Samsung Galaxy A50s review: A bit of an upgrade

Eye catching even in the more boring black variant we received, the Samsung A50s is still a very interesting looking smartphone — from the back.

There’s the prismatic sheen that Samsung has been using this whole year but this time it’s set in a geometrical arrangement of two-toned triangles. The effect is very nice and made me wish I had laid my hands on the violet version. There’s also a white version.

The back is made of polycarbonate and given what that looks like these days, it’s easy enough to make one’s peace with it though there is a slight plastic feel to the build. It could display smudges, so use the provided case until you need to show it off and let others see the nice pattern on the back.

The A50s is fairly slim and light, despite not being a compact phone. It has a 6.4-inch Full HD AMOLED screen that looks great. Not that a middling screen from Samsung would be tolerated in these days. It has good strong colours and there’s no washing out on tilting.

Soon that too will be a thing of the past with readers wondering what we’re talking about because they will not have come across the bad viewing angles that used to grace almost all phones. The screen has a tiny rounded finger of a notch of the type that I find a little distracting because it’s an abrupt little protrusion instead of being rounded and curved. But let’s forgive it for now...

Here’s what you get in the box. There’s the transparent plastic case, quite standard nowadays. There’s a USB Type-C cable and thank goodness too because a regular old style USB would have raised a right clamour of objections. there’s a 10 watt charger and a basic set of earphones which will go into the 3.5mm headphone jack which many are entirely relieved to see.

Setting up the device

Setting up this device proved a little annoying though it’s a standard Samsung process. I couldn’t skirt around all the useless and annoying apps that wanted to come along for the ride. You have to make sure you un-tick every pre-selected app to move ahead in the setup process. Another blatant move was to ask for your age and gender, all the better to market stuff at you, I suppose. Luckily I caught that in time but moving further on there were still notifications and prompts from the Galaxy Store to get specific apps. When you’re finally done, you find a whole lot of things you might have wanted to choose to get on your own. I found Helo, Snapchat, Dailyhunt, Netflix, and Amazon alongside the usual Microsoft, Google and Samsung apps. Yes, you can offload them but why should one have to. But that’s how it is specially with the more affordable phones, so one has to live with it.

Finishing up the setup, I found the fingerprint sensor — in-display, on this phone — registered fast enough but was a little slow, requiring a long-press to unlock and sometimes failing to match. But this is typical of many phones you use newly. In time, the reaction time decreases and errors are all but gone.

Samsung A50s specifications

For internals, the A50s has 4GB or 6GB RAM with 128GB storage working with a somewhat upgraded Exynos 9611 processor. The phone runs on Android 9 Pie (not the newest and Samsung’s OneUI version 1.5 (the newest). The phone works fine although not notable for blazing speed or anything. The battery is 4,000mAh and certainly doesn’t feel it in terms of weight.

The camera is updated on this phone. It has a 48-MP f/2 primary camera and an 8-MP f/2.2 wide-angle lens with it plus a 5-MP depth sensor. The front-facing camera has also been upgraded to a 32-MP with f/2 aperture. As is typical, photographs in good light are pretty good. The camera has an enhanced night mode, but I found that it really artificially boosts the light often introducing softness. You have to work a bit to get clean sharp shots. The wide angle lens had no end of distorted sides and will mean that only some times in some situations will it be usable — probably not indoors in any case.

Read the Samsung Galaxy A50 review

What’s different from the A50 launched earlier this year mainly then is the refreshed processor, and somewhat better camera. But the phone has competition which is faring rather better, specially in the form of Xiaomi’s K20.