Last few quarters have been not great for Samsung in India as they were fast losing their market share to Xiaomi. In 2019, Samsung has been pretty aggressive with their launches and we have seen M series and A series smartphones launch in India. The latest to have launched in India under the A series is the Galaxy A20 which is priced Rs 12,500 and comes with decent hardware, dual cameras, One UI and a 4000mAh battery. So how good is the device for the price segment? Let’s find out in this detailed Samsung Galaxy A20 Review.
Here is the unboxing video:
Design and Build:
In the design department, the Galaxy A20 has a lot of similarities between the A30 and A50. It has a good front design with infinity V notch and smaller bezels for the price segment. The bezels are quite similar to the A30 and A50 and Samsung has done a good job here in terms of front design. Moving to the back panel, you can see the back panel has been given a glossy finish to mimic glass but it is made of plastic material. In a week of usage, we could see the device accumulating a lot of minor scratches which means you will require a case (not included in the box) for protection. The back panel is also curved towards the edges giving a good in hand feel.
The power and volume keys are the right side while the left side houses the SIM tray. The bottom section has speaker unit, 3.5mm audio jack and USB type C port included. Overall, it is quite a decent build.
Display:
The display is one of the important aspects of all A-series phones as they come with sAMOLED panels. Here again, the A20 packs a 6.4 inches display with a screen to body ratio of 85%. The display is an HD+ panel with 19.5:9 aspect ratio. While the display quality is good with the sAMOLED panel and gives good viewing angles and colors, the resolution is still HD+ and this is definitely disappointing for this price segment. There is also no mention of any protection offered on the display. But having said that, the overall display quality won’t disappoint most of the users unless you really know it is an HD+ resolution display.
Software:
The Samsung Galaxy A20 runs on Android 9.0 with One UI. The One UI is the new UI from Samsung which was released earlier this year and this is the same UI which comes on flagship phones including S10 and S10 Plus. The One UI feels quite good and is a refreshing change from the Experience UI which we have been seeing on previous J series phones.
The One UI offers a clutter-free UI and the options and tools are grouped well. It also offers additional gestures and motion controls. You can also customize the device with themes and wallpapers. Other options include one-handed UI, game launcher, dual messenger and easy mode.
The phone also comes pre-installed with bloatware which could have been avoided.
Performance:
Galaxy A20 is powered by the homegrown chipset, the Exynos 7884 and is coupled with 3GB of RAM. The Exynos 7884 is an underclocked variant of 7885 Octa-core processor. While the performance of the device is quite acceptable in day to day tasks without any major issues, the response time from the UI wasn’t very impressive.
The gaming experience of the device is also not great and we have done a detailed gaming review and found the experience to be sub-par in this price segment with a lot of lag and frame drops. We even lowered the graphics quality and still it was not great.
Related: Samsung Galaxy A20 Gaming Review
If you look at the benchmark score of the Exynos 7884, you can see it is not even close to what Snapdragon 636, 660 or Helio P70 offers. The device also comes with face unlock and fingerprint scanner as security options. Fingerprint scanner performance is pretty slow and face unlock is again accurate, but slow to unlock the device.
The phone offers 32GB of internal storage and it has the option to expand the storage via a dedicated SD card slot. The call quality is pretty good on the device and we did not see any issues. The speaker performance was average and the sound was not loud enough for good music playback.
Camera:
In terms of camera hardware, The Galaxy A20 comes with a dual camera set up with the primary 13MP camera with f/1.9 aperture and a secondary 5MP ultra-wide-angle camera with f/2.2 aperture with 123-degree wide angle lens.it also packs an LED flash.
The phone also comes with an 8MP front camera with f/2.0 aperture and screen flash included for low light selfies.
In the daylight captures, you can see it has decent clarity in the images shot in daylight conditions. But when you zoom into the picture you can see that the sharpness levels are pretty much average, especially in the sub 15k price segment. The colors are also a bit inconsistent especially with the skies where it saturates a bit. Also, the dynamic range is quite average. Overall, in daylight, it performs quite average considering the price segment. There is also an ultra-wide-angle camera with the 5MP shooter and takes decent shots.
The rear camera portraits are not the best you can see in the segment. While the edge detection is quite good, it has the tendency to mute the colors. Moving to low light photos, here the Galaxy A20 disappoints with average performance and there is a lot of noise in the low light captures. When there is an adequate amount of artificial light, it does take decent photos but again not the best for the segment.
The Galaxy a20 surprised us with the selfies taken with the 8MP shooter. With good colors, decent sharpness levels and dynamic range, the selfies won’t disappoint you. Even the low light selfies turned to be quite good. The device also has portrait selfie mode but here is the inconsistent with poor edge detection at times. Here are some of the samples taken with the device.
Battery Life:
Samsung Galaxy A20 comes with a 4000mAh battery with 15W fast charging supported. Similar to the battery performance of A30 and A50, the battery life on Galaxy A20 is very good and you can easily get around 6-7 hours of screen on time with more than 1 days of battery life. The 15W fast charging also comes handy in charging the smartphone quickly and the box includes the fast charger. Overall, the battery performance is very good.
Verdict:
So how good is the Galaxy A20 priced Rs 12,500? The Galaxy A20 comes with a good sAMOLED display, One UI with Android 9.0, decent selfie experience and great battery life. But for a price of Rs 12,500, there are many worthy alternatives available offering Full HD+ resolution display, powerful processor and great cameras as well. So we feel, if you are looking for a phone in sub 13k price segment, you should be considering Realme U1, Zenfone Max pro M2 or even Redmi Note 7 which are better alternatives than the Galaxy A20.
