Shane
With the glitz and glamour of the top shelf models of Samsung’s smartphone lineup it’s easy to overlook the middle tier, the A Series.
You shouldn’t. The Samsung A Series Android phones have a lot of bang for your buck, and at a budget friendly price tag.
This years Galaxy A55 bring us an Android based smartphone with some killer specs.
Coming in at 6.6 inch, near-to all AMOLED screen, the nicely rounded squared edges are beautifully finished off with a dust and water resistant aluminium frame.
Around the back there’s a triple camera which sees a generous 50MP wide lens coupled with a 12MP ultra-wide and a 5MP macro.
The front ‘selfie’ camera comes in at a whopping 32MP. For the social media divas and video bloggers this is an absolute dream front facing camera.
More on that 5MP Macro lens though.
Smartphone manufacturers often forget about macro photography, or they include it but it doesn’t quite get the technical love it should. Not so with the Galaxy A55.
Using Macro mode on the camera you can get some super detailed close-ups.
Night mode was a bit hit and miss though. It does pull in light or light up an environment in a pitch black scene. However it’s not as lit up as Samsung’s S Series smartphones and I found that the Galaxy A55 tended to struggle to give a true replication of a ‘normal’ lit environment, by way of adding in an almost rainbow array of colours in to a shot to illuminate it.
The inner specs of the Galaxy A55 are not to be sniffed at.
While the internal storage is low at 128GB you can boost this by way of a microSD card (something I wish we would see come back in the S Series).
There’s 8GB RAM to keep you multitasking like a pro, and this is beneficial when it comes to some more heavy weight tasks that you may put the Galaxy A55 through.
The processor, a Exynos 1480, is most definitely not a Snapdragon Gen 2 or 3 for sure, but it is able to hold its own very well, even with console quality mobile gaming.
Infact I did not have any technical lag or issues with games I tried on the Galaxy A55 – and if you’re going to get yourself one of these the inner specs are more than enough for day to day use and snapping pics and vids.
Battery life was mixed. The Galaxy A55 has a 5,000mAh powercell and for the average user this will likely get you through a couple of days before requiring a charge up.
Day to day use for me, who tends to be a little heavier, definitely got me through an entire day, morning to night, however when it came to mobile gaming the battery depleted quicker than I had expected.
While I wouldn’t recommend for lengthy gaming sessions, the Galaxy A55 is one of the best mobile photography phones you can get without the hefty price tag.
It’s almost up there with some of the more expensive handsets, even offering a better camera than some, yet its affordability puts the Galaxy A55 makes it accessible to most.
There’s no need to need to substitute or suffer a downgrade with the Galaxy A55, it has almost the same chops as a top shelf smartphone.
Released: March 2024
Device Name: Samsung Galaxy A55
Chipset: Exynos 1480
Memory: 8GB
Internal Storage: 128GB
Camera: F: 32MP. R: 50MP wide, 12MP ultra-wide, 5MP macro
Battery: 5,000 mAh