Samsung Galaxy A8S 2019 Review & Unboxing (English)

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enThis right here is Samsung's GalaxyA8S it's a new phone that was releasedonly about a week ago in China and it isSamsung's first phone to have a hole inthe screen so it's following that newtrend has a 24 megapixel front-facingcamera with an F 2.0 aperture the screenon it is not one of those reallyhigh-end ones from Samsung so it's notan AMOLED panel or Super AMOLED it'sjust an IPS and overall it's aabove-average screen when I compare itto the likes of say the u-20 that I justreviewed this phone right here ispowered by the Snapdragon 710 that's amid-range chipset my version has 6gigabytes of RAM in 128 gigabytes ofstorage non expandable so let's take alook at what you get in the box you geta type C 2 USB cable in white you getsome earphones say the budget kind ofcheaper ones but it does have a remoteon it at least so you can control theaudio through that and then we get aQualcomm quick charge to charges so it's9 volts max it's not the 12 volts 1.5amps that you normally get with Qualcommquick charge 3 which the chipsetsupports then we get a sim tool and alsoa case that case has another TPU clearstyle one so it covers all the buttonsprotects the camera and overall it willdo the job as your first case straightout of the box so the rear of the phoneis made of glass it is very slipperythat's probably why they included thatcase in the box there we've got a rearfingerprint reader a dual tone singletone LED flash actually I thought it wasjewel but on closer inspection it seemsto only have just the single flash inthere and a three camera set up on therear so we have the main sensor which is24 that's the one with a blue around itand then the one at the top is the 10megapixel sensor up the top of the phoneyou'll find the dual antenna Lions theframe the housing around it feels a lotand looks a lot like the Samsung GalaxyS a the Samsung Galaxy S 9 it's this thesame kind of DNA they're sharing they'rethe same style and there's of course asecondary mic they're used for noisecancellation on the right hand side youwill find the volume up and down andpower buttons they are made of metal andthey have a good feel to them and theyalso do not rattle around on the leftside al Juhl nano SIM tray it does havea rubber gasket around it and then abutton that isto Bixby and then along the bottom youcan see the two antenna lines a singleloudspeakers so the earpiece does nothouse a secondary loudspeaker in it itdoesn't have that function the type Cport and then our main microphone sothis is why Samsung included the type Cheadphones because there is no 3.5millimeter headphone jack on this sadlynow with a keen eye you would havenoticed that the white isn't quiteuniform here around the top of thebezels and most importantly around thatcamera too you'll notice that it's notperfect it's not a perfect white andwhen you have a solid color you will seethe difference there that it has thisshadow around it so it's slightly darkeraround the edges and it's just notuniformed but it's not as bad as forexample the view Twenties screen as youcan see here so on the right of thescreen that is the a8 s and now we havethe honor of u-20 on the left you cansee it's even worse and we get an addeda little bit of light leakage right onthat corner just there you can see whereit's extra bright and you can clearlysee here the difference in the bezels soagain on the left it's the view 20 andthe samsung galaxy a8 s is on the rightof the screen with a larger top bezeland the border that is around that frontfacing camera is also quite a bit largerthere so to me overall this buildquality is very good it's in fact betterthan the on up view 20 this one herejust a little bit more refined the IIjust feel a little bit better in handyes it as a slippery phone and I'mpretty sure it's gonna be very fragiletoo with that glass on the rear so youshould use that case really when you getit straight away out of the box to saveyourself from any damagenow the screen has larger bezels as Ipointed out versus the view 20 when youhave a look at them side-by-side you canclearly see that the view 20 there yesit does have slightly smaller bezels butthe better screen overall is actuallythe Samsung's here and I'm probably nota surprise to people but Venus ants onscreen it would be a little bit betterslightly brighter it's about a hundredLux brighter at 530 versus the 430approximately that you get on the honourview 20 the gamma is also much betterhere it's about 2.2 which is almostspot-onmaybe 2.1 but that is really good it'san IPS panel so it doesn't quite look asgood of course as the premiumout there which will have deeper blacksbut the blacks on this as you can seewhat I'm looking at and even what hasbeen displayed on the video watchingthey are quite deep so this is goodthere's another positive of the screenso over I feel it's not a bad screenthat have gone with yes it does have alittle bit of that and uniformed colordistribution with the whites with solidcolors just around you can see there andthen of course as I pointed out aroundthe camera but besides that it's reallynot a bad screen at all and a goodbrightness of that 530 Lux under displaysettings you will also find this which Iparticularly like this is the screenzoom so you can change the scaling andthe font size to your own personalpreference it's good to see a lot ofmanufacturers are now including thisoption because we have many phones youjust never had this choice at the timeof my review here the phone is shippingwith Android 8.1 I was really hopingthat this was going to have Android 9I'm pretty sure it was advertised havingAndroid Pi it has a security patch levelof December the first so it's only amonth out or so so that's not bad at allit also comes with very few bloatwareapps just this right here and a lot ofpeople probably won't even consider thisas bloat so that's it which is reallygood considering most of the Chinesephones I review