Samsung launched the Galaxy A22 5G last month as the company’s first budget 5G phone in the A series. It is powered by MediaTek Dimensity 700 SoC with support for 11 5G bands that you rarely see in the price range. The phone has a FHD+ LCD screen, comes with a 48MP rear camera and packs a 5000mAh battery. Specifications are decent on paper. Is the phone worth the price? Let us dive into the review to find out.
| Box Contents |
| Camera |
| Battery Life |
| Conclusion |
Box Contents
- Samsung Galaxy A22 5G 6GB RAM, 128GB storage version in Mint colour
- 2-pin 15W (9V-1.67A / 5V-2A) fast charger
- USB Type-C Cable
- SIM ejector tool
- Quick Start Guide and Warranty information
Display, Hardware and Design
The phone comes with a 6.6-inch Full HD+ Infinity-V LCD screen with a resolution of 1080×2408 pixels at about 400PPI, aspect ratio of 20:9. The display looks bright, offers good color reproduction and the sunlight legibility is good as well, but it can’t be compared to an AMOLED panel that is available on several Samsung phones in the price range. The phone doesn’t have a notification LED. Since it doesn’t have an AMOLED screen, you also don’t get Always on display.
Since it has a 90Hz refresh rate screen that offers a fluid user experience since it offers smoother animations, scrolling and gaming. Similar to the other Samsung phones, there is Blue light filter, which is called Eye comfort shield. This is said to reduce eye strain by limiting the amount of blue light emitted by the screen, You can set it for sunrise to sunset and also set a custom schedule. You can change font size and style and select apps that you want to use in the full screen aspect ratio. There is also dark mode.
On the top, there is an 8-megapixel camera in the Infinity-V style notch and the earpiece is present on the top edge. It has gyroscope and magnetic sensor, otherwise known as magnetometer.
The phone has a plastic frame, but it has a smooth finish, so it is not prone to scratches and smudges. Coming to the button placements, the power button that includes the fingerprint scanner and the volume rockers are present on the right side. The dedicated dual SIM and microSD slot is present on the left side. The secondary microphone is on the top. The 3.5mm audio jack, primary microphone, USB Type-C port and the loudspeaker grill are on the bottom.
On the back, there is a triple camera module arranged in a rectangular array that also includes a LED flash. It is 9mm thick and weighs 203 grams mainly due to the huge 5000mAh battery. The phone has a plastic back with a matte finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints or smudges, and is also not prone to scratches with day-to-day use. This might not feel premium, but the design looks attractive, and you can use the phone without a case.
In addition to the Mint colour variant that we have, the phone also comes in Gray, and Violet colours. The phone doesn’t have any kind of water resistance.
Camera
It has a 48-megapixel rear camera with f/1.8 aperture. The secondary camera is 5-megapixel ultra-wide sensor with f/2.2 aperture and there is a 2-megapixel depth sensor with f/2.2 aperture. The phone has an 8-megapixel camera on the front with f/2.0 aperture. There is Live Focus that makes use of the 5-megapixel depth sensor. You can also adjust the bokeh effect before or after the shot. There is a selfie portrait option for the front camera that uses software to blur the background. There is also a wide-angle option for the front camera.
It has Food, Night, Panorama, Portrait, Slow motion and Hyperlapse as well as Pro mode to adjust ISO, white balance and exposure manually. You can choose 48MP option from the aspect ratio settings on the top. It also has scene optimizer, which is AI mode that automatically detects modes, and you can also enable auto HDR option. The phone has Cam2API support with RAW support.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are decent, and auto HDR helps in improving dynamic range and detailing since it automatically turns on HDR when needed. Even though the phone has a 48-megapixel sensor, the final output has 12-megapixel resolution, which is common in phones with large sensors. Autofocus speeds are fast and accurate. Ultra-wide shots from the 5MP camera is just average. Even though the edges look a bit curved due to the ultra-wide lens, ‘Shape Correction’ is automatically applied that automatically crop the edges, still some images look a bit curved at the corners, which is common in wide-angle lenses.
Portrait shots are good with decent edge detection. Low-light performance is just average, and the Night mode is not much useful. 48-megapixel shots have a good amount of details, but the images are about 15MB in size. Images with flash is good and is not overpowering. The 8-megapixel front camera is decent in daylight. Both the normal and Wide-angle mode takes images in the same 8-megapixel resolution. Software blur in the live focus mode has average edge detection.
Check out some camera samples.
It can record videos at maximum 2K resolution at 30 fps from both front, rear cameras, but it is limited to 1080p in the ultra-wide camera. There is no 60fps option. There is EIS, but it doesn’t have a separate Super steady mode. This is smooth, but you don’t see a huge difference between this and the normal stabilization from the main camera. You can’t switch between normal and ultra-wide cameras when video recording is in progress, which is a feature available in several Samsung phones.
