Galaxy A5 2017 Review

The 2017 Galaxy A5 is the third phone Samsung has produced with exactly this name. It first appeared at the very end of 2014, and Samsung has updated and tweaked the style for each new model.

Each year the phone has classed-up its act a little, leading to this 2017 version, which you could easily mistake for a top-end phone. Dig deep enough into the hardware and you’ll find a few parts that would make the Samsung Galaxy A5 a swindle if it cost as much as the Galaxy S7, though.

But they’re not the sort of things most people will notice every day. If you’re not obsessed with having the latest and greatest tech in your phone, you’ll probably love the Samsung Galaxy A5. And saving a few hundred dollars or pounds in the bargain is an attractive sweetener.

It’s also arguably a more successful phone than HTC’s attempt at the same idea, the pretty-but-flawed HTC U Play.

The main group that might be put off is the bargain hunter crowd. The OnePlus 3T is a more powerful phone, and has a lot more storage too, but is only $40/£30 (around AU$50) extra. 

Motorola’s Moto G4 Plus is also a much better deal in the “tech per dollar” stakes. As usual, Samsung charges what it can for the Galaxy A5, rather than trying to squeeze in as much as possible.

Not everyone quibbles about every pound/dollar as much as we do, though, and for the most part the Samsung Galaxy A5 is a joy to use. The screen’s great, the battery life commendable, the size of the little guy accessible, and while the power on tap isn’t all that impressive, there’s enough to stop the phone seeming underpowered.

Samsung Galaxy A5 2017 price and release date

• Cheaper than a Galaxy S7, but not cheap
• Similar price to a OnePlus 3T
• At the top-end of “mid-range”

The Samsung Galaxy A5 shows you quite how expensive “mid-range” phones can be nowadays. It costs $399 in the US, £369 in the UK and AU$649 in Australia.

That’s a chunk more expensive than the 2016 version of the Galaxy A5, but the phone comes with a few important feature upgrades too, like water resistance.

The 2017 Galaxy A5 launched in January 2017, a year after the 2016 Galaxy A5 appeared. Much like the Galaxy S series, the mid-range A phones have started to appear annually, and more reliably than the average train.

Meet in the mid-range

• Megapixel-packed cameras
• Octa-core Samsung CPU
• 32GB of storage with microSD expansion

Just look at the spec list of the Samsung Galaxy A5 and it may seem to have more features than last year’s Samsung flagship, the Galaxy S7.

It has more megapixels, with 16 squeezed into both the front and rear cameras, and a new-style USB-C socket. It’s also a classic example of why it pays to know a little more about the tech behind the figures, though.

For example, the Samsung Galaxy A5 has a distinctly mid-range chipset, the Samsung Exynos 7880. It’s reasonably close in power to the Snapdragon 617 used in phones like the Moto G4 Plus, even though the A5 is twice the price.

imilarly, its rear camera is worse than that of the many 12MP models around today, and also worse than some of the very best 13MP ones. Much cheaper phones use similar-quality hardware.

Where the Galaxy A5 excels is in making this conventional hardware work well. For example, the camera is very quick, with the same almost lag-free experience as seen in Samsung’s most expensive phones. And that performance is combined with a typically high-quality Full HD Super AMOLED display.

Tech obsessives can do better, but those who simply want a ‘nice’ phone that seems like a fairly high-end piece of hardware will appreciate the A5’s style.

The Galaxy A5 also has a comfortable 32GB of storage, and a microSD card slot to let you add to it (with cards of up to 256GB).

Design and display

• Classy-but-plain metal and glass build
• AMOLED screen but not as sharp as the S7’s
• Water-resistant

Like the 2016 version of the Samsung Galaxy A5, this phone is made of metal and glass. The front and back are glass, the sides aluminum with a color-matched finish.

Its glass is Gorilla Glass 4 rather than Gorilla Glass 5. It’s very tough, but where version five is designed to handle drops from shoulder height, version four is tested at 1 meter, or roughly waist height.

We’re using the black version, but Samsung also makes the Galaxy A5 in gold, light blue and pink. As the entire phone ends up one shade, there’s a certain plain simplicity to the handset that makes it less striking than the S7 family. However, it feels just as well-made. It’s also just as thin, at 7.9mm thick.

Samsung describes the design as “uniform all round”, and that’s on the money. The rear glass curves into the metal sides for a smoother feel too.