they are crammed packedfull of so many extras you have touninstall but not here so I've got aslightly different icon set here the waythey've got it looking the UI and I'mnot to go into a lot of detail you'vegot Samsung's Galaxy sorry Samsung'sknocks on here Bixby their AI assistantSamsung pay you've got all that sort ofstuff on there if you like it that's allbeen covered by many other people in somuch detail don't really need to go intothat what matters to me and probably youto its performance does it perform wellwell not reallyit's very average that performance hereand this kind of surprised me becauseI've used other phones with theSnapdragon 710 and I found them to be okbut this seems to just need a little bitmore tweaking optimization I've got the60 gigabytes of RAM version so with 8gigabytes that may perhaps be a littlebit smoother but you'll notice here evenrecent apps it's just not as smooth asit should be it's running below at times30 frames per second you just see alittle bit of animation stutters hereand there when you're going through yourmultitasking when you're exiting outerapps it's not as fluidas it should be for this chipset I knowit's not a high-end chipset we'rereaching its limits here when you dopush it really heavy you will see thatand even sometimes when I was installingan app at the same time and also usingthe keyboard I'm using Google's G boardat the moment I even noticed some lagwith that which was really disappointingto see that should not be happening soyour answer to a score that comes out asexpected for this chipset perfectly finethere and same goes for the internalstorage space these are very goodactually almost 500 reads and 200 writesequential and both the random reads andwrites are also very goodnow GPS works ok the reason why I say okis I did notice so when I was movingaround that the accuracy would oftenjump up to 6 7 and even 9 meters and itwouldn't use all of the satellites thatwere around now most mobile phones willnot lock on to every single satellitebut this one just compared to otherphones seems to use a lot less anddoesn't seem quite as accurate as itcould or should be Wireless speeds andthe range no issues here it's performingas it should it's quick the wireless andalso the range is very good no problemswith thatyou might have just seen when I swipedas well look at that animation stutterthat is actually pretty slow when it wasdoing that now it's better but it issomething that you'll see often withthis phone is just that random sort oflag and stutter and these are the LTEspeeds there so 21 up and down it alldepends of course on your carrier but noissues using this phone here in Spaingood reception this phone also hasGoogle's Widevine level one so thismeans Netflix will run in resolutionsover standard definition so this is goodnow I've been using the phone andplugging it in and that keeps resettingmy battery stats of course but it islooking very good and my testing I'vebeen able to do for example one hour ofNetflix or Amazon Prime streaming orYouTube and you're only losing about 8%battery life so just looking very goodthat's looking like you'd be able to getat least over 10 hours of on-screen timewith us which is great now to fullycharge this battery which is the 3400milliamp hour battery you're looking atjust over two and a half hours I meanit's not the fastest but it's still finethe kind of speeds we are getting now todemonstrate the face unlocking which isfastbut not as fast as other phones I'lljust quickly demonstrate see how longthat took so that was about a second orso it's not bad sometimes it can be alittle slow it all depends on I guessthe lighting conditions or things likethat so overall the performance of it isgood that's decent it's just not gonnabe the fastest out there the same goesfor the fingerprint reader so thefingerprint reader on the rear here youneed to just touch it and it's always onthen it unlocks that only takes about asick and so that is very quick which isgreat it's a deal I just touched it andit was one second or under one second soabout half a second audio qualityso no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack sofor some people that's going to be adeal-breaker but you can use bluetooththere's a way around it they do havethat included headset in there now thevoice call quality I find to beexcellent it's good no problems with itwhatsoever so that is fine now we'veonly got that single loudspeaker sadlythis does not double as a loudspeakerwhich I feel is a bit of an error theycould have made that a secondaryloudspeaker but they decided not to forwhatever reason cost saving probably nowthe speaker output from the downwardsfiring speaker here it's fine I wish itwas a little louder but overall I thinkdepending on the content you're lookingat the loudness is gonna be okay buthere's that sampleso gaming performance we know theSnapdragon 710 is not a high-endflagship chipset it's a mid-range er butit's not a bad one the GPU has gotenough power to run all your latestgames with fluid frame rates and they'reall gonna be playable you can have noissues there so this is pub key on thehigh frame rate setting the HD settinglet's see how it runs motors to get acouple of kills without any issues andthe frame rate is keeping up that yousee a few little stutters and someoccasional little lag as you expect butwith the HD setting the high frame rateyou can see that it is quite fluid it'ssmooth and well you can see a bit of lagjust then see that little bit of startercomes into play but overall this is veryplayable you could of course lower thesettings if you're concerned about thatlag and of course how could I notmention this look at this big massiveborder we get on the left-hand sidebecause of the camera now this seems tohappen with just some games some gameswill fully stretch out but a lot ofcontent it will do this so this issomething that Samsung is going to haveto address with software I'm sure theycan just stretch it right out likeeveryone else doesor