It can shoot slow motion at 720p, but there is no super slow motion. Video quality is good, and the audio crisp since it has a secondary microphone.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 11 with Android security patch for May 2021. On the top of Android 11, it has the Samsung One UI Core 3.1, so it lacks some features like Knox security, Secure Folder, Samsung Pay and Bixby features.
The advanced features option has Games Launcher that gathers your games downloaded from Play Store and Galaxy Apps into one place for easy access, motion gestures like double tap to turn on or off the screen, turn over to mute and fingerprint sensor gesture to bring down the notification panel. The one-handed mode that lets you use the phone easily with one hand, Dual messenger lets you sign in to a second account of social media apps and the Panic mode lets you Send SOS message by pressing the Power key three times.
The Device maintenance option lets you manage your device’s battery life, storage, RAM usage, and security all in one place. Out of 128GB in our unit, 107.9GB is free. Out of 6GB LPDDR4x RAM, about 5.6GB is usable and 3GB is free when default apps are running in the background. Even though it was claimed to come with UFS 2.1 storage, we got sequential read speeds of about 288MB/s, so it is eMMC 5.1 which is disappointing for a phone in the price range.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, the smartphone comes with Facebook, Netflix and Microsoft apps such as OneDrive. There is also Samsung Max, My Galaxy and other Samsung apps. You get the option to install apps when you are setting up the phone, which you can choose not to.
Fingerprint sensor and Face unlock
The phone has a side-mounted fingerprint sensor that immediately unlocks the phone even when the phone is locked. You can add up to 3 fingerprints, and adding fingerprint is easy. It has support for Face recognition, which doesn’t work well if the lighting is poor in the room, if you are hats, or use heavy makeup.
Music, FM Radio and Multimedia
YouTube Music is the default music player. It has Dolby Atmos and Dolby Atmos for Gaming that improve the audio when listening through earphones, but misses UHQ upscaler, Surround and Tube Amp Pro sound effects that is available in high-end A series models. It has FM Radio support with support for recording. That said, audio through third-party headphones is good. Loudspeaker output from the mono speaker is decent.
The phone comes with Widevine L1 support out-of-the-box so that you can enjoy HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar and other streaming apps, but there is no HDR support.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The connectivity options include, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz + 5GHz), with VoWiFi for Jio and Airtel, Bluetooth v5.1 and GPS with GLONASS. It has support for USB OTG, but there is no NFC. It has 5G connectivity with support for several 5G bands (N1, N3, N5, N7, N8, N20, N28,N38, N40, N41, N78, N79). There is also 4G connectivity with support for a lot of bands and has Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and WiFi-Calling or Vo-WiFi support for Reliance Jio, Airtel and more, and also has support for LTE-A or Carrier Aggregation. The dialer and messaging have familiar UI. Since this is a dual SIM phone, you get the option to select either SIMs when calling or sending a text message. Moving on, the call quality is good, and we did not face any call drops and the earpiece volume was loud. Speaker output during calls were good as well.
The Galaxy A22 5G’s head SAR is 0.47 W/Kg, which is less than 1W/kg, even though the limit in India is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g).
Performance and Benchmarks
Coming to the performance, this is powered by an Octa-Core MediaTek Dimensity 700 7nm processor which has 2 x Cortex-A76 CPUs clocked at up to 2.2GHz and 6x Cortex-A55 CPUs at up to 2GHz. It has Mali-G57 MC2 950MHz with support for up to 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB storage. We did not face any issues or frame drops in the graphic-intensive games. It gets a bit warm on intensive gaming and 4G data use, but it doesn’t get too hot to handle. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Battery life
The 5000mAh battery offers good battery life that lasts for a day with heavy use. With average use, it should last for two days. I mostly got 5 to 6 hours of screen on time, mostly on Wi-Fi and occasionally on 4G for close to 2 days. Adaptive battery saving and other options will let you increase the battery life, but the performance might be affected.
In our One Charge rating, the Samsung Galaxy A22 5G scored 18 hours and 15 minutes, which is good. We tested in 90Hz, so it will be better in 60Hz. Samsung has offered 15W fast charger in the box. Charging with the bundled charger takes about 2 and half hours for 0 to 100%, and 0 to 50% took about about an hour minutes. Charging time is high compared to most competitors that takes less than one and half hours to charge the phone.
Conclusion
Overall, the Galaxy A22 5G is strictly for those who need a Samsung 5G phone with a lot of 5G bands and a long battery life for under Rs. 20,000. It has a 90Hz LCD screen which is decent, but the camera is just average and the One UI core lacks a lot of features that the other A series phones like A52 have. Hope we can expect better mid-range
Alternatives
iQOO Z3 5G is a good option for a 5G phone that is powered by a faster Snapdragon 768G SoC and has 120Hz HDR screen. The realme Narzo 30 Pro is also a good option with a better Dimensity 800U SoC if you need 5G.
Pros
- 5000mAh battery offers good battery life
- Smooth performance
- Decent build quality
- Future-proof with 5G support with several bands
Cons
- One UI Core misses some One UI features
- Average camera performance
- Slow charging