Samsung is known for their mid rangers and premium flagships but they also offer phones on the lower end of the spectrum. This is the entry level Galaxy A03s at this budget is it still able to provide a decent smartphone experience? Let’s find out in our for review.
Design on Galaxy A03s
As you might expect at this price, the Galaxy A03s doesn’t come with many bells and whistles. But still there is a big battery and 3 cameras on the back. The phone is made from a matte plastic unibody and The back features and interesting grippy texture. It isn’t too light because of the large battery pack. And of course there’s no Ingress Protection here, but it’s all solid and straightforward. On the front is a 6.5 inch LCD with a 720 p resolution and a droplet shaped notch for the selfie cam.
Display
This screen is nothing special. The pixel density isn’t too high at 270 ppi and you get a standard 60 hertz refresh rate. colors aren’t too accurate, even rather Dell and you don’t get options to tweak them. And max brightness is okay at around 490 ppi. At least you do get good contrast here for an LCD. The Galaxy A03s has a traditional headphone jack for audio as well as a single bottom firing speaker. It scored a good rating on our loudness charts. But as far as audio quality goes, there’s no bass and mid tones are lacking.
Battery
One thing the Galaxy A03s does excel that is battery life. It packs a 5000 milliamp power power pack, and it was able to score a 122 hour endurance rating and our proprietary tests. charging speed is really slow though. With the bundled 7.5 Watt charger we were only able to charge from zero to 15% and half an hour. And it’s the same speed even with a faster charger. You can get the Galaxy A03s with either 32 or 64 gigs of storage on board and it’s expandable to micro SD and you can wake up and unlock the A03s using the side mounted fingerprint reader which doubles as the power button. It’s really fast and accurate.
Feature
Another plus of the galaxy A03s is that you get Android 11 and Samsung software. The interface is one UI 3.1 core, which as the name suggests provides the essentials of the one UI experience but it is missing some of the features you’d get on more expensive Samsung phones. These include Knox Bixby, the game launcher and music share among others. But still you get handy features provided by Android 11 Like notification history, and advanced media controls. There is an edge panel handy for storing your shortcuts. And there are Samsung’s proprietary apps like the dialer, the gallery and internet browser. Unfortunately, the UI experience isn’t fast or fluid. Because of this phone’s budget level chipset.
Chipset
It’s an MediaTek Helio P 35. Those have a 12 nanometer process. In benchmarks the 803 s sits at the bottom of both the CPU and GPU charts, even in the budget category. Playing Games is a chore and the phone feels sluggish even when just scrolling around or doing your daily tasks.
Camera on Galaxy A03s
On the back the Galaxy A03s has a 13 megapixel main cam, a 2 megapixel macro camera and a depth sensor. In good lighting photos from the main cam are likable with accurate colors, good contrast and wide dynamic range.
The level of detail isn’t anything to write home about though, is enough at this price, but fine details are smeared the depth sensor is meant to help with portrait shots. These come out decent. Again the detail level isn’t great, but there is good subject separation and nice colors and contrast. close up shots from the macro camera pretty good. The detail level was okay considering the resolution and the noise levels are tolerable. low light photos from the main cam are dark with a blown highlights.
There is no night mode. But if you turn on Auto HDR, you will get an improvement in the dynamic range. It introduces more noise that you can take selfies with the Galaxy A03s 5 megapixel front facing camera, you get good colors and contrast but a very poor level of detail. Videos can be recorded with the main cam and up to 20 DP resolution at 30 FPS. These clips aren’t good.
They have washed out colors and a mediocre amount of detail. There’s no stabilization available here either. So that’s the Samsung Galaxy A03s, it’s an entry level smartphone. So we’re not expecting a lot here. But you still get good battery life and a large screen, a modern UI and an OK camera experience. The problem is the sluggish chipset is really noticeable. And for the same money you can find phones with better performance. So unless you find the A03s at a discount, or you really need an entry level Samsung might be better to shop around.
