Review: Samsung Galaxy A71 5G

Have you seen a Samsung Galaxy A before? It's a series of smartphones for people who don't want to spend $1,000 on a Galaxy S20. Samsung announced a whopping six new Galaxy A models for 2020, and they've been trickling out in the past few months.

I took the $400 Galaxy A51 for a spin in May, and my takeaway was that there are better phones for the same price. The newer Galaxy A71 5G doesn't have as many compromises, but it commands a $600 price tag ($500 at Amazon). It, too, struggles to stand out in a crowded field, but with a better camera system and more reliable performance, it's a great all-arounder worth considering.

Photograph: Samsung

Perhaps the most disappointing two things about the A71 5G are that it lacks water resistance and wireless charging, the same as most phones in this price bracket except the LG Velvet. Considering Samsung has been including these features in its flagship phones for years, you'd think it would have figure out by now how to trickle them down to a phone that costs only $120 less than its top-of-the-line Galaxy S9 from 2018. Ah well.

If you can get past those two omissions, the A71 mostly delivers. It has a MicroSD card slot so you can expand its 128 gigabytes of storage if you need more space; a 4,500-mAh battery capacity to keep it running more than a full day; and a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen that could stand to get brighter outdoors but does the job.

Performance, powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G processor and 6 GB of RAM, is ample, running games like Genshin Impact without much trouble. I noticed a few stutters here and there, but I never felt inconvenienced or hampered by them. It'll run your apps and games just fine.

The A71's body is plastic, which doesn't feel as nice as glass yet attracts the same amount of smudges. But hey, it also won't shatter if you drop it, and that's always a plus.

It also has a headphone jack. You'll want to use it, because the mono speaker at the bottom is easy to block with your hands when you're holding the phone in landscape (widescreen) orientation to watch video or play a game.

The fingerprint sensor is under the display, and it's not … great. It often takes two tries to identify my thumb. Registering the same fingerprint more than once helped, but you shouldn't have to do that.

Like most phone makers, Samsung likes to cram in as many cameras as it can these days. There are a total of five here, including a 32-megapixel selfie camera. The main camera packs 64 megapixels, then there's a 12-megapixel ultrawide, a 5-megapixel depth camera for improving the blur effect in portrait mode, and a 5-megapixel macro camera for extreme closeups.

The results are OK! They can all snap well-detailed, colorful photos during the day. Images can sometimes look too processed and a little flat, especially in high-contrast scenes where the sky is blindingly white and the foreground is masked in shadow.

Despite having a dedicated Night mode, the cameras falter in dim light. You need to be completely still (use two hands) to avoid a blurry mess in Night mode. It requires a bit more focus and effort than top phones. That's why you'll notice a disparity in some of the Night mode photos in the gallery above. Some of my shots were successful, others not so much. Google's $350 Pixel 4A happily (and consistently) takes better-looking night photos than the A71.

Samsung's phone does snap good-quality 4K videos at 30 frames per second, and the handy Super Steady mode is present if you want smoother-looking shots (at 1080p).

Photograph: Samsung

A key feature of the A71 is 5G support. (It's in the name, after all.) It's the new network technology following 4G LTE, but there are few reasons to get hyped about it—for now.

First, it's inaccessible for a lot of people. Carriers are slowly rolling it out across the US, so you'll be relying on 4G LTE a vast majority of the time. Second, internet speeds aren't all that fast right now. The type of 5G you'll encounter most often on Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile isn't much faster. To add to that, you'll need to buy the Verizon-locked version of the A71 from the carrier itself if you want to access millimeter wave, the variant of 5G that's significantly speedier at the cost of poor coverage and range. And third, did I mention you may have to pay extra for a data plan that supports 5G?

It's nice that 5G is present in some way. If coverage dramatically improves in 2021 or 2022, you won't need to upgrade your phone to access it. Also, Samsung's A71 is one of the few midrange unlocked 5G phones. Competition like the LG Velvet 5G and Moto One 5G are only available locked to specific networks, which means if you switch from T-Mobile to AT&T, you'll have to go through a troublesome unlocking process. Buying unlocked phones is the hassle-free way to go.

If you're shopping for an Android phone right now and want to future-proof it with 5G, the A71 is a solid buy if you don't pay more than $500. The Pixel 4A 5G costs that much. It matches the A71 in several ways and produces better photos. But the Pixel doesn't have expandable storage, and its battery isn't as long-lasting. Both phones get three years of software and security updates, though Pixels will likely get them many months sooner.

As we say in our Best Android Phones guide, you should think about 5G for your next upgrade, not this one. You're not going to lose much by opting for our current top pick, the $350 Pixel 4A. But if none of the Pixels strike your fancy, and you want 5G, the A71 will satisfy.