Like the iPhone 7 or Galaxy S7, the Samsung Galaxy A5 is of a size just about anyone should be able to get on with. It’s not a pocket-stretcher like most 5.5-inch phones, and the soft keys aren’t tricky to reach.

If you’re not switching from another Samsung phone, you may find the position of the soft keys takes some getting used to, though. The Samsung Galaxy A5 has separate light-up soft keys below the screen, but they’re flipped around: ‘back’ on the right, ‘recent apps’ on the left. This placement makes sense given that most people are right-handed and most use the back button more, but does take a day or two to feel right.

There are some other curiosities to the Samsung Galaxy A5 too. The SIM card and memory card slots are separate, one on the top, the other on the left side. You have to wonder whether Samsung could have crammed the two together, but does it matter? Not really.

The speaker placement is bizarre as well. There’s a main speaker at the top of the Samsung Galaxy A5’s right edge, when most phones have either front-facing drivers or one at the bottom. We’ve found you need to be a bit more careful about blocking the speaker if you’re just carrying the thing around listening to tunes or a podcast, but in other situations it actually works better than most.

It works for gaming because you won’t block it when holding the phone portrait, or on its side for those more involved two-hander titles.

The Samsung Galaxy A5’s fingerprint scanner is more conventional, similar to the Galaxy S7’s, it’s part of a clicky button below the screen.

This isn’t the fastest finger scanner going. It’s not instant, there’s a semi-quaver beat before it unlocks the phone, but we’ve only noticed this because we’ve used most of the fingerprint scanners out there. It is reliable, and doesn’t actually make you press the Home button to bring the Galaxy A5 out of standby.

The part that finishes off the Samsung Galaxy A5 hardware is water resistance. It’s certified to the IP68 standard, meaning you can submerge the phone in water of 1.5m depth for 30 minutes. Don’t get cocky and start dropping it in every body of water you come across, but you don’t have to worry about torrential rain or watching a bit of Netflix in the bath.

Given the choice we’d take the larger Galaxy S7 Edge as a media player, but the Samsung Galaxy A5’s top-quality screen is still a corker. It’s a 5.2-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display, using Samsung’s own panel tech.

Like other OLEDs, its black level and contrast are unbeatable, but a great LCD screen will generally get you purer-looking whites and slightly better sharpness. Thanks to a PenTile pixel structure, there’s the tiniest bit of fuzziness to the Samsung Galaxy A5’s display up-close, but it’s otherwise not light years away from the Galaxy S7’s screen.

s with that phone, you can choose from a bunch of color profiles that radically alter the screen’s personality. The standard Adaptive Display lets the OLED panel rip, with truly punchy oversaturated colors and cooler-skewed whites. It’s the equivalent of the mode you’ll see TVs use in high street shops.

Its AMOLED Cinema and AMOLED Photo mode calm those colors down while keeping a punchy look, and Basic brings tones all the way down to the sRGB color standard.

This may look undersaturated to many, or most, of you these days, but it’s like giving up on adding sugar to your coffee.

The neatest part of the Samsung Galaxy A5’s screen is its always-on display. When the phone is in standby, it shows the time, battery level, date and some little icons letting you know what sort of notifications you’ve received.

Alternatively, it can show the calendar, or one of a few specially-chosen images. You can also turn the feature off if you find it annoying.

As the Samsung Galaxy A5 uses an OLED screen, this seems to have very little impact on the battery. OLEDs have light-up pixels rather than a backlight, so displaying little bits of text doesn’t consume much power.

HTC One Review

PROS

• Excellent build and ergonomics
• Fab screen
• Sense 5 is visually slick
• Great performance

CONS

• Non-expandable memory
• Mediocre battery life
• Keyboard needs a visual refresh

 KEY FEATURES

• 1080 x 1920 pixel, 4.7in display
• 4MP camera with OIS and Ultrapixel
• 9mm thick aluminium chassis
• 1.7GHz quad core processor
• 2300mAh battery
• Android 4.1 with HTC Sense 5
• Manufacturer: HTC
• Review Price: £549.99

HTC ONE LONG-TERM TEST

Read the review of the HTC One M8

The HTC One has now been out for a year. Since we originally reviewed the phone, it has been crowned our phone of the year 2013, beating the Google Nexus 5, iPhone 5S and Samsung Galaxy S4.

As you might have guessed – we still like it. In fact we still think the HTC One is one of the best mobile phones on the market even though it's not quite as fast as some of the newer competitors.

