Samsung Galaxy A50 Preview – The affordable class among the S10 series

The Galaxy A series has not been doing bad business for several years. The devices we tested often had a solid build quality and a contemporary design, excellent battery life, water resistance and the necessary expansion options. Sometimes they were a bit pricey compared to phones with similar specifications and the camera seemed to be cut back. Samsung has now given the A-series a kind of reboot and the Galaxy A50 is the device from that series that is coming to the Benelux. We were able to get a first impression at the Mobile World Congress 2019.

The A50 is the device that falls directly below the S10 series in terms of price. It costs less than half of the S10e, while it has an OLED screen with the same screen diagonal as the Galaxy S10 +. Quite interesting, at first sight.

Of course you sacrifice something for that, but ‘how much then’ is of course the key question. One of the differences between the S10 series and the A50 is the housing. The Galaxy A50 does not have a glass housing, but is made of plastic. Presumably this is one of the things that makes this phone so light and feels so light for its screen size. The phone does not make a fragile impression despite the plastic casing, but it bends considerably if you put force on it. The material is also a lot more likely to scratch than the glass body of the S10 series; the back isn’t made of Gorilla Glass, of course.

The coating on the device is interesting. This refracts the light in a special way, as you can see in one of the photos below. Whether you like that is personal. Of course it doesn’t come across as very business-like, especially if you choose the blue or pink variant. Thanks to the rainbow colors that arise, it is certainly not a dime a dozen phone. Each color has a slightly different refraction of light. The pink variant gets a glow that is mostly yellow with lilac, while the blue one again didn’t really break the light during our hands-on.

Something that also speaks for the housing is that the phone has an ip68 certification. The S10 series also has that and it means that the device can survive a fresh dip in the toilet. The buttons appear to be plastic, as does the case, but otherwise feel solid.

The screen is one of the showpieces of the A50, because it is an OLED screen and is nice and big at 6.4 inches, if you like that of course. The aspect ratio is slightly more elongated than with the S10 series, with 19.5:9 compared to 19:9. The screen has a resolution of 1080×2340 pixels, which equates to just over 400ppi. The colors splash off the screen and it is very contrasty; we think many people won’t even notice the difference with an S10 screen at first.

Behind the screen is a fingerprint scanner. At first we thought it was a generally inferior optical variant. This appeared to not be the case. According to the Samsung employee at the stand, it is indeed an ultrasonic. This technique works better if you have wet fingers, for example. In the S10 it is very fast. Unfortunately, the software on the A50 was set up in such a way that we could not test it at the fair. Presumably it will run slower than with the S10, because the speed of the soc is also a factor in this.

You notice that it is a cheaper device

One of the things you can tell that it is a cheaper device is the speed when navigating Android. The A50 has a 10nm Exynos 9610 soc and that, in combination with the Samsung software, led to a lot of frame drops during our hands-on. Unfortunately, most will notice the difference in speed with an S10 device.

The haptic feedback is another thing that lets you know you’re holding a lower-caste smartphone. You will not get the short, fast and powerful tap that an S10 can give you with this device. It remains with a relatively weak hum. Then there’s the audio, of course. The A50 has mono sound and sounds a lot less bassy, ​​spacious and clear than an S10, as far as we could judge on a busy exhibition floor.

The camera is often seen as a part that betrays that you have a price fighter in your hands. The first thing we notice, also in this case, is the shutter lag. Focusing was not too bad with the A50; that goes quite smoothly, even though it only works with phase detection.

The device has three cameras on the back. One of them is purely to see depth, so effectively you use two. The primary is a 25-megapixel camera. That is already quite a lot of megapixels for a primary camera, but the front camera also has 25 and that is even more exceptional. As you can see in the picture of the screen at the top of this preview, it’s Samsung’s S5K2X5 sensor. On the back is the IMX576 sensor from Sony. That is the same sensor as the P20 Pro, for example, but it has it in the front. We took a portrait photo with both cameras, because we can usually say something about the quality with that kind of photos.

The picture from the front camera is a lot softer than that from the camera on the back. The latter has more detail. The colors also represent reality a bit better. Still, the front camera isn’t bad at first glance. It has a wider angle of view than the camera on the back, so you can capture more in one image for selfies. The portrait mode leaves something to be desired if you look closely. The A50 makes some minor mistakes when separating foreground from background, and the edges are a bit too fuzzy.

The photos we have taken with the devices are nevertheless quite acceptable at first sight. The A50 also has an ultra-wide-angle lens on the back to get more in a shot. Unfortunately, we again see a big difference in white balance between the two cameras. The ultra-wide angle is handy to have, because sometimes it is difficult to take more distance from an object, such as a large building.