Samsung Galaxy A15 5G

Price: £199 from fave.co/3TporJ1

2024-03-27 -

The Samsung Galaxy A15 5G is the successor to last year’s A14, which sat atop our list of the best budget phones. It therefore has its work cut out if it wants to maintain its grip on the budget market, which every year seems to add new entrants able to squeeze more valuable features into affordable frames.

Fortunately, the A15 5G succeeds on almost all fronts, combining deceptively stylish looks with a 90Hz display, a longlasting battery, user-friendly software and a solid main camera.

Just how much value-for-money does it offer, and does it compare to more mid-range and expensive alternatives?

DESIGN

It may carry the ‘budget’ tag, but the Galaxy A15 5G looks like a more expensive phone than it really is. Aside from the all-important Samsung logo, it features a very tasteful choice of

colours, all of which shimmer and reflect differently as you turn the phone in your hands.

My review model sports the Personality Yellow colour, which lives up to its name by giving the phone some distinctiveness in a market saturated by uninspired budget phone designs. It looks fresh, bright and modern while helping you disguise the fact that you haven’t spent £1,000 on a mobile.

It also helps that the A15 5G has the same kind of flat-edged design as the S24 line-up, with its squared sides making it easier to grip. There’s a neat triple-lens camera module on the rear of the phone, arrayed in a vertical line in the top-left corner, with the Samsung logo at the bottom rounding off an uncluttered design.

The phone is relatively lightweight, with its 200g making it comfortable to carry and use for longer periods. With a 6.5-inch screen onboard (more about that below), it is relatively large, although not too large.

It’s worth mentioning that, at 8.4mm, it’s about 1mm thicker than the standard Galaxy S24, as well as one of its main rivals, the Motorola Moto G84 5G. This isn’t too much of a problem, since it never feels particularly weighty or cumbersome in your hands.

But as aesthetically pleasing as the A15 is, it lacks an IP rating of any kind whatsoever. Combined with a standard glass screen, this means you may need to take a little more care with it than you would with something more premium.

DISPLAY

The Galaxy A15 5G represents something of an upgrade over its predecessor in the screen department, featuring a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED panel, as opposed to the less impressive LCD display of the A14.

This makes the phone great for watching videos, TV and films, with the

high-definition 1080p resolution making it more than usable as a media device.

While it doesn’t quite compare to more flagship models, the 90Hz refresh rate is super smooth, especially when compared to the 60Hz rates you find on standard iPhone models.

Brightness doesn’t quite compare to these promising core specs, with its max topping out at just over 800 nits. This isn’t too much of a problem in most contexts, with the adaptive brightness generally filling in the gaps, but you may have to manually raise the brightness to the limit when taking the phone to a sunny park or beach.

Compared to pricier models, the bezel surrounding the A15’s display is fairly thick, particularly at the bottom. The phone also houses a teardrop selfie notch, which is less discreet than the pinhole cameras you find on Galaxy S models, for instance, and will probably reinforce the sensation of handling a cheaper device.

Still, the A15’s screen does look pretty overall, particularly for a phone in its price range.

Its speakers also punch a little above their weight, even if they’re neither stereo nor spectacular, with music – even fairly dense music – sounding clear and nicely layered.

PERFORMANCE

There’s no doubt that performance is the A15’s weak point, which probably isn’t surprising for a budget phone.

It runs on a Mediatek Dimensity 6100+ chipset, which is a 6nm processor built to handle 5G. It is otherwise identical in specs and performance to the Helio G99 processor found inside the non-5G Galaxy A15.

As with the A15 4G model, the A15 5G comes with 4GB of RAM. This is at

the lower end of the RAM spectrum, even for some budget phones, with the Motorola Moto G84 5G wielding an impressive 12GB of RAM for example.

In practice, this means you’ll experience a fair amount of slowdown and lag, even when opening apps and pursuing some of the more mundane tasks your phone does for you.

Compared to something like a Galaxy S24 or an iPhone 15, you will definitely notice a palpable difference of course, and anyone hoping to save some money while enjoying 2024 performance will be disappointed.

It also means that any kind of highend gaming is more or less impossible on the A15, while less advanced games will also run into slowing issues. Still, completing everyday tasks and browsing the web is fine once corresponding apps have opened, so less ambitious users won’t have too many issues.

The A15 also provides 128GB of internal storage, which is perfectly fine for a ‘typical’ user who probably won’t be using it for much more than calling/ messaging, social networking and taking photos. There’s a microSDXC slot, so if you’re someone who likes to take plenty of photos and videos, you have the option of expanding on what you receive out of the box.

Finally, the benchmarks below confirm that the A15 5G is one of the least-powered phones released by a major manufacturer this year. With only 4GB of RAM, it’s outperformed by several of its budget rivals.