perhaps because this phone currentlyis not supported by pub key looking nowthe stock camera app so this is prettystraightforward it's exactly like otherSamsung phones it's very similar to mysamsung galaxy s 9 plus that I have ismy main phone but we've got this editoption here so that's similar to whenyou swap over to the two x lens on thesamsung galaxy s line plus but they'vejust done it differently with the iconthere so you're showing you got like awide shot then the one that goes in soit's a two time zoom it's using that 10megapixel lens and then I start off ifyou've seen x 2 and then you are able togo and just zoom right up if you want tonow swiping up or down on the screenyou've got all the different modes hereso you've got the beauty modes andyou've got life focus with the blurredbackgrounds that you can change afteryou've already taken the shot pro modenot a lot of settings in here at all sowe just got white balance and then ISOISO goes only up to 800 now I find thecameras on this phone to be a littledisappointing the focus on the rearcamera is very hit and miss ofreminds me of the old Xiaomi phones theyshould have gone with a sensor I feelwith dual-pixel phase detection and notjust phase detection but anyway here aresome samples from the camerahere's a sample from the front-facingcamera so we get a fixed focus herethere's no autofocus on it a little bitof a crop in fact no no crop really withthis it can shoot in an odd resolutionwith the screens 19 by 9 aspect ratiosomething like twenty thirty eight byten eighty eight max res and you can seethat there is no electronic imagestabilization with the front-facingcamera so it's gonna be a little bitrocky the audio quality I find to begood and the image quality as well asgood it's fine I don't really have toomany complaints to find it it's okayit's not too soft it's not too sharp andhaving the fixed focus means we don'thave that focus issue with it pulsing inand out like I do with my Galaxy S nineplus there's video now with the a8 s andyou can see it does not have anyelectronic or optical imagestabilization in 4k if you turn on 1080pthen it is smoothed out quite nicely itdoes an okay job you will notice thatthe focus I have been having issues withit that it hasn't really been that goodit can be very slow so it's not there wego it's locked under my hand now andsometimes it can be off like now andthere we go it's got it again andoverall pretty disappointing qualityhere if only they could really enablethat electronic image stabilization herewith 4k would make it a lot more usablethey Mike's the whatever the mic slavefeel is acceptable it's fine it's notbad and overall if you use a Steadicamor a gimbal or something like that thenyou can get usable 4k quality from thisit's just that focus at times does annoyme and this at the front-facing camerain low lights you can see it gets a lotmore grain and the frame rate seems tobe okay the viewfinder that when you areusing the front-facing camera gets ahuge amount of lag because it'sconstantly always trying to brightenthings up low light not amazing qualitywe're seeing a lot more green asexpected this is very challengingconditions for any smartphone camera atleast the frame rate is keeping up thereokay guys so we have a very decent buildon this it feels premium in hand it'svery similar to say the Samsung Galaxys8 the build quality so good there thescreen is not perfect it's an averagescreen it has IPs and they've made somecompromises really I feel with it andwith the hole that they've put in therehopefully when we have the flagshipswe're going to have a much better screenthan this one but of course those onesfrom Samsungwe'll be using their Super AMOLED panelsso the front-facing camera can producein okay photo you get the portraitphotos and things like thatand overall it as good the faceunlocking is fast for the most part justlike the fingerprint unlocking veryquick there it's running Android 8.1it's not the latest version of Androidand it doesn't have the latest securitypatch either so hopefully Samsung isgoing to up their game with that andrelease some new patches bring us up toAndroid Pi but also effects and improvethe performance of this which I findtruly to be super disappointing on thisbecause I have used snapdragon 17 mobilephones before this one is running choppyyou run into lag and I've even seen asfar as lag with input when you're typingso I want to put something in and Googlesearch and I was installing something atthe same time there was a noticeable lageverything sort of froze up for a secondand then the text all appeared again andthat to me is completely unacceptableconsidering the price of this here thecamera quality is also a letdown andwill often over expose on the rears yousing with my photo of the camera whatthe sorry the clock tower there from thecameras that it overexposed it a littlebit there the focus can be all over theplace it has very poor focus Samsung inmy opinion should have gone with one oftheir 12 megapixel dual pixel phasedetection autofocus cameras this one hasonly phase detection autofocus and veryhit and miss and video it can be a realpain the video quality so we don't havein 4k any electronic image stabilisationthe microphone quality is definitelygood it's fine it's a lot better thanthe likes of the honor view xx that Ihave only just recently reviewed but Ifeel that if you're going to be spinningthe same kind of amount of money thatboth of these phones cost that youprobably want to go for the view xx proso make sure you check out my review ofthat one which is right up here and letme know down in the comments what do youprefer do you prefer a tear drop notch awide notch normal not CH or do you thinkthat this is the way to go with the holein the screen that we're starting to seenow should we have more phones withholes in the screen is this the bestoption or do you think pop-up cameras orsliders is the way to go let us know inthe comments and thank you so much forwatching this review bye for now\n"