SAMSUNG A32 DEPTH REVIEW

 SAMSUNG GALAXY A32

this year samsung has packed its a-series mid-rangers with more value than ever before at least in the higher tier models but can the same be said about the galaxy a32 let's find out in our full review so first off we have the regular 4g version of the phone here despite the name is quite a different device from the galaxy a32 5g and it's hard to say which one is better like many phones in this price categorize the galaxy a32 is made from plastic ours is in the awesome black finish and is quite minimal and conservative the a32 is rather compact for a phone these days too one unique accent you'll find on the back are the camera bumps plural rather than hanging out on an island together three cameras each get their own little hump probably the most attractive feature of the a32 is its display 6.4 inches in diagonal is a proper samsung super amoled with a 1080p resolution and a fast 90 hertz refresh rate this is opposed to the 720p lcd with a standard refresh rate that you'd get on the a32 5g even though the bezels are a bit thick here and you have a u-shaped notch cut out eating a bit of screen space we are definitely happy with the a32 screen content is nice and contrasty thanks to the old technology and plenty sharp too brightness is excellent here we measured 400 nits maximum with the slider and up to around 815 nits in auto mode when in bright sun and colors can be tuned to be quite accurate in settings too one thing you don't get on this panel is official support for hdr video though of course thanks to the high refresh rate motion on the screen like when you're scrolling or swiping the ui looks quite smooth but unlike what you'd see on more expensive phones the a32 doesn't adapt the refresh rate to what's on screen to save energy even so i wouldn't be worried about the battery life here the galaxy a32 has a large five thousand million power power pack and even with the screen at 90 hertz it posted excellent results in our proprietary tests scoring an endurance rating of 119 hours charging speed isn't too fast though the a32's bundled 15 watt charger was able to take the phone from zero to just 25 percent in half an hour and you don't get support for faster charging the a32's great battery life is also partly due to its rather modest chipset it's a mediatek helio g80 and unfortunately it isn't very competitive for the class in cpu and gpu benchmarks scores are toward the bottom of the charts the phone isn't exactly slow but we've seen better performance in the competition and even though the 90 hertz refresh rate does add some smoothness to the ui you may encounter a hiccup from time to time the interface itself is samsung's one ui 3.1 based on android 11. it's quite a familiar interface if you've used a recent samsung phone some features that were introduced with the new android version are bubbles for your messaging apps and updates to how the phone handles permissions and you get notification history which you can use if you think you've missed something or just want to go back and double check waking up and unlocking the phone is done with an under display fingerprint scanner it works fine though it's not the fastest one we've seen and according to samsung its new devices will get software support for quite a long time three major os updates and four years of security patches for audio the galaxy a32 has a single bottom firing speaker it scores below average on our loudness charts quieter than nearly all of the competition the sound quality isn't too bad though you can also plug into the 3.5 millimeter jack with traditional headphones if you want to and the phone has options for 64 or 128 gigs of on-board storage either of which are expandable through a dedicated card slot now let's go over the cameras the a32 has four cameras on the back a 64 megapixel quad bay or main cam with face detection auto focus an 8 megapixel ultra wide angle cam a 5 megapixel macro camera and a depth sensor 16 megapixel daylight photos from the main cam are good overall there's plenty of detail though fine details aren't the sharpest there's also little to no noise respectable dynamic range and colors that are more restrained than what we're used to from samsung portrait shots look okay for the most part though the subject detection can sometimes get tripped up by messy hair the more problematic part is the lack of hdr in portrait mode so you may end up with a blown out background the ultra wide cam delivers decent 8 megapixel images with an okay level of detail and not half bad dynamic range the colors are less saturated than the main cams and you don't get distortion correction here so straight lines will appear curved toward the edges of the frame close-up shots from the macro camera are pretty good for this class at 5 megapixels they have a resolution advantage over much of the competition which are using 2 megapixel sensors but without autofocus it will take trial and error to get a sharp result light photos from the main camera are unimpressive they are generally soft and noisy while the dynamic range is relatively narrow and you'll end up with dark shadows missing detail the a32 supports night mode on the main cam but for some reason for us it was quite buggy quite often the camera app would freeze or crash after taking a night mode shot and images that would get captured this way came out with some clearly messed up processing hopefully samsung will address this problem with a software update nighttime shots from the ultra wide cam are barely usable they're quite noisy and dark and dynamic range is narrow with clipped highlights luckily night mode works on this camera without problems the results are likable with lifted shadows and recovered highlights and extra detail in the dark selfies are taken with a 20 megapixel front facing cam but they come out at 12 megapixels these are okay with good enough detail and natural looking colors dynamic range is wide too thanks to hdr there's no support for 4k video on the galaxy a32 and we weren't too impressed with the quality of 1080p video eithe footage from the main cam has below average detail and some heavy-handed sharpening at least noise is low and dynamic range is reasonably wide video from the ultra wide has a heavily processed sort of look that isn't very appealing we've seen much better video quality from competitors at this price so that's the 4g galaxy a32 you get a great high refresh rate amoled display excellent battery life and solid software support from samsung however there are quite a few features that just don't hold up to what the competition is doing at a similar or even a lower price the chipset performance and speaker quality here aren't great and while the camera stills could be decent assuming that samsung fixes the night mode the video recording is lackluster so overall unless you specifically want a samsung phone at this price there are other options that can offer nicer features and value for money.