Friends+Design
- Well built, sleek, modern design, with a Infinity-U display
- Eye-catching back panel with a gradient and prism-like finish
- The fingerprint sensor is sluggish - and cannot recognise fingerprints accurately
- The Galaxy A30s 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 looks colour accurate and bright
- The resolution is only 720p which is rather low by today's standards
Software
- The Galaxy A30s 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
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 G90T and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 675, the A30s does lag behind the competition in terms of performance
Camera
- Decent triple rear camera setup - primary 25MP sensor + 5MP depth sensor + 8MP ultra-wide sensor
- The 25MP camera reproduces objects and panoramic scenes well, colours always look vivid - the edges of objects and textures lack clarity, though
- The Primary camera can also take good macro shots - it capture more details than when in general shots, edges of objects are more distinguishable too
- Good video quality - on par with that of other phones in this price range
- Front camera shoots vibrant-looking portraits
- The front 16-megapixel selfie camera is average - selfies are a bit soft in daylight and in low-light, selfies lack good detail, with visible grain
- Camera struggles in low-light conditions - it captures hardly any details and underexposes the whole scene, with a lot of noise
- Camera app does not have a slow-motion mode
Audio
- Good Loudspeaker
- Good call quality - it gets loud enough to make and receive calls from noisy environments
Battery
- The 4000mAh battery is one of the Galaxy A30s's strong suits - you will easily manage to push past a full day on one charge
- The bundled 15W fast charger is able to take the battery to about 70 percent in an hour, which is not bad at all
Verdict
- Overall, the A30s 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 8 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 M30s will give you a slightly better camera performance, a bigger battery, and storage - so, significantly better value
