It seems that no one has ever said that Samsung is a "ten thousand year old plastic", and Samsung is not satisfied with one or two machines with a metal middle frame, but has directly launched the A series with an all metal integrated body. Even the most rudimentary A3 also uses a metal body with full texture. Will anyone buy it?
Specifications:
130.1 x 65.5 x 6.9 mm, 110.3 g;
Dual card version and LTE version are optional;
4.5 inch qHD Super AMOLED screen, 245ppi;
Snapdragon 410 processor, 1GB RAM for dual card version and 1.5GB RAM for LTE version;
Android 4.4.4；
8 megapixel rear camera;
5 megapixel front camera, supporting 1080p video recording;
16GB built-in storage, supporting up to 64GB SD card expansion. The No. 2 card slot of the dual card version is a dual-use card slot, which cannot achieve dual cards and expanded memory at the same time;
Built in 1900 mAh non removable battery;
The dual card version does not support LTE NFC。
Appearance design:
The design elements introduced from the Galaxy Alpha have been inherited on the Galaxy A3. The first time we got the A3, we could notice the aluminum alloy middle frame. The style set by the middle frame design extends gracefully to every corner of the fuselage. The back material is also aluminum alloy.
The A3 is one of the thinnest smartphones produced by Samsung at present. The body thickness of 6.3 mm is only second to that of the A7 in the same series. Comparing the A3 and A5 side by side, there is little difference in the appearance design between the two. The A5 looks like a magnified version of the A3.
Compared with Galaxy Alpha, the A3 is shorter and more compact, and the HOME button of the A3 does not have fingerprint recognition function, and there is no heart rate sensor on the back.
Samsung believes that it is not enough just to make the whole back and middle frame into metal materials, so the metal materials that further wrap around the lens, the protection net of the speaker and the buttons around the body are also made of metal, and the partition strips that have to be opened for signal reception quality are also filled with unusually high-quality plastic.
The back metal of A3 has been specially treated. The coating on the surface feels very smooth, and under the light, it will flash a luster similar to pearls. This surface treatment process even gives the A3 fuselage design a faint feminine flavor.
The earpiece and sensor on the top of the front are still designed in the obvious Samsung style, and the HOME button on the bottom and capacitive touch buttons on both sides are not unexpected.
The card slot is located on the right side and can be easily poked out by using the card picking pin attached with the card. Both LTE and dual card versions support memory card expansion, but the dual card version uses a dual-use design for the No. 2 card slot, which means that the dual card version does not have the ability to expand memory when inserting two SIM cards.
Hold the A3 in your hand. The feeling of holding it is impressive. The touch of the power key, volume key and HOME key is also quite good, but the space between the upper and lower volume keys is relatively small. It is relatively difficult to press it. If you leave this aside, The overall appearance design and workmanship of the A3 are impeccable. The matte back provides comfortable feel while increasing friction. The well made, thin and compact body can be easily put into the shirt pocket. It is also possible to forget it carelessly.
If there is any regret, the A3 has given up the design of replaceable batteries and people who buy the dual card version must choose between the dual card function and expanding memory. However, considering that Alpha can replace batteries or not expand memory in those years, we have to say that there are gains and losses.
Screen:
The ppi converted from the 4.5 inch qHD screen of the A3 is 245. Today, this parameter is not enough for a large brand of mid and low-end mobile phones. The resolution has become a hard wound at first. Samsung still chooses its preferred Super AMOLED screen in terms of screen material, but the sub pixel arrangement on the A3 is slightly different, A3's screen sub-pixel arrangement is similar to Note 2's screen sub-pixel arrangement. AMOLED also provides a good viewing angle, although there is inevitable color deviation in large angles.
In addition, it is a pity that Samsung did not equip the A3 with the current popular gorilla scratch resistant glass.
In terms of screen brightness performance, A3 performs well. The maximum brightness of 470 nits is a rare achievement for AMOLED screens, and the outdoor visibility performance is even more amazing. The outdoor contrast performance of 4.241 is even better than the expensive flagship phones such as Note 4 and iPhone 6.
