-light conditions, the pictures turned out to be grainy. But on the positive side, the images taken by Galaxy M10 in low-light conditions were better than most of the other handsets in this price range. The phone lets you shoot videos in up to 1080p resolution and the quality of these videos is not bad either.The selfie camera on the Galaxy M10 manages to take some detailed pictures but we did not find it to be quite as impressive as the one found on the Realme 2 (review) and the Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 (review).
The Galaxy M10 is powered by the brand's octa-core Exynos 7870 chipset, clocked at 1.6GHz. There are two configurations available for the handset, i.e. 2GB RAM with 16GB storage, and 3GB RAM with 32GB storage, our review unit being the latter. The onboard storage is expandable up to 512GB via a microSD card. Now that we have got the specifications aside, let's talk about the real-world performance. In the time that we spent with the Galaxy M10, we did not face any stutter or lag issues while switching between the apps or navigating through the user interface. For a budget phone from Samsung, this is an impressive feat.
App loading times, in general, are not particularly impressive but in this price range, this will be considered nitpicking. We should mention, however, that we were especially disappointed with the loudspeaker performance offered by the handset.
Having discussed the hardware, it is time to throw some light on the software that drives the Galaxy M10. If you were expecting the phone to load Samsung's One UI, we should inform you right away that it is not the case. The Galaxy M10 runs Android 8.1 Oreo-based Experience 9.5 user interface out of the box. Samsung has undoubtedly come a long way in the last few years in decluttering its platform and its Experience UI is closer to the stock Android interface than ever before.
Then there are some pre-installed apps from Microsoft, Google, and of course Samsung. The Game Launcher feature, as you might already know, serves to improve your gaming performance by hiding notification banners and allocating phone's resources to gaming, in case you choose to do so. Coming to the face unlock feature that we mentioned briefly in the design section, the unlocking method worked just fine for us. However, it takes slightly more than a second to unlock, which is not bad but slower than some other phones in the market. There is also a nice animation effect around the notch area as soon as you unlock the phone.
Overall, there are just a handful of pre-installed apps and all of them can either be disabled or uninstalled. The clean interface definitely looks promising and should work well in the long run.
Compared to the Galaxy M20, which houses a massive 5,000mAh battery, the Galaxy M10 uses a smaller, 3,400mAh cell. So how does this translate into real-world usage?
To put things into perspective, the M10 managed to last for around a day in regular use, which is not bad. In our HD video loop test, the Galaxy M10 lasted for around 17 hours, which should be enough for most users.
Samsung has not launched a lot of affordable phones in the recent past, and Galaxy M10 looks like a solid entry in the market below the Rs 10,000 mark. The phone offers a good display, decent camera performance, and a satisfactory battery backup, which are some of the most appealing features for any potential customer. However, the Galaxy M10 will be going up against the likes of Realme 2 (review) and the Xiaomi Redmi 6 (review), both of which are also compelling offerings in this price range. Despite some minor issues, we can say that the Galaxy M10 gets a thumbs up from our side, and is worth a look for brand-conscious buyers.
Photos by Raj Rout