New sub-flagship: Samsung Galaxy A50 – advantages and disadvantages

While Huawei conquers the flagship smartphone market by announcing the release of a new high-budget line P30, Samsung is trying to keep up with them and also announces the release of its flagship.

And although the Samsung Galaxy A50 has not yet been released, many details and technical characteristics of the upcoming novelty are already known. Judging by them, the smartphone, although it claims to be the flagship, but according to the currently known characteristics, it barely falls short of it. Therefore, it should be perceived rather as a worthy model from the middle class.

Its official release is scheduled for the first quarter of 2019, and until that moment we will try to analyze in detail what is already known about the Galaxy A50.

Design

This time we won't have to judge the new device only by the renders published by Trending Leaks insiders.This time, photos of the smartphone body have appeared on the network, which are undoubtedly more convincing than ordinary renders.

It will be a device with a screen with a diagonal of 6 inches and a frameless display.

At first, the renderers used a small sensor as a selfie camera, built right into the active screen, but later it became known that the phone will still have a V-shaped cutout at the top, which will house the selfie camera, the backlight for it and speaker. In addition, it will also house a light sensor.

However, the triple rear camera shown in the renders did remain. In addition to it, everything is pretty standard: two speakers at the bottom, a 3.5-inch headphone jack and USB Type C for charging. The lock button and the volume rocker are traditionally located on the side.

The fingerprint scanner in the first developments was supposed to be placed on the back of the cover, but now it is assumed that it will be integrated into the screen.

According to a report from Trending Leaks, it is known that the device will be released in three colors: Blue-blue gradient, soft pink gradient, smoothly turning into red and classic black.

Display

The new model from Samsung will receive a capacitive Super Amoled screen, the diagonal of which is 6 inches with a popular resolution of 1080x2340, which is classified as FullHD + and has already become standard for frameless smartphones of the new generation. The number of pixels per inch of the screen will be approximately 430.

The display will display the usual 16 million colors for screens of this type, so its color reproduction should be at a very high level.

The screen will also support the software function Always on display, which displays all the necessary information, such as time, calendar, call list, battery level, on the display turned off. This allows you to save battery power well.

Also, according to rumors, it became known that the screen will be made using the new technology of Samsung V or Samsung U, there is no difference between them, these are just different names for the same brand.

A screen made using this technology should calmly bend at an angle of 90^about without any effect on the display. To protect the screen, Gorilla Glass will not be used, but a special plastic polymer.

Nevertheless, this is very controversial information, and not all sources confirm it. True or not, it will be possible to find out only after the release.

Specifications

Here we will indicate the currently known list of technical characteristics, and a little lower we will consider them in more detail. Please note that as the release date approaches, the list may change.

CPU

The new smartphone from Samsung will be powered by the Exynos 9610 processor, designed to complement the lineup of flagship processors, in which the well-established Exynos 9810, used in the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 +, is already well established.

This is an octa-core system consisting of four 2.3 GHz Cortex A73 performance cores that perform the main computing work and four 1.6 GHz Cortex-A53 cores that take on tasks that do not require significant computing potential.

A system with this principle of splitting performance across cores is also called BIGLITTLE.

This single-chip system is based on a 10-nanometer process called FinFET, which in the future will provide it with less heat and less power consumption.

However, the main advantage of this chip was the system of neural image processing and machine learning. The use of these modules has a good effect on the quality of images and videos. It allows you to process night shots, correcting dark places and brightening images.

Thanks to this chip, the blur effect was successfully implemented with only one camera module in the Pixel smartphone line.

The face recognition system has also been greatly improved. The device now recognizes faces, even if they are partially covered by hair or other accessories.

For a phone that, although with a stretch, can be considered a flagship, in which the developer has focused on the quality of shooting, besides having 3 camera modules, this is an excellent solution that will allow you to reveal the capabilities of the processor.

The graphics chip is Mali-G71, which was previously used in the Kirin 960 and Exynos 8895. No major changes in the graphics component are expected, although it showed good results in the above processors and coped with most games without problems, and supported work with VR.

Memory

Judging by the available information, the phone will be released in two versions:

• 128 GB of internal memory and 6 GB of RAM;
• 64 GB internal and 4 GB RAM.

As you can see, the latest outgoing smartphones no longer have less than 4 GB of RAM, which undoubtedly has a positive effect on their performance.

To increase the amount of internal memory, there will be an SD card slot that supports media up to 512 GB.

Camera

As mentioned above, the rear camera will consist of three modules:

• The main sensor will receive a resolution of 24 MP and phase detection autofocus PDAF. This technology is the brainchild of Samsung and has been successfully used in phones from this company, starting with the Samsung Galaxy S. It is a tracing paper from SLR cameras and provides high accuracy, which is especially noticeable in poor lighting.
• The second sensor will have a resolution of 8 MP. Most likely, it will be used for the correct operation of the phase autofocus, since it needs an additional sensor that would set the processor the necessary settings for the picture.
• The third sensor is rumored to be dedicated to the TOF camera.Although this technology is not new, it has been used in smartphones quite recently. The abbreviation TOF stands for Time of flight camera or time of flight camera. The sensor in this camera is able to emit light and record the speed of its reflection from the object. The camera consists of many miniature sensors that capture each point captured by a beam of light. This allows you to create 3D models of captured objects and work with them through special programs.

The FaceID facial recognition system also uses a low-resolution TOF camera to recognize the user's unique facial features.

Thanks to the Exynos 9610 chip, the phone will be able to record Full HD video at a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at 480 frames per second, which essentially allows you to shoot in Slo-mo mode.

In addition, the camera settings will include panoramic shooting and HDR.

selfie camera

At the moment, little is known about the front camera. We can only say that it will have an optical sensor with a resolution of 24 megapixels and support HDR mode.

Also through it you can shoot video in FullHD with a frequency of 30 FPS.

Operating system

It is known that the phone will run on Android version 9.0 Pie. It differs from Oreo in that it fixes a lot of bugs, slightly redesigned the interface, and improved battery saving services.

We analyzed it in more detail in the review on Huawei P30.

Battery

This device will work from a Lithium-polymer battery with a capacity of 4000 mAh, which will traditionally be made non-removable. It is difficult to predict how long the battery will last, but it is safe to assume that it will provide a day of work.

This will also contribute to the service to save battery, implemented in the operating system Android 9.0 Pie.

Advantages and disadvantages

Here we will try to summarize the alleged strengths and weaknesses of the phone.

• Camera. A triple sensor with phase detection autofocus will allow you to take clear and high-quality photos even in low light conditions. This is greatly facilitated by a processor with a neural processing unit for automatically correcting photos and shooting in slo-mo mode. In addition to this, a 3rd sensor with a TOF camera will allow you to create virtual models and work with them.
• Curved screen Samsung V. It is not known if this technology will be implemented in this model, but it would be interesting to see it in action.
• New operating system right out of the box.
• Beautiful design.
• The presence of the NFC system.

• Despite the fact that this processor has many advantages, the graphics system in it is relatively old, and overall performance is approximately at the sub-flagship level.

Conclusion

Not to say that Samsung will release a revolutionary model, but it still has a few attractive things, such as a camera with a TOF sensor and a curved glass (not sure).

The model is positioned as a flagship and even has all the necessary characteristics for this, however, in terms of performance, the processor may be inferior to the flagship models from Huawei and Xiaomi.

The main issue now is its cost, if the phone is sold at an adequate price, it will definitely be in demand, and we will find out in May 2019 whether this will be the case or not.