Samsung Galaxy A5

Without a doubt, the Korean behemoth has put a lot of focus on the design aspect of the Galaxy A series, including the device we’re reviewing today, the Galaxy A5. Even though, at first glance, you might brush it off as just another Samsung device, but when looked upon closely... you’ll surely come to appreciate the engineering gone into designing the smartphone.

Displays used on Samsung phones are always best-in-class thanks to the use of its proprietary Super AMOLED technology, which is know for its true-to-life colour reproduction and high brightness levels. The 5-inch display panel used on the Galaxy A5 is no different and is a delight for viewing images, videos or reading text. The text also appears to be sharp as the display offers decent pixel density of 294ppi with a 720p resolution.

The Korean titan was one of the first smartphone manufacturers which layered Android with its own custom interface. Since the pre-Gingerbread era, Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface has come a long way – both in good as well as bad ways. While the customisations provided by the interface pleased first time users earlier, now these changes seem like feature spam.

Samsung phones are known for their image quality, especially when we talk about its top-end offerings such as the Galaxy S6 (first impressions) and Note 4 (review). But Samsung isn’t keeping its camera prowess limited to its flagships and the Galaxy A5 is a prime example of that. Both in terms of the megapixel count as well as its quality, its shooters manages to impress, as highlighted in our camera review as well.

Samsung has made sure that the Galaxy A5 is a future-ready smartphone by equipping it with latest-gen SoC. The device is equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410, a 64-bit processor that offers four cores tuned at 1.2GHz. Even though the device can’t make use of the 64-bit instruction set since that support is only available with Android Lollipop, you’ll be able to exploit its capabilities whenever the A5 is updated to Android 5.0.

Powerful specs don’t matter if the device can’t even last an entire working day. And the Samsung Galaxy A5 shines in this aspect as its battery life is nothing short of impressive. While the capacity of 2,300mAh may not sound that high, the device comfortably keeps on going for almost a day and a half. Even with the use of 3G, GPS and playing games, it was able to last a day. In our standard battery test, the handset ran an HD video on a loop for about 10 hours while both the brightness and volume were at 50 percent level and Wi-Fi was off.