Samsung Galaxy M31 128GB

The biggest upgrade to the Galaxy M31 is the cameras. The smartphone features a 64MP quad camera setup at the back as opposed to the 48MP triple camera system on the Galaxy M30s. The new setup includes a high-resolution 64MP f/1.8 Samsung GW1 primary sensor, an 8MP ultra wide-angle lens, a 5MP depth camera and a 5MP macro lens. The upgraded setup is more versatile, allowing users more ways to photograph.The Galaxy M31's main camera does take decent daylight photos. With scene optimiser enabled, the camera uses a lot of software processing to boost colours, which you might prefer over more natural tones. So, if you're capturing flowers, for example, greens will look greener and pinks can turn red. Photos are warmer, which means you won't be able to capture natural white tones. In general, I found the photos captured during daylight to lack contrast and dynamic range compared to the Redmi Note 8 Pro in this segment. The main camera is able to quickly focus on a subject in daylight, but this gets a little iffy as the sun goes down. By default, the main camera shoots in 16MP and uses pixel binning to offer brighter and sharper photos. You can manually switch the ratio to 3:4 64MP to capture high-resolution photos. However, 64MP photos will look darker, lack HDR support and should only be used in broad daylight if you want to capture a wide landscape to zoom in on later. Moving on from the main camera, the Samsung Galaxy M31's 8MP wide-angle manages to capture pleasing wide-angle shots in daylight. Colours look good and there enough detail as long as you don't zoom in and pixel-peep. Portrait mode using the Live Focus mode can capture some please bokeh shots as long as the blur effect is not extreme. Skin tones look warm and soft, but there's good detailing to be found.

Samsung Galaxy M31 is powered by a 2.3GHz Exynos 9611 octa-core chipset based on a 10nm process and equipped with Mali G72 MP3 GPU. This is the same processor that powered the Galaxy M30s as well. Samsung has bumped up the base variant from 4GB RAM to 6GB RAM, which should deliver a smoother multitasking experience. The smartphone comes in 64GB and 128GB storage variants, which can be further expanded by up to 512GB via a microSD card. Right out of the box, the Samsung Galaxy M31 felt as fast as you would expect from a brand new smartphone. Scrolling through One UI 2.0 was smooth and apps were quick to open as well. Throughout our week-long usage, we did not encounter any slowdown or lags while using different day-to-day apps for messaging, social media browsing and so on. The Exynos 9611 is a decent mid-range processor that can handle day-to-day tasks with ease. It can also run graphic-intensive games like PUBG on high graphics and frame-rate settings by default. We played a 30-minute session of PUBG on default settings, which ran smoothly. In high to extreme graphics settings, we noticed the phone got hot to the touch during gameplay. This did not affect the battery life of the phone, however, as a 30-minute session only drained the battery by around 5 percent, which is impressive.     Talking about the Android 10-based One UI 2.0 software, it is a fairly simple and easy-to-use interface. In fact, the Galaxy M31 ships with One UI Core rather than One UI, which means some features such as Bixby and Bixby Home are missing. You also won't be able to download Samsung Pay from the Play Store. The stripped-down One UI Core will still feel like One UI, so if you don't miss Bixby and Samsung Pay too much, you should be happy with what the software offers.

Samsung Galaxy M31 houses a massive 6,000mAh battery, which is unchanged from the Galaxy M30s. It is good to see that Samsung has not downgraded the battery, because this truly sets the smartphone apart from most of its rivals in this segment. From day-to-day usage, to gaming and media consumption and standby time, the Galaxy M31's battery life is simply terrific. The phone can easily last well over a day with intensive usage and can last a day and a half on lighter use that simply involves browsing through social media and messaging.In our PCMark test, the Galaxy M31 lasted an impressive 14 hours and 40 minutes from 100 percent to 20 percent. The Galaxy M31 supports 15W fast charging, which is quite disappointing to see given the size of the battery. It took over three hours to charge the phone from zero to 100 percent.

ProsTerrific battery lifeAttractive AMOLED displaySmooth software experienceConsPoor low-light camera performanceProcessor could be betterUninspiring design