Geekbench 6 (multi-core)

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G: 1,907 Motorola Moto G54 5G: 2,335 Samsung Galaxy A14 5G: 1,855 Motorola Moto G84 5G: 2,049 Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 5G: 2,051 Motorola Edge 40 Neo: 2,526

GFX Manhattan 3.1

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G: 22fps Motorola Moto G54 5G: 31fps Samsung Galaxy A14 5G: 25fps Motorola Moto G84 5G: 30fps Motorola Edge 40 Neo: 44fps

Battery life

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G: 15 hours, 13 minutes

Motorola Moto G54 5G: 12 hours, 24 minutes

Samsung Galaxy A14 5G: 14 hours, 11 minutes

Motorola Moto G84 5G: 14 hours, 30 minutes

Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 5G: 10 hours, 25 minutes

Motorola Edge 40 Neo: 7 hours, 39 minutes

Charge in 30 minutes

Samsung Galaxy A15 5G: 55% Motorola Moto G54 5G: 29% Samsung Galaxy A14 5G: 30% Motorola Moto G84 5G: 55% Xiaomi Redmi Note 12 5G: 54% Motorola Edge 40 Neo: 82%

PHOTOGRAPHY

Samsung makes some of the best camera phones around, and while the A15 5G isn’t one of them, it provides enough camera prowess for the price.

The highlight – the only real highlight – is the main 50Mp wide lens, which can do a good job in the right hands and light. It doesn’t feature optical image stabilization (OIS) like most mobiles today, but its use of autofocus does still make it easy to use and to capture pleasing shots.

In my experience, the camera’s palette is well-balanced and naturalistic, with little of the oversaturation that used to bug earlier generations of Galaxy phones. Skies aren’t overexposed, colours are vibrant without being too vibrant, while the Portrait mode provides enough detail while being flattering.

This is where the good news ends, however, because the additional two lenses feel more like box-ticking exercises than genuine additions to the phone’s arsenal.

The ultrawide lens can take fairly useful panoramic shots if used with a steady hand, but a few of our pictures ended up having blurred edges or lines, at least when you zoomed in a little. It’s a similar story with the 2Mp macro lens, in that images usually look fine at first glance, but a closer inspection reveals a little too much rawness and blur.

As such, users will need to be careful to get the most out of the phone’s additional cameras, something which can also be said for its night mode. The latter can be used well in some circumstances and scenes, but it can be hit and miss, so photographers will have to have some patience.

The 13Mp front-facing lens does fare better than the two extra rear lenses, in that it’s more forgiving and can take flattering selfies in most lights. It’s not perfect and can lack a certain liveliness, but it will certainly provide enough usable shots for social media and sharing.

BATTERY LIFE

With a 5,000mAh battery on board and comparatively limited drains on its resources, the Galaxy A15 5G is built to last users through the day, if not considerably longer.

The PCMark for Android battery test returned an impressive result of just over 15 hours, while my day-today use of the device found me easily making it through to a second day without needing to recharge.

Yes, the level will drop more quickly if you keep the 90Hz mode on all the time and use the phone for whole afternoons or evenings. But given that the A15 isn’t really cut out to be a dedicated gaming phone, for instance, the typical user may find themselves using it for only essential purposes, extending its battery life into a second day.

As generous as the phone’s battery is, the A15 doesn’t come with a charger out of the box. And it’s compatible with chargers of a maximum of only 25 watts, so replenishing the battery isn’t a particularly speedy affair though a result of 55 percent in half an hour isn’t bad either, managing to match the 33watt Redmi Note 13 5G with the same battery capacity.

This doesn’t detract from the value for money offered by the A15’s battery too much. The phone will prove a reliable companion for most users, saving them from worries that they may run out of juice before they get home.

SOFTWARE

The Galaxy A15 5G runs on Android 14 with Samsung’s One UI 6.0 over the top,

retaining most of the features One UI 6 brings to more premium Galaxy phones.

The only significant omissions are the absence of an always-on display and DeX mode, which is probably not surprising given that the A15 isn’t marketed as a productivity phone and Samsung is within its rights to keep features for more expensive models.

Otherwise, the A15 offers a typically smooth One UI experience, even if the phone’s slow performance means you may have to wait a second longer than usual for apps to open. Menus such as the Quick Settings panel are easy to access and laid out intuitively, with the larger icons making things simpler.

As with other Galaxy phones, the A15 offers plenty of customization options, allowing users to change wallpapers, home and app screens to suit. It also offers the Modes and Routines features first introduced with One UI 5, allowing you to adjust settings according to the time of day, what you’re doing and/or where you are.

One slight, albeit entirely unsurprising, downside is that the A15 doesn’t come with any of the neat AI-based features you can find with the Samsung Galaxy S24 series. This is a shame, but given that these features don’t offer anything truly gamechanging (yet), most users probably won’t notice.

Unlike the similarly affordable Galaxy A25 5G, which Samsung will treat to four years of core Android updates, the A15 5G will receive three. This may be disappointing for some, but given how underpowered the A15 already is, it may not be realistic to expect Samsung to extend its software life too far and this is typical for phones of this price.

VERDICT

The Samsung Galaxy A15 5G is a very strong all-round budget phone, with its only real weakness being its lack of computing power.

Therefore don’t buy it with gaming or other demanding tasks in mind but apart from this, it offers great looks, a big fluid display, a decent main camera, and impressive battery life.

Yes, the additional camera lenses aren’t particularly useful, and yes, three years of core Android updates isn’t anything to write home about, but there are minor blemishes on a budget phone that otherwise provides great value. Simon Chandler