Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016) review: The S6 Mini in disguise

The Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016) is a budget smartphone with a premium look. With a metal frame, Samsung gave its customers the same high-end feel as its Galaxy S line, without them having to burn a hole in their pockets.

With such a beautiful design, the Galaxy A3 2016 could even be mistaken for a miniature Galaxy S6. It’s stunning to look at with its smooth glass rear, slim bezels, that both combine with its thickness to produce a fantastic phone to hold.

Better still, since we reviewed it, it has dropped in price – dropping from £269 to under £200, making it an even more appealing pruchase.

That beauty does come at a higher price this year, though, as its current SIM-free price of £269 is a long way from the initial £225 you had to pay for its plastic-backed forebear. In fact, it’s even more expensive than the OnePlus 2, which has a large 5.5in display and considerably faster components thanks to its top-end spec. Not everyone wants a massive smartphone, of course, but even the OnePlus X, which is a similar size to the 4.7in Galaxy A3 2016 and offers a similarly luxurious kind of build quality, only costs £199.

Performance

The A3 2016’s got some pretty tough competition, then, but it’s not a complete right-off before it’s even got out of the gate. In fact, the A3 2016’s quad-core 1.5GHz Exynos 7580 chip and 1.5GB of RAM put up a surprisingly good fight against the OnePlus X’s old Snapdragon 801 processor and 3GB of RAM, as our benchmark results weren’t as far apart as you might expect.

If anything, the A3’s Exynos chip is more akin to Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 615 chip, as its single core Geekbench 3 result of 701 puts it on a level playing field with the Moto X Play and Sony Xperia M4 Aqua. This is about 200 points slower than the OnePlus X, but Android 5.1.1 still felt lovely and smooth on the new A3 when flicking through its various menu screens.

The A3 also fell behind in the multicore test, but its score of 2,143 (up from 1,418 on last year’s A3) was still only 300 points behind the X. This is pretty good going considering the X’s Snapdragon 801 runs at a much faster clock speed of 2.3GHz, and in day-to-day use you’d be hard-pushed to see much of a difference.

Likewise, the A3’s web browsing Peacekeeper score of 677 was within 100 points of the OnePlus X, and it proved very capable indeed when it came to handling media-heavy web pages. Scrolling could still be a little stop-start in places, particularly while pages were loading, but its smooth touchscreen felt very responsive once everything was ready to view.

The only area where it really loses out to the OnePlus X is its gaming performance, as its rather pitiful 254 frames (around 4.1fps) in the offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test in GFX Bench GL isn’t that much better than an entry-level smartphone with a Snapdragon 410 inside it. It’s still perfectly adequate for simple games like Threes! but anyone looking to play more graphically-complex titles like Hearthstone should probably look elsewhere, as a quick round of Blizzard’s card-trading game ended up being just a bit too juddery for my liking.

Battery Life

The A3 pulls it back when it comes to battery life, though, as it lasted a very impressive 14h 48m in our continuous video playback test with the screen set to our usual brightness setting of 170cd/m2. This is one of the best battery lives I’ve seen from a mid-range handset, as it beats the OnePlus X by almost two hours. It’s also nearly four hours more than the OnePlus 2, making the 2016 A3 more reliable over the course of a day.

Display

Its impressive stamina is partly thanks to a 4.7in, 1,280×720 Super AMOLED display, which is more energy efficient than traditional LCD panels. As with all of Samsung’s Super AMOLED screens, each pixel is individually backlit, which means there’s essentially no power drain when they’re displaying black. It arguably produces better-looking images than typiacl LCDs, as blacks are truly pitch perfect at 0.00cd/m2 and its colour reproduction stretches across the whole 100% of the sRGB colour space. Contrast is also absurdly high on the A3, which allows plenty of detail to shine through in darker shadow areas.

It all makes for a beautiful display, and it really makes the A3 stand out compared to other mid-range phones with LCD displays. Admittedly, the A3 isn’t quite as bright as other LCD screens, though my measurement of 410cd/m2 is still much higher than what I’d normally expect to see from this kind of panel. Sadly, it doesn’t have any kind of dynamic outdoor brightness mode that pushes it beyond this figure like the Galaxy S7, but even 410cd/m2 is still perfectly usable outside.

Camera

You won’t be disappointed with the A3 2016’s 13-megapixel camera, either. While detail levels tend to veer off towards the corners of the frame, it still produced bright, vibrant images when shooting outdoors, and almost everything looked sharp and crisp. The sky was a little overexposed when shooting in Auto mode, but switching to HDR quickly sorted this out, bringing back plenty of contrast and cloud shadow detail.

Indoors, the A3 can sometimes struggle to bring everything in focus, so you’ll need to be patient with its rather lethargic autofocus speed. However, you should still be able to produce some decent shots in low light, as evidenced by my test shots below. With no additional lighting, our still life arrangement was a little soft in places, but colours still looked natural and there was hardly any noise present whatsoever.

Things improved dramatically when I turned on the flash or our external studio lights, though, so you’ll want to make sure you have as much natural light as possible in order to produce the best pictures. In these circumstances, there was a lot more detail and contrast on show, and every object was that much sharper round the edge.

Conclusion

When you come down to cold, hard numbers, there’s no denying the OnePlus X is better value for money overall. While I’m not a great fan of the X’s overly-textured and rather scratchy metal frame, the draw of Cyanogen OS (which looks identical to vanilla Android) and a 5in, Full HD AMOLED display is hard to resist, particularly if, like me, you’re not a great fan of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface.

That said, if you’re not really bothered by which version of Android you have and you’ve been desperately waiting for Samsung’s next, true ‘mini’ phone, then you really can’t get much better than the Galaxy A3 2016. It may be a little expensive right now, but that’s sure to change with time, especially when Samsung products are renowned for falling in price not long after launch. While the OnePlus X is probably the phone you should be buying at this kind of price, the Galaxy A3 2016 is the one you’ll want to have in your pocket.

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