However, it now has a rival from its own family. The HTC One M8 has launched and it's a very good phone indeed. It offers an improved camera, a tweaked design and a slightly larger screen.

Since our original review, a few different versions of the HTC One phone have been released, other than the standard silver type we initially looked at. The Google Play HTC One edition has vanilla Android rather than the HTC Sense software used in the original. However, it is not available in the UK – a real shame.

A few new colours have also been outed, and these are a bit easier to get hold of here. There’s a deep red, a striking blue, a gold shade and a near-black dark grey.

Here are a few pictures to see how they compare to the version seen in the review below.

Related: HTC 10 review

HTC One: What has changed?

In the year since the HTC One’s launch we’ve seen its processor go from cutting edge to being a slight ‘has been’. The Snapdragon 600 processor of the phone is no longer used in new mobiles, discarded in favour of the Snapdragon 800, which allows for faster clock speeds and has an updated graphics processor.

However, it’s not something we notice much in actual use. The HTC One can play pretty much every game the newer top-end phones can handle (that we’ve tried) and sequential updates have only improved the performance of the phone.

The phone’s superlative features remain top of their game too. The HTC One is still the phone that feels best in-hand out of all the top-end Androids, and it has better internal speakers than any of its big-name rivals.

HTC One – never been topped

What is also interesting – and a bit sad – is that HTC has not quite managed to recreate the spark of genius that resulted in the HTC One in its subsequent phones. There have been two other One-series phones in the range, the HTC One Mini and the HTC One Max, but neither has been quite as good. Unlike the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and Xperia Z Ultra it’s not quite a case of a bigger and smaller version of the HTC One.

Part of this is down to the way the phones are made. The HTC One has an aluminium frame with plastic inlays, but the Mini and Max look and feel more like plastic phones with some aluminium plates grafted onto them. They are not as classy or immaculate as the phone that inspired them, the HTC One. The One Max in particular looks like a bit of a mess next to it.

                            
The HTC One is much better-looking than the One Max

HTC One Software

Since the HTC One’s launch there have been a few little software changes too. First of all, the Deals app no longer works – the service has been discontinued. This makes being unable to install it even more annoying, but it was never an asset in the first place so at least we haven’t lost out on anything.

The latest build of the HTC One software also comes with a new app, KeyVPN. This lets you securely connect to your work computer with your phone – it was a very easy way for HTC to make the phone more Enterprise-friendly. Other than that, you still get everything we talk about in the software section of this review.

One neat little improvement is that HTC now lets you get rid of the BlinkFeed widget if you like - one of the most common criticisms of the phone when it launched. However, one obvious niggle remains. It sounds tiny, but it's irritating. It's far too easy to switch the keyboard into a different language when typing, and we recommend switching to a third-party keyboard as soon as you get hold of the phone.

Carry on reading for our full review of the HTC One.

Sony c3 Preview

 

While it’s not unheard of for smartphones to include selfie-friendly camera features, such as beautify modes and timers, the Xperia C3 is probably the first to be marketed specifically with selfies in mind and it’s also likely to be one of the most affordable handsets with a decent front-facing camera (though the exact price is yet to be confirmed). But is it just a one-trick pony or is there more to the Xperia C3? Read on to find out.

Phablet dreams

While Sony is selling the Xperia C3 on its photographic potential it’s the screen size that you’ll probably notice first. At 5.5 inches it’s certainly large, verging on phablet territory in fact, which is all the more noticeable because it’s a mid-range handset and they tend to have smaller screen sizes.

Occasionally you’ll find a larger one like this, but for a mid-range phone money needs to be saved somewhere and unfortunately they’re rarely full HD, which doesn’t matter so much on a smaller phone, but a 720 x 1280 resolution 5.5 inch screen as found on the Xperia C3 leads to a pixel density of just 267 pixels per inch.

That’s not appallingly low and the phone is perfectly useable, but icons, text and even images are far from crisp. To put it into perspective even the exceedingly cheap Moto G has a screen with 326 pixels per inch (though it is only 4.5 inches in size). So with the Xperia C3 you’re getting size rather than clarity.

Resolution aside it’s not too bad. It’s an IPS LCD display with reasonable colour reproduction and good viewing angles.

Slimline

The Sony Xperia C3 is a reasonably attractive phone. It has the OmniBalance design that has become synonymous with Sony handsets and it’s slim at just 7.6mm thick. It also has Sony’s near-iconic metal power button on the side and a metallic edging to give it a vaguely premium look.