Endurance performance:
Samsung claims that the built-in 1900 mAh of the A3 enables the A3 to maintain 11 hours of video playback and 13 hours of call time. It should be noted that AMOLED obviously does not have any advantage in the web browsing test that focuses on bright colors.
In the test, both the single card version and the dual card version achieved 20 hours of 3G talk time, 7.5 hours of web browsing time and 8.5 hours of video playback time. However, in the comprehensive evaluation, the single card version outperformed the dual card version by 65 hours of comprehensive performance. Considering that the built-in battery capacity of A3 is only 1900 mAh, this performance is not bad.
User interface:
The user interface of A3 is still the TouchWiz we are familiar with. This time, the TouchWiz of A3 is built based on Android 4.4.4, and the overall style is also a strong Samsung flavor.
The theme function that the people like to see and hear is not absent.
The setting menu uses a white background, which can not help worrying about the resulting power consumption.
Performance:
The Snapdragon 410 processor used in A3 is a recently popular four core 64 bit processor. The processor has four 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 cores, which are matched with Adreno 306 GPU and 1GB/1.5GB RAM. In theory, the performance of Cortex-A53 with the same frequency will be 25% higher than that of Cortex-A7.
Snapdragon 410 is not a very powerful processor. It is positioned as a low-end processor, so we don't expect much of its overall performance, The performance of the A3 in terms of running points is in line with the rules, and reflected in the hands of users, it is the fluency of the whole machine. The fluency of the A3 machine is very good. I believe that the overall operating experience can be further improved after upgrading to the 5.0 system in the future.
photograph:
The A3 rear camera can take a maximum of 8 million pixels of 4:3 photos. The photo taking interface is not significantly different from the Samsung mobile phone we have encountered before. Various photo taking modes and special effects options are not omitted. The left function area can be manually edited. Users can drag and drop the two most commonly used functions here for operation.
This 8 megapixel rear camera performs very well in actual photography, with good color rendering and dynamic range. However, A3 is conservative in smearing noise points, so there will be smearing traces and noise points on the picture at the same time. When the picture is magnified to 100%, sharp "halo" marks will appear around the scene, but in general, The imaging quality of A3 is very suitable for its positioning.
For scenes with large contrast of ambient light, the HDR mode of A3 can help a lot. Some details highlighted in the picture have been found, and the overall picture still has good contrast, and the detail performance has not declined significantly (the sample below enables the HDR function).
The A3 front lens has a total number of 5 million pixels, and also supports wide-angle self portrait and gesture photography modes. The automatic beauty function is also quite practical. Under wide-angle self portrait mode, 120 ° scenery can be shot at most. However, if the phone is kept shooting vertically, there will be only 110 ° wide-angle.
The 1080p video quality recorded by A3 is also impressive. The stable 30fps frame rate and 256Kbps/48kHz stereo recording are unparalleled among mobile phones of the same level.
The detail performance of the video is quite good, and the color rendering and dynamic range are as good as the static photos. This makes us very impressed. After all, among the mobile phones of this level, 1080p video recording function is more just a simple tag, and the quality of the video recorded by A3 is at least equal to the number of 1080p.
Summary:
To be honest, the Samsung Galaxy A3 is an attractive mobile phone. Its well made metal body is small and light. This alone is enough to make the A3 stand out in its targeted market. Its comfortable grip and excellent portability are also unique to other giant screen phones.
In addition to its beautiful appearance, the A3 also has two cameras that perform very well. The 8 megapixel camera on the back is a good hand at both taking pictures and recording video. The 5 megapixel camera on the front has no pressure to deal with users' daily self taking and video chat. The front camera also supports 1080p video recording.
The weakness of A3 is also quite obvious. In 2015, a mobile phone with qHD resolution was indeed a bit outdated, but the parameters of 245ppi are not too ugly. Moreover, this screen is Samsung's unique AMOLED, providing nearly infinite contrast, excellent viewing angle and excellent sunlight visibility.
advantage:
The machine body is light and exquisite;
The performance of screen brightness, contrast and outdoor visibility is excellent;
The TouchWiz interface supporting theme function runs smoothly;
The photo and video effects are very good.
Disadvantages:
The battery has average endurance and cannot be disassembled;
The size of the dual card version is shrunk, and dual cards and memory expansion cannot be realized at the same time.
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