Samsung Galaxy A70 review

All the right specs in all the right places

TechRadar Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy A70 has a bright and vivid display which makes it one of the best phones for multimedia coupled with a humongous battery that lasts longer than ever. Users looking for a neatly balanced phone, the A70 is where you should be looking at.

Pros

  • +

    Superior perfromance

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    Long lasting battery

  • +

    Luminous back panel

  • +

    Great display for watching videos

Cons

  • -

    Average cameras

  • -

    OneUI needs further optimizations

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Samsung’s sixth phone in its refreshed Galaxy A series, the Galaxy A70 is aimed at millennials according to the company. The phone features one of the biggest display by Samsung and has a huge battery to back it up.

While the Galaxy A50 was strictly a mid-range smartphone and a step in the right direction, the A70 takes the fight to more premium phones like the Vivo V15 Pro, Oppo F11 Pro, POCO F1 and Nokia 8.1 among others.

Having said that, does the Galaxy A70 come with enough firepower to take on the slightly more premium phones, we find out.

Samsung Galaxy A70 price and availability

Samsung Galaxy A70 has been priced at Rs 28,990 with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage which can be expanded by upto 512GB via microSD card.

The phone is available to purchase from Samsung India Store, Amazon India and brick and mortar stores across India.

Image Credit: TechRadar

Image Credit: TechRadar

Design

Right off the box, the A70 looks eerily similar to its younger cousin, Galaxy A50. It’s got a plastic build which feels very polished and curves towards the sides allowing for a better grip. Due to the reflective nature of the back panel, it produces a rainbow colour pattern whenever light falls on it from different angles. 

On the downside though, the back is easily susceptible to scratches, lint and fingerprints. Users will definitely have a hard time keeping the back clear at all times. Samsung does bundle a cover in-the-box but that takes away all the allure the A70 has to offer. You'll be able to pick from one of four colors for the Galaxy A70: black, blue, pink and white.

The A70 has a u-shaped notched display which allows narrow bezels, especially at the chin. In fact, the A70 has a narrower bottom bezel than any phone in the Galaxy A series but it is still pretty noticeable.

It weighs around 183 grams and is 7.9mm at its thickest point making relatively easy to hold in one hand and isn't overly heavy. The USB-C and a 3.5mm headphone jack are positioned at the bottom joined by power and volume buttons on the right edge.

On the back, the vertical triple camera module is positioned on the top-left corner with an LED flash below. There’s a Samsung logo in the center which gives away different hues when light strikes it.

Overall, the phone is very solid to hold in hand and is quite sleek at that. However, the glossy back panel takes the limelight here as it makes the phone stand out in the crowd.

Display

Samsung Galaxy A70 uses a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED panel which is tall and vivid with a Full HD+ (2400 x 1080 pixels) resolution. The screen has a u-shaped cutout for the selfie camera housing which gives it a 20:9 aspect ratio.

The display on the A70 can get really bright with vibrant colour reproduction and deep blacks. The size of the screen makes it one of the better phones to consume videos or binge-watch the latest show on Netflix.

If one notices closely, some of the UI elements often seem like softening down on details around the edges. That’s due to the Full HD+ resolution of the screen at 6.7-inch and while Samsung could have gone for a higher resolution, it would have drastically increased the cost of the phone. Additionally, the on-screen fingerprint sensor isn’t as fast as a physical sensor which is why it can take a bit of time for the sensor to register the print.

After using the phone for a while, we can easily say it is one of the best phones to watch videos and movies on. The colours just pop-out with good contrast and saturation.

Cameras

Samsung Galaxy A70 comes with three rear cameras, consisting of a main 32MP (f/1.7) snapper, an 8MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide angle camera with 123-degree lens and a 5MP (f/2.2) depth camera for portrait mode.

On the front, selfie fans will be happy with the 32MP (f/2.0) front-facing camera.

Through our tests, the camera received an update which improves the image quality and adds beauty mode in videos taken from rear camera.

The A70 performs great in daylight but the same can't be said when the sun goes down. It picks up finer details along with textures in optimally lit environments. The colours feel natural and accurate to the scene with balanced dynamic ratio. 

At night, it requires a couple of tries to get the right exposure along with hand stability to get a good picture. One of the major problems with the camera app on the Galaxy A70 is just how hard it is to focus on a particular object and the time it takes to capture a frame even after having tapped the shutter button. This is something that can be fixed by a software upgrade and we hope Samsung looks into it. 

Other than that, pictures taken in low light were grainy and lacked details. They look over-processed with blown out highlights. Our daylight shots were full of detail, identifiable texture, accurate colours and contrast. 

Samsung's Live Focus mode – which produces blurred background portrait shots – uses both the 32MP camera and 5MP depth sensor to produce photos which look pretty good, although the edges between focused foreground and out-of-focus background aren't sharp.

The ultra-wide camera is easy to switch to within the camera app and provides you with a field of view greater than the human eye, allowing you to capture more of your surroundings, including some that you won't catch in your peripheral vision. However, it is one of the other areas where the company needs to work on. The wide-angle camera is a hit or a miss situation and more often than not, the images lack details towards the edges.

The snaps we took with the Galaxy A70 during our short time with it looked acceptable for a mid-range device but we are certain that if Samsung dedicates some of its time to optimize the cameras on the phone a bit more, could elevate the phone's standing in the price bracket.

Siddharth Chauhan
Siddharth Chauhan is the Consumer Technology Reporter at Digit India. He used to work as an Assistant Editor at TechRadar India