Samsung Galaxy A71 5G In-Depth Review

Let me start off by saying that the Samsung Galaxy A71 5G is the sauce, as in the solution. I know what you want. You want a solid camera. Galaxy A71 is the sauce. You want a phone whose UI is one of the smoothest. At this price point, Samsung A71 is the sauce. You want solid battery life and 5G. The Samsung Galaxy A71 5G iOS, once again, the sauce.

This phone is pretty large while keeping it feeling manageable in hand. You get a beautiful Samsung panel that is 6.7in of Super AMOLED Plus and Infinity-O display crystal clarity. It is a joy to look at.

The phone creeps into Samsung's higher-end phone territory with its size, comparable to the S and Note lines. The differences show up in battery size and features.

The other thing the A line maybe should stand for is ‘Average’, meaning for the average user. I think this is plenty, but let's look a little deeper.

Along with this gorgeous display on the front, you’re going to get a front-facing 32-megapixel camera, which takes solid selfies. It gives you the ability to take both the standard and wider angle versions.

One thing I noticed on the A51 4G version, and now on this A71 5G, is that these front cameras do a wonderful job of dealing with areas of an image that are overexposed. Samsung’s software does a fantastic job of not blowing out the background in images and maintains a serviceable amount of detail in the background. Colors on the front shooter aren't so over-saturated, but closer to real life.

Below the camera is an in-display fingerprint sensor, which is standard fare for 5G phones at this price point. Once you get the muscle memory down, it's pretty consistent. My only gripe is that Samsung needs to increase the target area or the size of the scanner. On the right side of the phone, you get the power button and volume rocker, while the left is barren. No Bixby button, and as you already know, that’s fine by me.

The bottom of the phone is where you'll find a microphone, stereo speaker, USB-C charge port, and a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack. The top is where the SIM tray and expandable storage are located.

Samsung has done a good job on down their lines with consistent, solid quality camera sensors, which produce pretty consistently across their lines. The night mode algorithm does, of course, get better at the top of the line, but here in the mid-range, you’re still going to get quality nighttime shots. One of the solid points of night mode is that even in relative darkness, with the feature activated, you still get a good amount of detail and color. Daytime shots are solid as well.

Now, this is a 5G phone and that means that potentially you're going to have to deal with some battery life issues depending on where you work and play. For me, both at home and on the job site, I have strong 5G signal on T-Mobile and AT&T which is the carrier this review unit is connected to.

In the areas I frequent the most on my weekends, I had a fast connection with his phone. If you aren't in an area with a strong signal and the Samsung Galaxy A7 5G is constantly searching for a signal, you will take a hit to the battery. This Galaxy A7 5G has a big battery, weighing in at a massive 4,500 milliamp hours and includes 25-Watt fast charging. This got me to almost a 50% charge in 30 minutes.

My only issue with Galaxy A7’s battery is its lack of wireless charging. At $600 I think it should absolutely have this feature.

One of the interesting cases this phone makes is just how much device you can get at half the cost of the premium phones. Every time I picked this phone up, I was constantly impressed by just how smooth and fast this phone operates. It isn't something you might notice until you've had quite a few phones come through your hands, but the A71 is noticeably faster and smoother than some competition at this price point.

I'll even take that a step further and tell you, it feels smoother and faster than some phones which cost much more, which is even more impressive considering the version I'm testing is the one with only six gigabytes of RAM.

Samsung also offers a version with eight gigabytes of RAM. Clearly, Samsung has done some solid work optimizing their One UI interface on top of Android 10.

Here in the US, you're going to get full-featured Samsung Pay with MST, not just NFC, meaning you get a phone which emulates your credit cards and not just one which needs to wirelessly connect to a payment terminal for tap to pay like Google and Apple Pay.