Samsung Galaxy A71: an awesome flagship preview for consumers

Hear me out. Samsung Galaxy A71 is not a flagship smartphone, but it gives consumers a preview of how a flagship device performs.

If you give it a closer look, Galaxy A71 shares a lot of its look with the Samsung Galaxy S20 especially its rectangular quad-cam setup at the back and its Infinity-O sAMOLED display.

Galaxy A71 would pass as “Galaxy S20e” in terms of design. It shares a lot of design queues of Galaxy S20, albeit having inferior specifications. What I got is the Prism crush black colorway, and it’s interesting to see its subtle design variations.

The rhythmical pattern of its smooth backplate looks stunning, and it oozes a different kind of elegance when light touches on its surface. Impressive.

Awesome Screen

One of the best things about the Galaxy A71 is its massive 6.7-inch FHD+ Super AMOLED Plus Infinity-O Display. I know it’s a mouthful, but Samsung has the knack of putting a flashy mix of nouns on their products. I digress.

This display provides a lot of benefits for consumers. The display works fine under direct sunlight. Colors look really punchy and the amount of detail you can see is just overwhelming. You can never go wrong with Samsung when it comes to sAMOLED, not because they first coined the term for its AMOLED displays with integrated digitizer but they have been using the same display technology for many years.

The punch hole “notch” grew on me. I may be biased here, but for someone who have been using Galaxy S10+, Note 10+ and S20 Ultra, that hole has become a non-issue for me. Slap a wallpaper and you’ll barely notice it. While watching Netflix or YouTube, you have the option to maximize the display to where the “hole” is

Midrange Level Performance

Samsung Galaxy A71 performs as expected from a midrange device. It managed to go beyond 250K in Antutu, but still didn’t get to pass Nova 5T’s over 300K score. For reference, you can check the results of our other synthetic benchmarks including storage speed.

In terms of real-world performance, Galaxy A71 worked pretty great! Despite having lower synthetic benchmark score, it performed like, if not better, than the Xiaomi Mi9T and Nova 5T.

This device is also good for gaming. I played a few rounds of Call of Duty Mobile, Black Desert and PUBG Mobile and the device worked out pretty well with zero to minimal lags at low to medium settings. High frame rate works at 60fps at some extent, but usually goes around 53-57fps average using GameBench.

If you want to know the full sweep of its specs, you can check it out below:

Samsung Galaxy A71 Specifications:

• 6.7 inches Super AMOLED Plus capacitive touchscreen, Corning Gorilla Glass 3
• Qualcomm SDM730 Snapdragon 730G (8 nm)
• Adreno 618
• 8GB RAM
• 128GB, UFS 2.1
• Non-removable Li-Po 4500 mAh battery
• Prism, Crush Black, Silver, Blue, Pink

One UI 2 makes this phone even better to use

Galaxy A71 runs on the latest Android version with One UI 2. This is one of the first midrange devices by Samsung that has this UI, which adds a lot of functions on the smartphone. From system-wide Dark Mode to new camera capabilities, One UI 2 simply makes the Galaxy A71 a better smartphone.

If you’re someone like me who experienced the now-defunct TouchWiz, you’ll definitely love the new UI. It flexes the device’s capability even further without any sacrifice in user experience.

Laudable Camera Performance

Samsung has always displayed its competence when it comes to camera performance. They continued their consistent streak with the Galaxy A71. What I don’t like though is its supersized photo watermark as seen in some photos below.

Everything worked and in order insofar as the quad cameras are concerned. From its wide lens down to its 5MP depth sensor, the photos it produced using the rear camera look really nice and impressive. I find it typical for Samsung smartphones to produce overly saturated photos, but not this time.

The same goes for its 32MP front camera. Honestly, I don’t see any point of putting a 32MP camera in front unless you’re someone who uses it as much as you use the rear camera. At this time of Instagram Stories, Snapchat and Tiktok, the demand for having good front camera matters.

Check out the sample photos I took using the quad rear and front cameras.

Battery Life

One of the good things about Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G is its battery-saving features without sacrifice in performance. For a single charge of its 4,500mAh battery, it took us 16 hours of medium usage time. This includes all-day connection via 4G with low to medium use of social media, occasional gaming, 2-3 episodes of The Good Place series and several photo and video captures.

Our Verdict

Samsung Galaxy A71 has features that preview what the flagship devices of Samsung can do. Consumers don’t usually have the means to quickly jump the gun and buy a flagship device right away. Settling with a device that manages to give them a glimpse of how a flagship performs usually works best.

Noteworthy features include the performance of its complete array of cameras, battery performance, clean but functional UI and outstanding sound. It is, however, not perfect. For one, the slightly higher price may not be as “reachable” as other smartphones from other brands, and the “glasstic” build isn’t something that most people prefer.

Giancarlo Viterbo

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Giancarlo Viterbo is a Filipino Technology Journalist, blogger and Editor of gadgetpilipinas.net, He is also a Geek, Dad and a Husband. He knows a lot about washing the dishes, doing some errands and following instructions from his boss on his day job. Follow him on twitter: @gianviterbo and @gadgetpilipinas.