Samsung has been hugely successful in the flagship segment for a long time now, the Galaxy S line-up and the Galaxy Note series has been successful for the past many years, however, the brand has never competitively entered the budget segment till the recent times. Not very long ago, the brand unveiled their Galaxy M series of smartphones and has now added more phones to the Galaxy A series. The Korean brand has launched as many as six new models over the M and A series in the recent weeks.
The Galaxy A50 stands at the top of the series for now and the Galaxy A10 is the new entry-level smartphone from the brand available at a price under Rs 10,000.
Design
The Galaxy A10 is a pretty big phone with a 6.2-inch display but it fits in the hand just right. While the body is big enough, most of the front is taken up by the display itself and the borders are pretty slim, the chin on the front of the smartphone is relatively thicker than the sides but smaller than what we’ve seen on most smartphones. The Samsung Galaxy A10 comes with an HD+ resolution display having 1520 vertical pixels and 720 horizontal pixels. The Galaxy A10 has an IPS LCD panel unlike the higher end Samsung Galaxy A30 and A50 that come with a Super AMOLED display. There wasn’t any mention of external protection for the display but it did cope pretty well against scratches and damage. Despite the IPS LCD panel, the colors pop out and images look vivid on the bright display.
The overall design on the Galaxy A10 is pretty simple and uses a plastic back which makes the phone evident from the budget segment. The phone is fairly slim and easy to hold with a confident grip. The buttons on the right are tactile and offer a firm press. The Galaxy A10 comes with dual SIM functionality and support for a microSD card, this sim tray is located to the left of the smartphone. The primary microphone, 3.5mm headphone port, and the micro USB charging port are all present at the bottom of the device while the speaker is placed to the rear of the smartphone.
The back of the Galaxy A10 is very simple and is completely made of plastic which gives it a very dull appearance. However, the material is fairly immune to fingerprints and scuffs which is a good thing. The device doesn’t come with a fingerprint sensor and uses face recognition for quick unlock, the camera detects and recognizes the face fairly well but struggles under bad lighting conditions. There is no raise-to-wake gesture meaning that you will have to manually wake up the device to unlock.
The packaging comes with a SIM ejector tool, power brick, micro USB cable, and the documentation. The Samsung Galaxy A10 is pretty well built and looks decent for a budget smartphone.
Specifications and Features
The Samsung Galaxy S10 is powered by their in-house chipset, the Exynos 7884 which is an octa-core chipset with 2 x 1.6GHz cores and 6 x 1.35GHz cores. The chipset comes paired with the Mali G71 MP2 GPU for handling basic games. The RAM on the smartphone is 2GB and the internal memory is 32GB which can be expanded to up to 512GB via microSD card. The device comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, FM Radio, GLONASS, Accelerometer and Proximity sensors.
The Samsung Galaxy A10 runs on the latest One UI software based on Android Pie version, the device also came with the February security patch installed. The One UI makes it easy to use even such a large phone without struggling to reach out. The home screen setup does need some changes as the icons look comically large by default, this can be reverted by choosing a denser grid for the home screen. There are even options to enable one-finger swipe for the notifications and this is hugely helpful given the size of the smartphone.
The Samsung Galaxy A10 also comes with the Samsung Pay mini pre-installed, this is a cut-down version allowing UPI transfer, payment wallets, and gift cards access. The software also comes with support for Android Pie Digital Wellbeing which keeps a track of the individual user. The device does come preinstalled with software like Daily Hunt, My Galaxy, and Amazon Shopping and the Galaxy Apps store does send a lot of unwanted notifications. This can be opted out for once the initial setup of the Samsung’s applications are done.
Performance
The Samsung Galaxy A10 is an average performer when it comes to chatting and other productivity applications, the experience was overall mostly smooth without too much stutter. We could, however, occasionally experience some lag while scrolling through the recent apps carousel. In the Geek Bench test, the Samsung Galaxy A10 got a score of 3324 on multi-core and 1103 on a single core while the AnTuTu score of the device was 89,895. While these numbers aren’t particularly impressive considering that a few another smartphone with better chipsets is available for the same price, the phone does stack up pretty well.
The phone doesn’t heat up much for general usage, on continuous CPU and GPU usage, the Galaxy A10 does get warm but the temperatures are still very much under control. We tried playing PUBG on the Galaxy A10 and the phone could barely manage the game even at the lowest setting, Asphalt 9: Legends did a better job on the smartphone with a smoother frame rate. The audio on the Galaxy A10 is pretty weak and the volume is low in the games too. Even in applications like YouTube, and Amazon Music, the volumes were far below the levels that we would like. There is also Dolby Atmos on the smartphone for an enhanced Audio experience and can be enabled for both wired and wireless headsets.
Camera
The camera setup on the Samsung galaxy A10 is pretty mediocre, the rear camera is a single 13MP camera setup with an f/1.9 aperture while the front camera is in the Infinity-U display with a resolution of 5MP and has an f/2.0 aperture. The rear camera comes with a LED flash to aid the natural light. The camera application is pretty similar to what we’ve seen on the new One UI Smartphones. The rear camera comes with support for HDR capture but doesn’t have scene optimizer functionality. The higher-end smartphones from the brand including the Galaxy A30 come with the Scene Optimizer functionality that boosts the colors and softens the textures making the photos more catchy.
The landscape shots had decent detail and capture a good view, there is a little distortion in low light conditions but the camera does handle imaging pretty well. The auto-focus works decently in getting a lock of the focus but does take up a while which results in some out of focus shots when in a hurry. The macros in good lighting conditions had enough detail and colors with sharp edges and well-defined details.
Despite the wide aperture, the low light images were slightly blurred and lacked detail, the noise increased when the lighting conditions weren’t favoring. Overall, the photos taken in low light were underwhelming and it got even worse when shooting indoors in low lighting, the macros turned out slightly better but the overall quality was still below average. The camera application comes with multiple modes including Panorama, Pro and the Sticker mode.
The front camera on the Samsung Galaxy A10 is about average the 5MP sensor with an f/2.0 aperture does an average job in daylight and struggles a lot in low light conditions. The Selfies turned out a little softer than our liking in most conditions but the color accuracy was acceptable. In low-light conditions, the selfies had visible grain and lacked any detail.
The Galaxy A10 can shoot in FullHD resolution using both the front and the rear camera, it doesn’t come with any software or hardware stabilization making the end videos look very shaky. The continuous autofocus isn’t very quick and is mostly a hit and miss. There are AR Emojis in the camera application which was first seen on the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus.
Battery
The Samsung Galaxy A10 comes with a 3,400mAh battery and lasted about 10 hours in the battery loop test, with a regular day usage involving calls, chatting and browsing through social media we could get through the day with a single charge. The phone charges pretty fast and does good on the battery segment.
Verdict
Samsung has been doing pretty good in the budget segment with the launch of the new Galaxy A series and Galaxy M series smartphones. The Galaxy A10 is a barebone smartphone that offers the confidence of the brand at a price segment that is within the reach of most users. The Samsung Galaxy A10 does make a few cuts to keep the price of the smartphone low, the device even misses out on some important sensor and skips a secondary camera on the rear to keep the prices low.
The competition is stiff in the budget segment, however, very few smartphones offer the quality, confidence, and reliability as what is offered by the Galaxy A10. The Galaxy A10 is a decent phone for a first time user or as a secondary phone, the device has decent battery life and can handle most basic social networking and chatting apps fine. The processor on the Galaxy A10 isn’t competitive enough for the price and the cameras are about average.
While there are other options in the price segment that might perform better than the Galaxy A10, the Galaxy A10 comes up as a jack of all segments.
