17/06/2019
to our Galaxy A50/A30 review: Both the Galaxy A50 and A30 look well-made and elegant: they are thin, they feature a slightly curved back that lends itself to a very comfortable in-hand feel, and you have minimal bezel around the screen. The back of the phones also reflects light and transforms with it in all sorts of interesting patterns, adding further style points.
If we had to pick just one favorite feature in Samsung phones, this would without a doubt be the screen. And the Galaxy A50 and Galaxy A30 are no exception: both devices come equipped with the same 6.4-inch 1080 x 2340-pixel Super AMOLED display protected with Gorilla Glass 3. These screens are an absolute joy to have: they are sharp, they come with rich, vibrant colors, they get plenty bright (the brightness is not quite as record-breaking as on the S10 series, but still good enough for comfortable outdoor use), and they just look good!
Both the A50 and the A30 are powered by octa-core Samsung-made Exynos chips, but there is a tangible difference in the actual performance.
The big takeaway that we want to start with here is that neither of these two phones feels fast or smooth, but the A30 specifically often feels a bit sluggish. You commonly see dropped frames, animations are not as smooth as on many other phones and so on. For us, this is one of the major downsides of affordable Samsung phones, and these ones are no exception. This is not something that we blame on the chip, but more so on the Samsung One UI.
