Review on Samsung Galaxy SM A515F DS Unlocked by Jim Velasco

I bought the 128GB model with 4GB RAM in black. My wife's S8+ was about to fail and I was in desperate need of a new phone. I previously bought an A20 for my son so I ordered an A30 first until I did some research on my cell phone provider T-Mobile in the US. I gave up the A30 and got the A51 mainly for the LTE bands it supports. T-Mobile uses the following bands 2, 4, 5, 12, 66, 71. A30s only supports band 5 from this list! However, the A51 supports bands 2, 4, 5, 12 and 66. I was happy to pay a little more to get the best connection with my carrier, so I ditched the A30 and bought the A51 instead. Now let's discard that main consideration and move on to the rest of the review. I'll start with the best parts first.1. Call Quality, Reception and Connection Call quality on this phone is excellent, on par with my s10+. I think the quality of the mic has been improved because my wife likes to use speakerphone and her voice on her s8+ sometimes breaks here and there when the mic is trying to pick up her voice. In addition, the sound quality of the voice has improved, which further helps to understand the conversation. Reception was about the same compared to my s10+ which is pretty good. We measured signal strength and AC current. Mobile data rate is excellent even in areas where signal strength is typically weak.2. The Samsung AMOLED screen is the best in the business when it comes to screen quality. We're a bit glad the screen isn't curved because we have such a solid body to protect everything. Colors, quality and resolution are indistinguishable from my s10+. The front camera is a tiny hole, so the entire body occupies almost the entire screen. My s10+ has an in-screen fingerprint reader, which is more optical than infrasonic, but still unlocks the phone pretty quickly. Yes, it's a bit slower than my s10+, but we're talking milliseconds difference.3. Overall Ease of Use My wife isn't a gamer so I can't comment on gaming experience, but she uses a lot of multimedia and productivity apps. Despite what she's used on them so far, she says they seem to work right away. They all open quickly and switch well, and they multitask like before without the slightest difference. When we first set up the phone we were concerned that there would be a lag in the UI, but found that there was a lot of processing involved during the Samsung Switch transferring their entire old phone to the new phone. Once the switch was complete we rebooted and the phone was fast and responsive. The camera hardware has some powerful features. But for a photographer who primarily works point-and-shoot, it's hard to go wrong with many of the camera's settings. Image quality looks great in the light and not as good in the dark as my s10+. The camera's slower speed is noticeable, the transition between main camera/wide-angle/macro takes about half a second, while on my s10+ it's almost instantaneous. Luckily, the shutter is just as fast. If camera speed is important to you, you probably won't be happy with this phone.5. Battery We have to admit that we were looking forward to longer battery life. The battery is 4000 mAh while the s8+ is only 3500 mAh. However, with typical daily use, we found that the percentage remaining was about the same at the end of the day. On average, we spend around 4 hours on the screen, using apps and surfing the web during the day, and the battery has around 40% left, which is on par with the s8+. If long battery life is important to you, you won't be satisfied with this phone, but remember that it can easily last a full day on a single charge. Overall, we like the phone under $300.