This is the successor of the most popular and the most sold Android phone Yes, this is the Samsung Galaxy A55 there are some very interesting observations that you really need to know. It has a glass sandwich design with Gorilla Glass Victus+ protection on both sides; aluminum frame and IP 67 rating for dust and water resistance. But when I picked this phone up for the first time, it immediately felt bulky and hefty. And that may be because of the boxy design and sharp edges.
Phone Build and Design
The phone is also 8. 2mm thick and weighs 213 grams, so it’s not very comfortable to hold. On the bottom, you get a Type-C port, speaker along with a mic; and at the top, there’s a dual SIM+ microSD slot and a mic. The volume and power buttons are on the right side and if you look closely, they’re raised up a little bit but I don’t prefer this design because I prefer symmetry.
And by the way, you also can’t type on it like this. See, the build of this phone matches the flagship level design but the in-hand feel, not so much. On the front you get a 6.6 inch 120Hz Super AMOLED display. Now, I would have liked an LTPO panel here because the competing phones come with that but it is what it is.
Display and Performance Review
The peak brightness numbers are also not impressive but in my usage I found the display to be fairly bright outdoors. My movie watching experience with this phone was also pretty good as it comes with HDR support and very good stereo speakers. There’s also an in-display fingerprint scanner but for some reason it’s not working as expected so I relied mostly on the face unlock for this review.
Also, the bezels are thick and uneven; this chin definitely stands out, and not in a good way. Since I am a fan of symmetry, these things matter to me. So the display is good but doesn’t beat the competition; and since we’re talking about things that don’t beat the competition, let’s talk about this phone’s performance.
Performance Analysis: Samsung’s Exynos 1480
The phone is powered by Samsung’s in-house Exynos 1480 processor and is paired with 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM and 128 GB of UFS 3.1 Storage for the base variant. We have the 8+256 model. Before I talk about the day to day performance, let me show you the benchmark numbers. As you can see, the Antutu scores of this phone are less than half of the competing phones; Geekbench scores also repeat the same story and the 3D mark scores are even more disturbing but the stability here is 97%.
We also ran the CPU throttling test and it does throttle, Benchmarks don’t tell the complete story… Agreed! I also tried gaming on this. The gameplay is good be it BGMI, COD Mobile or Genshin Impact but there’s a catch. The catch is that you get a maximum of 30FPS even on the lowest settings in BGMI while other phones offer 90FPS.
On COD Mobile, you do get 60FPS on low graphics but the gameplay is not as smooth as I expected; and finally when it comes to Genship Impact, the gameplay is decent and you get around 40-45 FPS in the highest graphic settings. It is quite clear that this processor is not optimised for gaming and that could be the reason that the gaming performance is so average but not everyone is gamer so let me give you my perspective on day-to-day usage.
Samsung Phone Performance
I took a lot of calls on this phone, played some games, took a lot of photos, ran navigation and did almost everything that I usually do with my phone, and it was always super responsive. RAM management was also very good and I never came across any bugs as well. One thing though, the haptics on this phone could have been better.
So, when it comes to the performance, it’s okay for basic usage but doesn’t win any medals and it’s not good for gaming as well. But one thing where Samsung always wins is the software support and it’s true for this phone as well. the phone is running the latest OneUI 6.1 based on Android 14 and will get 4 OS updates and 5 years of Security patches.
Samsung OneUI 6.1 Review
You get Samsung Wallet, Video Editor, Quick Share, which are all good features to have. Plus, you can swipe up on photos in the gallery to do things like removing reflections from your photos, and more. So ya, OneUI 6.1 is definitely nice BUT this phone comes with a lot of bloatware, ads and even Glance which I honestly wasn’t expecting on a phone with 40,000 rupees price tag.
Sure, OneUI is feature rich and the bloatware can be uninstalled but I really wish Samsung didn’t bundle these ads and Glance lock screen on at-least this phone. Also, there’s no Samsung DeX support on this phone. So, when it comes to software experience, one thing that I don’t like about Samsung is that they are not going towards the clean software experience which everyone wants and have been asking for, especially for phones like A55 which are more about experience than performance, a clean software experience would definitely go a very long way.
Camera Comparison: A55 vs. 12R
You get a triple rear camera set-up with a 50MP primary sensor with OIS, a 12MP ultra wide camera, and a 5MP macro lens. Photos from the main camera turn out pretty good. I also took a lot of comparison shots with the OnePlus 12R to help you decide which one’s better.
In daytime, photos from both the phones look quite nice, but the A55 does capture more details than the 12R in most cases. However, I did notice that the A55 sometimes gets the exposure wrong, so some photos are nice and bright, and others are too dark as compared to the OnePlus 12R. Still, the A55 does usually take better photos in daytime than the OnePlus 12R.
When it comes to low light photos, the A55 takes much brighter photos than the OnePlus 12R, as you can see. However, it does lose out on details when compared to the OnePlus 12R. I also took a lot of portrait shots from both the phones, and here also the A55 takes the lead. The edge detection is better on the A55, and it gets the colors very accurately as well.
Plus, I did notice that the OnePlus 12R seems to smoothen faces a bit, but the A55 has more details, which is nice. The ultrawide camera gets good colors, and the best part is that there’s not a lot of color shifting between the primary camera and the ultrawide lens. However, if you zoom in, the photos from the A55 have much less detail than the 8MP ultrawide camera on the OnePlus 12R.
In low light, the A55’s ultrawide camera takes very washed out photos, so that’s something you should know. The Galaxy A55 comes with 4K 30FPS video support on both the primary and ultrawide camera and videos from this phone do have nice, natural colors and are pretty stable too. However, no 4K 60fps support either.
On the front, you get a 32MP selfie camera in the punch hole, and ya, I took a few selfies with the phone, and it does take nice photos. There is plenty of details and the photos have more natural colors when compared to photos from the OnePlus 12R. So the cameras on A55 are pretty good and better than the competition, be it the 12R or the IQOO Neo9 Pro.
Battery and Charging Performance
While I was testing the phone, I was also looking at the battery level and I am happy to report that the battery on this phone never gave me any anxiety. The Screen-on time that I got on this phone is around 6 hours and with a full charge, it can easily last the entire day BUT the charging speeds are quite slow compared to today’s standards.
With 25W charging speed, it takes 1 hour 25 minutes to fully charge this phone. Plus, you don’t get wireless charging support and as I mentioned earlier, there’s no charger in the box. Lastly, you do get WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, NFC and 12 5G bands. I tested this phone with an Airtel SIM and I did not face any issue with the coverage. It’s time for the verdict. The phone comes with a premium build but it’s bulky, heavy, and not very comfortable to use. The display is very good but it’s not an LTPO panel.
Battery life is really good but it charges very slow, there’s no wireless charging support and there’s no charger in the box. OneUI is feature rich and the software support is really good but there are a lot of ads, bloatware and glance lockscreen. And lastly, the processor is underpowered compared to the other phones in the same price segment.
