Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016)
The latest Galaxy is an instant star
Picture editing is a fascinating job. Less so, to be honest, when you work on a computer magazine. While your colleagues in the national press are poring over snaps of celebrities on red carpets and politicians in compromising situations, you’re trying to match endless photos of silver and black plastic cases to similar-sounding product descriptions. Samsung helps out, at least, by writing its name in big letters on the front of its phones, but this one still had us stumped.
In pictures, you see, the new Galaxy A3 is indistinguishable from the new Galaxy A5 (see review, Issue 483). No, really, get out your copy of that issue and have a look. After much triple-checking, we’ve definitely got the right photo, but it probably doesn’t matter, because you won’t be able to spot the difference either. In real life, however, you’d never confuse the two, because the A5 is bigger. The A3 is Samsung’s compact model and matches Apple’s regular-sized iphone – Samsung’s idea of normal being a handset the size of a dinner plate.
For those who prefer a more manageable phone, the A3 has a lot going for it. As much as it resembles a smaller A5, it could just as easily be considered a shrunken S6, which was last year’s top-of-the-range Galaxy. The metal frame and glass back (available in black, silver or gold) make it feel more expensive than it is, even if they pick up fingerprints rather easily, and at a slim 7.3mm this is certainly no chunky plastic budget buy.
We were a little disappointed that it comes with Samsung’s version of last year’s Android 5.1.1 Lollipop rather than the current version 6 Marshmallow. But in our tests this ran very smoothly on the eight-core Exynos processor, matching the likes of the Motorola Moto X Play and Sony Xperia M4 Aqua, although falling short of the cheaper Oneplus X’s performance. Complicated web pages were no problem for it, but demanding games felt a little too juddery to be fun.
Samsung’s trump card is a vibrant AMOLED display, which covers the full SRGB colour range with high contrast, largely because black pixels stay truly black. Brightness is a weak point, with no boost mode to counteract sunlight, but we still found the A3 perfectly easy to use outdoors, and although its resolution isn’t the highest available, it looked sharp to us. The 13- megapixel rear camera tended to overexpose our daylight photos, blowing out detail in the sky, but the HDR mode fixed this. Indoors it sometimes struggled to focus, but low light didn’t stop us achieving decent results, with natural colour and not too much splotchy noise.
At this price you don’t get fancy extras such as fingerprint recognition, but what you do get is exceptional battery life: the A3 lasted 12 minutes short of 15 hours in our video playback test. That makes the difference between reliably lasting you a whole day away from home and not.
That’s one reason we’d consider the A3 over the beautifully made and highly specified Oneplus X (£189 from www.snipca.com/21752), which is arguably better value, and has a faster processor and a slightly larger Full HD AMOLED screen. Both have a less than generous 16GB of storage built in. You can add to this with a microsd card. Neither phone would disappoint.
An attractive phone with exceptional battery life