Samsung Galaxy A30 review

Apart from Google phones, Samsung phones are the next make of phones that I keep on buying. The new Galaxy A series are a midrange phone with decent specs and reasonable price point. At launch they offered three models, the entry level A10, the middle spec A30 and the higher spec A50. Not encouraged by the low specs of A10, I decided to go with the mid specced A30.





The main difference between the A30 and the A50 is the on screen fingerprint scanner on the latter apart from the modest spec bump. I though I wouldn’t miss that feature much hence why I decided on the A30. On paper, this phone has a massive 6.4” screen but since it’s built longer in length than width, it doesn’t look that big in person.Powering the phone is Samsung’s proprietary Exynos 7904 processor. The phone that I got had 32GB of ROM and 3GB of RAM. You can further expand the storage with the dedicated microSDXC slot but it won’t count against the basic ROM because no adoptable storage.







The front screen sports a nice Super AMOLED screen. As with other AMOLED Samsung screens, this one also features always on display which I love on smartphones. The entire chassis is unmistakably plastic to save cost. I can’t bring myself to get the black version because it was not really black but shiny dark grey. The white version is slightly more bearable. Still so shiny and plasticky but not bad. The new Samsung One UI interface is a refreshing change from the god-awful TouchWiz interface of yore. Nothing as sleek as a stock Android OS but acceptable. Though I’d rather have a full metal or glass sandwich chassis, the full plastic body does make the entire phone pretty lightweight.







The A30 comes with two cameras, one wide and another ultra wide camera. Inspire of those, the photo quality is quite average, nothing iPhone or Pixel-like. The 4,000mAh battery could easily last a whole day on normal use. If I charge overnight, the battery would still have 30% left at 10:00PM. Performance of this midrange smartphone is nothing to shout about. I can see noticeable dropped frames while playing graphic-intensive games like PUBG. Also, the speaker was not so loud even when you cranked it to maximum.





For under 700 ringgit at the time of writing, the A30 is a decent midrange phone from Samsung. Don’t expect any heavy-duty gaming on this though and the camera quality is just below average. You know what they say, you pay peanuts, you get this Samsung.