Samsung A3 Smartphone
Samsung A3 Smartphone from Various Suppliers at £99.00 – £250.00
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The Promise
The A3 is Samsung’s mid-range smartphone for budget conscious purchasers who want a sleek, high quality phone without being able to afford the rather higher prices of the top range, signature products.
What We Found
One of our testers was looking for a new phone for his rather fussy teenage daughter. He offered to review the phone, planning on purchasing one for his daughter if it seemed to be a good deal. He took it home and spent about twenty minutes accustoming himself to the phone.
One rather confusing moment was when he realised that the slender phone does not have a removable battery and that there is no way to access the phones insides as with every other phone he has owned before.
Instead, the SIM card and Micro SD card fit into semi-concealed slots on the side of the phone. He found the settings easy to use, easily connecting the phone to his phone Wi-Fi and instructing it to automatically switch to Wi-Fi when in range so as to save his data for when he is out and about.
He downloaded some apps, accessed YouTube and Facebook and took several photographs with the camera. He found the later to be good quality when used at 1:0 ratio zoom, but rather poor when zoomed in to the fullest extent.
The zoomed in pictures were blurry and even the best shots looked fuzzy and rather as though they had been taken by someone with a shaky hand.
The battery lasted a long time, even with more or less constant use during the day, and the phone survived one or two accidents drops onto the floor, showing the basic durability of the product.
Ratings
User-Friendly: 100%
Our tester has an Android phone of his own and found this phone extremely simple to use
Features: 100%
The phone comes with everything that a purchaser might expect of a smart phone – front and rear facing cameras (the first of which even has ‘selfie’ mode which makes it easier to snap yourself without struggling to press the button), headphone jack for quiet listening or video viewing and a host of apps ready installed.
Performance: 100%
The A3 performed well in all the tasks that our tester could think to test it with: charging rapidly and lasting a long time, taking clear, high quality pictures and allowing him to upload them easily to social media and painlessly syncing his cloud-stored music and photographs.
It also offered clear sound and good reception for that rarest of smart phone usages: making a telephone call!
Value for Money: 95%
The phone is a sturdy, elegant-looking offering, slotting in comfortably below the more expensive Samsung phones, but offering many of the same features and boasting such a good look that it can pass for being a more expensive model to anyone not looking too closely.
Our tester was so pleased that he immediately procured one for his daughter, and is currently considering switching to the model himself.
