The Samsung Galaxy A5 is, in my opinion, way better looking device than the Samsung Galaxy S4. It is the first Samsungsmartphone to sport a full-metal body as well as a luxurious design. The devices has a stunning 5″ Super AMOLED display and feels premium in the hands. It’s available in 4 colors: Dark blue, gold, grey and white — we got the white model. Anyway, let’s dig in to the box!
In the box, we see the standard set up of the handset itself, the USB cable as well as the AC wall plug, the quick start guide, the SIM/microSD slot eject pin, some stickers and… Some spare silicone tips for the ear buds. I did not find the standard Samsung in-ears anywhere in the box. Not sure if this was a packaging error. The Galaxy A5 runs on Android KitKat (4.4.4) powered by aQualcomm Snapdragon 410 quad-core 1.2GHz processor with 2GB of RAM — running alongside an Adreno 306 GPU. The display housed in the metal body is a 5″ 1280 by 720 display — which I find sufficient at 294ppi. For storage, we see 16GB of internal memory and an expandable microSDHC slot up to 64GB. it comes with WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4 — with EDR, AD2P and LE –, GPS support including A-GPS and GLONASS as well as LTE support. The handset is kept alive by a 2300mAh battery which I think, considering the size of the display and the processor, would be able to last a very very long while.
The display is bright and the adaptive brightness works well. Powering it on, we’re greeted with Samsung’s proprietary launcher; swiping right will give you Flipboard, and swiping left gives you more home-screen space. The native browser is a pain to use and I’m totally not used to having the back-button and app-drawer buttons on the right. The front also has the 5MP front facing CMOS camera which Samsung advertises to provide “smarter selfie shooting” with palm and speech capture features. I’m a bit sad that there are no front facing speakers though. I see no signs of a notification LED.
On the left we have the volume rocker and some really clean and sleek lines.
On the right we have the microSIM card slot, the microSD slot as well as the lock-button.
On the bottom we have the microUSB jack as well as the 3.5mm TRRS audio jack.
On the back we have the 13MP CMOS shooter, the LED flash and the loud speaker.
I have to admit, I am a little excited about this phone. It’s light, it’s sleek and it’s something very different from Samsung. They’ve always stuck to and sworn by their plastic bodies, but this is a piece of engineergasm. It is very nice in the hands and I don’t feel it heating up much when using it to Waze around on foot. It do have to admit that the 1280 by 720 screen is a little bit of a drawback, but for a mid-range phone, you can’t argue with the fluidity of everything on it. There are some slight stutters but they’re very negligible. I will not want to be too quick to pass judgement on the phone until it has crashed on me a few times or maybe cut me off from a few calls. I’ll be plugging my personal SIM and a microSD to start using this as a daily driver for the next week. But, till then, I will leave us all with this: This phone is freaking beautiful in it’s simplicity. I just wished it had front facing stereo speakers and Lollipop out of the box.
