My experience with Samsung A50

It was a mixed bag but mostly erred on the side of positivity and enjoyment. This was my very first smartphone and I bought it back in April 2019. Back then, I did not know much about technology and phones but I am super grateful that I went for a Samsung and not some other Android Chinese brand. You guys very well know how I feel about those. iPhone wasn't an option for me back then as they were expensive and I was young. But that left me as the only one in the family who wasn't a part of the extensive Apple ecosystem.

I still remember my very first impressions after unboxing the device and turning it on for the first time. As soon as I had finished setting up and was on the home screen, I went "Holy Cow". I knew there and then that this phone had an exceptional display and was probably the reason why it sold 25 million units. I also immediately loved how light and slim the phone was and have only grown to appreciate this attribute even more over the years as phones have gotten chunkier and box-shaped. This was even more impressive considering the phone had a 4000mah battery which was pretty big then and is still considered a respectable benchmark capacity.

I do regret my color choice and am almost ashamed to use my phone without a case that doesn't hide the back fully. I went for the blue mainly on account that black and white were too common. I have hated it ever since. In a world of Pacific and Sierra blue iPhones, that tacky, cheap-looking, overly-shiny and glossy light sea blue of the Samsung A50 struck me as almost repulsive. I have always used a cover on that phone and never loved the way sunlight shone off the back of the phone making it appear even worse. To make matters worse, the back of the phone is plastic and not glass. I dropped my phone once and that was it for the back. That drop left 2 cracks and using the phone for a week without a case left scratches and scrapped off the color of the phone.

The display was big, bright, and colorful. Nobody in my family had a phone so big. The AMOLED display just reeled me in. Since I watch a lot of YouTube videos and prefer true blacks, I could appreciate the AMOLED display that was visibly superior to an iPhone 11 in the family. I'd say that the display did not get bright enough and dimmed too early after sustained high brightness even when you were not pushing the CPU to its max and were just casually using it in an outdoor environment. It often became hard to see. The adaptive brightness was a bit slow and responsive. It often did not calibrate the display to high enough brightness in direct sunlight.

The speakers were mediocre but were considerably louder at the higher end and sounded a bit muted and low even at 50% volume. All in all, it won't be an immersive experience but you would be able to listen to music while you shower. The area around the speaker grill and charging port is particularly susceptible to chunks of paint being removed making it appear like a partially painted wall. Speaking of the charging port, it is USB-C and supports fast charging. I only used fast charging for the first 1.5 years of my ownership and have used slow charging for the rest mainly because of two reasons:

i) My battery life and capacity had severely deteriorated and I had to preserve it

ii) The fast-charging brick that came in the box got damaged because of a sudden surge in socket current. (This happened twice) After that, I just decided to use a spare Apple 5W charger.

One UI is the best, most striking, and most polished Android OS. Period. It has improved a lot since its inception. The phone came with Android 9 out of the box and received two major software updates (till Android 11). One UI is second only to Apple's iOS and was better than iOS in some departments such as notifications which have been greatly improved in iOS 16. I like the whole interface: the icons, the animations, the gestures, the spacing, literally everything. Software is one of Samsung A50's strongest points.

Now for the big ones: The camera and battery. It is a 3-camera setup. Wide, Ultrawide, and a puny little depth sensor. The camera has been improved with subsequent software updates but you shouldn't expect any crazy clarity photos. It is a 20,000 Rs phone after all. It is good enough for taking pictures of handwriting and text which is what mattered to me as a student. The introduction of 25 Megapixel mode with a software update enabled the wide camera to take sharper photos and supported a wider pallet of colors. The selfie camera and portrait mode produced grainy, soft, and washed-out images. The camera isn't certainly the highlight of this phone.

The Battery functioned very well for the first 1.5 years but quickly started aging after that. Although it did not affect me much because I was a student during the pandemic, inside my home all the time with immediate access to a plug socket. I used my phone to attend a few subject classes and the battery life took a hit. I started noticing the trend sooner than later. As the pandemic subsided and the world opened up, I started attending offline school and coaching and had to carry a power bank a lot of time to juice up my phone while I was studying because the stand-by drain, especially at night, was substantial. Part of this can be attributed to Proton VPN which always worked in the background. Even 30-minute sessions of COD took 10% or more battery in addition to screen dimming happening even before I started the first round. The phone barely lasts 5 hours (screen-on time) now.

Then I had problems that people generally face with older devices. It started to lag, crash and did not respond. Often, it crashed simple apps like WhatsApp, Google, and YouTube while using and sometimes refused to open simple documents like PDFs even after tapping several times. I have faced no problem with the storage so far (64GB). I always hovered around the 60GB full mark and that too because COD occupied 8GB of space and I had a ton of high-quality videos and photos from other devices transferred to mine (about another 11GB).

The Face ID isn't as secure so I prefer not to rely on it. The fingerprint sensor is slow and goes maniac even if a single drop of water or grain of dust is on it. You will have to bear those since you can't do anything about it. The processor is a 10 nm Exynos 9610 that has seen better days. It is not powerful and optimized enough for the most demanding tasks and often bogs down or ends up drawing more power than it should. As is the case with all Android phones, cases are harder to come by even if the phone is new and there aren't as many options to choose from. It is difficult to find cases that are beautiful and accentuate the body of the phone.

To wrap it all up, I can't be more grateful for this phone for it really provided so much at such an affordable price. It did everything but just could not overdeliver when you sometimes wanted it to. It is a great handset and that can be said for all Samsung mid-rangers. I love this phone to Korea and back but I knew I had to jump on the iPhone bandwagon sooner or later.

So long, Samsung Galaxy A50.

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VANDE MATRAM

Quite self-explanatory and true