Friends+Design
- Well built, sleek, modern design, with a Infinity-U display
- The glossy sides and back look good (it has the appearance of glass but it is actually plastic)
- Of course the glossy body means that it also attracts smudges and fingerprints easily
- The fingerprint sensor works well, but is placed a bit too high up - and you will have to really stretch your index finger, or at times, shuffle the phone around to reach it
- You have the option to use face recognition instead of — or in addition to — using the fingerprint scanner, but it's not very quick, not even under good light
- The Galaxy A30 is also a big phone to carry around, even if you have large hands
Display
- Large, vivid Super AMOLED, Infinity-U display with slim borders all around - everything from images to text really pops - easily one of the best-in-class displays in this price category
Software
- The Galaxy A30 runs on Samsung's new One UI, which is one of the more polished, refined takes on an Android UI, and is one of the best Android UI implementations at present, along with Oxygen OS
- There are a number of useful features including Android Pie's Digital Wellbeing, and a whole bunch of motion gestures such as one-handed mode, Smart Stay, etc, which can be toggled on
- Unfortunately, there are still plenty of promotions, and ads to deal with, in the default phone setup (you can thankfully opt out of these though)
Performance
- Decent performance with a Exynos 7904 processor at the core (similar to Snapdragon 636) - day-to-day use is decent and complex games like PUBG are also playable at reduced graphics settings
- Given however, that other phones in this price range now come with much more powerful SoCs like the MediaTek Helio P70 and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675, the A30 does lag behind the competition in terms of performance
Camera
- One of the few affordable phones with a wide angle sensor at the rear, that can produce some interesting frames
- It also shoots pretty good portraits
- Overall quality-wise though, the dual rear camera (primary + wide-angle) setup at the rear is average though, especially in terms of low light performance
- The front 16-megapixel selfie camera is again average - selfies are a bit soft in daylight and in low-light, selfies lack good detail, with visible grain
- The Galaxy A30 can shoot up to full-HD videos with good quality, but the lack of stabilisation is a let-down - unless you're staying still, videos often end up looking shaky and unusable - continuous autofocus too isn't very quick, and you will see visible lag when the camera tries to refocus onto another subject
Audio
- Decent bundled headset - and you can enable Dolby Atmos for wired and Bluetooth headphones, which boosts the audio level and spatial separation a bit
- The audio output from the speaker however is quite weak in terms of volume
Battery
- The 4000mAh battery is one of the Galaxy A30's strong suits - you will easily manage to push past a full day on one charge
- The bundled fast charger is able to take the battery to about 70 percent in an hour, which is not bad at all
Verdict
- Overall, the A30 is not quite as good as Samsung's other recent launches in the M and A series
- It will face very stiff competition from the likes of the Redmi Note 7 Pro, which apart from being much more powerful, also takes a big lead in the camera department
- Even if you want to stick to Samsung, the M30 will give you a slightly better camera performance, a bigger battery, and storage - so, significantly better value
