Friends+Design
- Very well-built, plastic design - the phone generally feels like it could take a beating and come out looking just fine
- Feels comfortable to hold
- The volume rocker and power buttons placed on the right side of the phone are easy to reach out to - the buttons have great feedback and do not have any unnecessary rattle, something many budget phones are guilty of
- The front of the phone looks sharp and modern - it makes use of a waterdrop-style notch and has fairly minimal bezels to boot
- The back of the phone is where the design gets a bit more pedestrian - a subdued Samsung logo and the dual camera array aside, the phone doesn’t really have much else going on - the plastic used doesn’t feel premium and the simple matte blue finish looks a bit dull compared to the metal or gradient-style designs that many other brands employ
- No fingerprint scanner - facial recognition is the only option to unlock your phone using biometrics - and that too works only in good lighting conditions, and is slow
Display
- Nice, vibrant, water-drop notch 6.23-inch LCD display
- Display resolution could have been higher - it's not the sharpest display on the block
- No ambient light sensor
- Sunlight legibility is also not the best owing to the highly reflective nature of the display
Software
- Samsung Experience UI is fairly well done and provides a pretty cohesive and optimized experience - the phone offers a familiar experience to the long-time Samsung user, while giving enough customization options to please a more demanding audience
- Samsung has also done a good job with gesture navigation on the phone - on a screen as large as the M10’s, navigation gestures make using the phone a lot more enjoyable
Performance
- Average performance - the Galaxy M10 uses the same internals as the Galaxy J7, which makes it obvious performance isn’t really the focus here - the phone is powered by an Exynos 7870 Octa system-on-a-chip which is pretty ancient as far as chipsets go - day-to-day performance is just about ok, but the phone certainly isn’t buttery smooth - gaming, especially with more high-end games (like PUBG) is a struggle
Camera
- The second rear camera (in the dual rear camera setup) is an ultra-wide one that adds some versatility - with a 120-degree field of view, you can capture a whole lot more of the scene in your images, be it monuments or just a larger group of people
- Decent video recording quality for this price bracket
- Overall image quality though is average
- Outdoors, the camera manages passable shots - the images exhibit limited dynamic range and details are often lost in shadow regions - similarly, the highlights are blown out at times, resulting in washed out shots
- Low light photos from the Galaxy M10 are high on noise and low on details
- Average selfie camera too - doesn’t resolve a lot of detail and images turn out ever so slightly blurry in less than perfect light
Audio
- The speaker grille is at the back of the phone, so sound gets muffled if you are playing music with the phone kept down on a table - the speaker also doesn’t get all that loud
Battery
- Good battery life - the Samsung Galaxy M10 uses its 3300mAh battery pretty well - with some good optimisation at the software level, the phone manages to handily last a full day of use and then some
Verdict
- Overall, the Galaxy M10 is a good looking, modern phone that handles the basics well - but all-round performance seekers should look elsewhere - you will be better served by Xiaomi or Realme’s phones
