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The Samsung Galaxy A51 offers a nice design and an attractive OLED display, but is characterized by mediocre performance, poor low-light cameras and relatively short battery life.
Update Samsung Galaxy A51 With Price Review
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Samsung Galaxy A51 Review
Once you take a look at the $399 Samsung Galaxy A51 and its list of laundry features, you may wonder why anyone would need a $1,000 Galaxy S20. You get a 6.5-inch OLED display, four rear cameras, and a massive 4,000mAh battery for a very reasonable price.
There’s just one problem: Samsung may have stepped up its midrange phone game, but so has the competition. While the Galaxy A51 has some advantages over the similarly priced iPhone SE 2020 and Google Pixel 3a, it sometimes suffers from sub-par performance, low-light photography that often fails to impress, and battery life that’s just reasonable.
In fact, this is one of the cheapest phones on the market; However, as you’ll see in our Samsung Galaxy A51 review, it’s more of an all-rounder than a master of the craft.
The $399 Samsung Galaxy A51 will launch on April 9. You can buy it unlocked directly from Samsung or through various carriers including Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and Xfinity Mobile. Amazon also sells the unlocked version.
Galaxy A51 5g To Get Android 13, But Updates Will Be Less Frequent
There is only one configuration of the Galaxy A51 in the US, and this configuration comes with 4GB of RAM and a generous 128GB of storage. If you need even more space, you can add a microSD card up to 512GB in size.
While $399 is a reasonable price for a phone with all the features the Galaxy A51 has to offer, Samsung is running a number of promotions to make it even better. The company offers up to $220 credit for a Galaxy A51 when you trade in a Galaxy S9, Note 9 or older; iPhone X or older; or Pixel 3, 3 XL or 3a. With a decent trade in, you can pay for an unlocked Galaxy A51 at $14.58 per month at zero percent interest for 24 months. For a limited time, Samsung is giving away a pair of first-gen Galaxy Buds with every A51 purchase.
A tip for shoppers: Search the internet for alternative Galaxy A51 models circulating through retailers. If the price seems too good to be true, you’re probably looking at the Latin American or international variant rather than the US version tuned for local networks.
Many phone makers want to learn how their flagship designs land on more affordable mid-range models, and Samsung is making similar noises for the Galaxy A51. Shockingly, however, I found myself preferring the look and feel of the A51 to the Galaxy S20 extended family.
Samsung Galaxy A51 Review: Can It Beat The Competition?
There are several reasons for this. First, the A51 is bright – really bright. Samsung has always done a good job of producing featherweight phones that still feel well made, and the A51 is a testament to that. Its 6.5-inch screen is almost two inches larger than the 4.7-inch panel on Apple’s new iPhone SE, and yet the A51 weighs in at just 0.8 ounces. When you hold it all in one hand, you might say the galaxy is a little wilder, but not as much as you might think.
Secondly, the A51’s screen is flat, which is a new take on curved panels, which is inevitable in every modern premium mobile phone. It’s hard to put my finger on, but a flat screen feels easier to use and live with. While some curved panels look weird from the front (e.g. Motorola Edge Plus), others are magnets for unwanted touches made worse by bad palm rejection software (e.g. OnePlus 8 Pro). But the A51 is attractive, with its super-thin bezels and screen that perfectly follows the body silhouette. These aspects in particular make it look like a more expensive phone than it really is.
But it gets better: The A51 has a headphone jack—something you won’t find on Apple’s cheap new iPhone. Unfortunately, it is not IP rated water resistant; To be fair, this is rare at this price point.
I have only two minor criticisms of the A51’s design. First, the iPhone SE and Pixel 3a both pack stereo speakers mounted to the earpiece and under the bezel, while the A51 routes all audio through the latter. It’s not a deal breaker at this price, although it does cause the classic muffled sound problem when you shake the phone from side to side in your hands while playing a game.
Should You Buy Samsung Galaxy A51 In 2021?
Second, while the materials that make up the A51 aren’t a replacement for the glass and metal iPhone SE or the partially matte-textured Pixel 3a, it doesn’t feel cheap.
Samsung actually has a name for what it uses behind it – officially known as “glass” – and I’m happy to say that this eerie name feels more like real glass than it would make you believe. I don’t care about the subtle iridescence of our Prism Crush Black review unit. Even if the A51 isn’t unnecessarily light, normally this sort of thing looks bright to me. However, I could have done without the frivolous lines and triangular designs on the back, as the phone is a constant reminder of its budget origins.
One of the best things about last year’s Galaxy A50 was its AMOLED display – a luxury usually reserved for higher-end devices. The new Galaxy A51 retains its dazzling panel, but this time it measures 6.5 inches from corner to corner while keeping the Full-HD resolution.
Not all OLED panels are created equal, and therefore the Galaxy A51’s display cannot quite match the astronomical peak brightness or high dynamic range of the displays in the Galaxy S20 series. The A51 stands out for its full screen brightness of 565 nits, which is pretty high – even if you only see this kind of brightness outside, in harsh sunlight. Normally, the highest manual setting will leave you around 353 nits; this is much dimmer than the iPhone SE’s maximum of 653 nits.
Samsung Galaxy A51 (blue, 128 Gb Rom) (6 Gb Ram)
But of course the iPhone SE’s screen is LCD, not OLED. And because the iPhone’s display is LCD, it can’t deliver the strong tones and deep blacks that the A51 routinely outputs.
Watching Ken Miles’ epic final laps in Ford v Ferrari in the Galaxie A51, I was captivated by the sunlight seeping through the trees lining the Arnage corner of Le Mans, the treetops for bathing in a warm glow and the forest depths suitably gloomy. I’m used to seeing this kind of contrast on flagship phone panels, but that’s not something I’d expect from devices as cheap as the Galaxy.
At its default Vivid setting (which is extremely saturated), the A51 rendered 212.2% of the sRGB color space, compared to 111.2% of the iPhone SE and 182.3% of the Pixel 3a. The A51’s Delta-E color accuracy also takes a hit under the Live profile, as the Samsung phone recorded a Delta-E score of 0.30 under our light meter, compared to the Apple and Google budget phones’ scores of 0.20 and 0.18, respectively. (Numbers close to zero are better in the Delta-E test.)
You can expect a camera or two on a $400 phone, but the Galaxy A51 has four cameras on the back: a 48-megapixel, ƒ/2.0 wide-angle primary camera powered by 12MP ultra-wide, 5MP depth, and 5MP macro optics. The 32MP sensor handles selfie tasks on the front.
Samsung Galaxy A52 5g Vs Galaxy A51 5g Comparison
That’s a lot of megapixels, and when the conditions are right, the A51 can capture a lot of detail, producing positive shots compared to the iPhone SE’s best work. Samsung’s Live Focus mode isn’t limited to people like Apple’s Portrait Mode; so you can take shallow depth-of-field shots of everything, including this flashlight. Overall, the iPhone’s white balance and lighting are more realistic here, but I like the A51’s depth effects, although some details on the side of the flashlight are incorrectly blurred.
Ultra wide angle shooter shines even when the sun is shining. The iPhone SE lacks a lens with a similar all-encompassing perspective, and so iPhone owners are at a loss for such backyard shots that the A51 provides. Apple’s device also went into a weird hot dump here which is not true under the circumstances. The Galaxy device’s shot isn’t perfect – the right porch, for example, has been blown out completely – but Samsung’s shot overall has a surprising level of detail and good dynamic range as you move from shadows to daylight.
I’m even impressed with the A51’s macro camera – an optic that’s easy to miss, given the amount on this device. i could
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