It’s not a total win though, the back is very obviously plastic and it has large bezels at all sides of the screen, which betray its mid-range price. As mid-range phones go it doesn’t look bad at all, but it won’t stand out in a crowd.

Power

It seems to have almost become the standard thing that mid-range phones will have 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processors and 1GB of RAM and the Sony Xperia C3 is no exception. As such it’s no more or less powerful than the majority of its rivals.

It is however powerful enough to comfortably use. Slowdown is rare and it can cope with most media and games. It’s also equipped with 4G LTE so you can browse the net at superfast speeds even without a Wi-Fi connection and it’s running Android 4.4 so its software is up to date.

Selfie central

 

Now to discuss the thing that the Sony Xperia C3 really prides itself on- its camera, or more specifically its front-facing camera. The Xperia C3 has a 5 megapixel snapper on the front which is a substantially higher megapixel count than most front-facing cameras, particularly in the mid-range.

Of course that’s because this is the self-proclaimed selfie phone, but it has more than megapixels to back that up. There’s a soft LED flash to ensure that photos are always taken in flattering light, a 25mm wide-angle lens so you can fit your friends in the shot and a Superior Auto mode to ensure the settings are always optimally configured.

It’s also easy to take photos, as rather than tapping the screen you can just double-tap the back of the phone to snap away and of course there are some selfie-centric apps, such as ‘Portrait retouch’ which essentially adds makeup and ‘AR Effect mode’ which lets you add fun effects, including masks, hats and more.

It’s a decent selection of modes and features and if you really do care that much about selfies then the Sony Xperia C3 is well worth considering. Even when looking at high end phones there are few that do a better job.

Its rear camera is a little more standard. It has an 8 megapixel sensor, an LED flash, various modes including HDR and panorama and it can shoot 1080p video. It’s not up to the standards of the 20.7 megapixel camera on the Xperia Z2, but it’s not bad as mid-range offerings go.

Battery life, memory and connectivity

The Sony Xperia C3 has a 2500 mAh battery which keeps it going for quite some time, easily lasting a day to a day and a half on a single charge with moderate use. If you do find yourself running low before you can plug it in there’s also a Stamina mode, which can make it last up to four times as long on standby by limiting what runs in the background.

The Xperia C3 comes with 8GB of built in storage along with a microSD card slot with support for cards of up to 32GB. For connectivity options it supports Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G LTE, Bluetooth 4.0 and even NFC.

Early verdict

The Sony Xperia C3 is a solid all-round handset. It might be sold on its selfie abilities (and with good reason) but it’s got other stuff going for it too, including good battery life, a large screen, a slim build and a reasonable amount of power.

It’s not perfect by any means though as the screen is only 720p, which given the size is a bit on the low side and while the phone is slim it’s also plastic and has large bezels, so it doesn’t look as good as it could.

All of which means that if the selfie aspect doesn’t really interest you then this may not be the phone for you, though until we know exactly how much it costs it’s hard to say for sure.

Grand Prime Preview

Introducion

History has shown us that Samsung is notorious for giving some of its phones ridiculously long model names. Anyone remember the Samsung Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch? As much as we’d like the practice to stop altogether, it’s still something that’s well and alive today – like the Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime most recently, for example. With words like grand and prime, you’d envision something super spec’d, but alas, that’s not the case here, as it’s just an entry-level offering that aims to diversify 
Sammy’s portfolio to cover all segments of the smartphone space.

The package contains:

• Samsung Galaxy Grand Prime
• microUSB cable
• Wall charger
• Stereo headphones
• Get start guide
• Important information

Design

Undeniably a Samsung design, it’s bland and dull looking for the most part, but it’s befitting for a low-end thing.

Distinctively employing the traits akin to its Galaxy line, the phone doesn’t scream anything remarkable with its straightforward and dull design. Constructed out of plastic, it naturally asserts itself as a budget-friendly offering – one that luckily doesn’t feel too cheap in the hand. In all fairness, the design is as bland and predictable as it goes for Samsung, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise considering low-end stuff like this don’t normally get the royal treatment.

In true fashion to being a Galaxy branded phone, it features the same buttons and ports you’d find in other phones from Sammy – so that includes the power button along the left edge, volume controls on the right, 3.5mm headset jack on the top, and a microUSB port on the bottom. Yes, it even has the line’s distinguishable physical home button, flanked by capacitive buttons for back and recent apps. With this, however, the rear plastic cover can be removed to gain access to its battery, SIM, and microSD slots