Samsung Galaxy A51: the full Review

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In 2019, Samsung sold more than 295 million smartphones. This pharaonic number reflects the power of the world's leading manufacturer, which, thanks to its many ranges, offers products suitable for all social categories. Among them, those of the Galaxy A family are most certainly the most popular thanks to their prices between 159 and 659 euros, excluding subsidies.

In this range A, there is a good chance that the Galaxy A51 is one of the bestsellers of 2020. Successor of the Galaxy A50, this smartphone puts on its immersive OLED screen to distinguish itself from the competition. At 379 euros, what is it really worth?

An incredible OLED screen

Samsung is the king of screens. Through its division Samsung Display, the Korean manufactures the slabs of very many manufacturers, starting with those used by Apple. This gives it a major advantage over its competitors since the Galaxy family has easier access to latest generation tiles. As a result, mid-range Samsung smartphones generally benefit from better screens than those of some competing high-end smartphones.

It is therefore no surprise that the Galaxy A51 excels in this area. At a diagonal of 6.5 inches, its Super AMOLED screen is one of the most magnificent that we have been able to try in recent months. As with its Galaxy Note 10, Samsung hides the A51's front camera in a small punch at the top of its screen, like a cyclops eye. The result is splendid, the Galaxy A51 thus has an edge-to-edge screen worthy of mobiles sold two to three times more expensive. Besides, we welcome Samsung's transition to a longer 20: 9 format. The mobile has a large screen but its narrowness makes handling pleasant.

Of course, the laboratory of artbzen.com has verified that this pretty design is not used to hide poor technical results. We reassure you on this point, Samsung gets a mention very well. The A51's Full HD + screen delivers a maximum brightness of 637 cd / m2 can even reach 690 cd / m2 if necessary, for example if you use your mobile in the sun. It’s just excellent. Same thing for the fidelity of its colors which seem much more natural than on its predecessor. Our laboratory confirms these impressions, our probe has measured a Delta E of 2.33 for the new Galaxy A51, which is very satisfactory. This improvement is mainly due to the fact that Samsung has decided to change the default display configuration. OLED requires, the contrast ratio is of course infinite. Watching videos is a treat.

Faced with competitors like the Xiaomi Mi 9T, the Oppo Reno or the Huawei Nova 5T, the Samsung Galaxy A51 is doing better in all respects in the field of display.

Problematic performances

In appearance, the Galaxy A51 is therefore promising. Unfortunately for Samsung, as we use these days, we have found that this device too often malfunctions. Its Exynos 9611 processor clearly does not seem to offer enough power for the applications used – or even for Android 10 – on a smartphone in 2020.

For example, when you want to access the notification center on this mobile, sometimes there are significant slowdowns. A simple scrolling shutter animation seems too energy intensive for this Galaxy A51, which worries us about its ability to withstand the Review of time. Another observation, this time linked to the RAM (4 GB of RAM), the Galaxy A51 cannot keep a card in cache Google Maps when switching from one application to another. Opening the camera can also sometimes take 5 to 6 seconds… All of this waiting time is frustrating, especially when you compare the Galaxy A51 to devices that are sold cheaper and are much more responsive. We regularly wanted to swing it against a wall (which we did not do, rest assured).

When the Galaxy A51 crashes too much, the only solution we have found is to restart the smartphone. That makes it a little more dynamic … until the next bug. We can always hope that a future update of One UI, the overlay used by Samsung, corrects these problems, but at the moment and despite an update released in early February, it is not.

Moreover, the laboratory of artbzen.com realized that the Exynos 9611 processor of the Galaxy A51 offered slightly lower performance in the benchmarks than those noted with the Exynos 9610 of the Galaxy A50, its predecessor. If these differences are not very obvious (around 1%), they reveal that Samsung has not really tried to move up a gear with its new smartphone. The Exynos 9611 is undoubtedly a recycled Exynos 9610, which shows that Samsung, on this point, has rested a little too much on its laurels.

Autonomy shows disappointing

Again, let's give Samsung the benefit of the doubt. The Galaxy A51's battery life is so disappointing that we really hope that a software update will fix it soon.

In the meantime, note that the Galaxy A51 only withstood 11:38 a.m. in the versatile Review of the artbzen.com laboratory. It is 2:30 hours less than its predecessor, yet equipped with a battery of the same capacity (4000 mAh). The observation is identical in communication with a measured autonomy of 17:11, against 20:59 on the A50. However, there is an improvement on the streaming side. The Galaxy A51 can thus link 11:08 videos, against 10:38 for the A50. Not bad for Netflix lovers.

In use, the Galaxy A51 confirms our laboratory results. It was difficult for us to end the evening when we had used the aircraft a lot during the day. With more moderate use (at work when you spend a lot of time on your computer for example), you end the day with 20-30% of remaining battery life. Note that the recharge time of the smartphone is 2:05, always according to our laboratory. Nothing incredible.

Slightly slow fingerprint sensor

To unlock its Galaxy A51, Samsung offers to use the fingerprint sensor located under the screen. Optical technology, the latter is clearly not the latest generation. Like the Galaxy A50 of last year, it does not recognize the user every time, which forces him to repeat himself several times. If patience is one of your qualities, you should survive this experience. Otherwise, we still recommend using a code or a schema. It is old school, but effective.

Four cameras… two of which are of little use

By turning over the Galaxy A51, it is difficult to miss the quadruple camera module of this smartphone. It is in a rectangular block that the four cameras of the mobile are grouped together, in a design design "hob". It inevitably divides, but we end up getting used to it.

Thus, the Galaxy A51 sports a quadruple camera module. Samsung is actually giving in to a bad industry habit of multiplying sensors just for "marketing" reasons. Indeed, two of the four modules of this A51 are frankly not essential.

There is a 5 Mpix depth sensor on the back of the mobile (which is used to improve portrait mode) and a macro lens (f / 2.4) associated with a 5 Mpix sensor. If the latter can be practical in certain circumstances – for example to photograph an insect -, it does not bring anything really useful in everyday life.

Thus, the two real objectives of the Galaxy A51 are a wide-angle (opening at f / 2.0) and an ultra wide-angle (opening at f / 2.2, 12 Mpix sensor).

The main sensor of the Galaxy A51 has a definition of 48 Mpix but is based on the process of Pixel binning to deliver 12MP photos. By day, the quality of these is quite satisfactory even if you quickly lack details when zooming. At night, the smartphone suffers from a big speed problem. It takes so long to capture an image that capturing a stationary subject is almost mission impossible. The opening of this lens limited to f / 2.0 is necessarily a bit penalizing despite good algorithmic processing. It's a shame, but most of the photos taken on the mobile are still usable.

Finally, the second really useful camera of the Galaxy A51 is an ultra wide-angle (12 Mpix sensor). This one somewhat distorts the angles but succeeds rather well in its mission. Samsung's algorithms provide good images.

The Galaxy A51 does not convince us with its performance and autonomy, but pleasantly surprises us with its photographic capabilities. For mid-range, Samsung is doing honorably. We can only blame the phone for the slowness of its application Camera.

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