Samsung Galaxy A70 review

All the right specs in all the right places

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Image Credit: TechRadar

Image Credit: TechRadar

Performance

Galaxy A70 is a departure from Samsung’s own Exynos series of processors for the Galaxy A series. The A70 adopts Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 chipset with an octa-core CPU. 

Two Kryo 460 Gold perfromance cores are clocked at 2.0GHz and six power-efficient Kryo 460 Silver cores are clocked at 1.7GHz. The chipset is fabricated using the 11nm FinFET architecture process. For the graphics side of things, the A70 has Adreno 612 GPU at its disposal.

This is paired with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage with an option to further expand the storage by upto 512GB via microSD card.

We ran a bunch of benchmarks and the Galaxy A70 scores 2054 points on Geekbench single-core tests and 6326 points on the multi-core performance. In addition, AnTuTu awarded it 167284 points in its CPU, GPU, UX and memory tests.

In day-to-day perfromance, the Galaxy A70 is simply able to run everything we throw at it and feels slick in regular use. The Galaxy A70 is able to handle day-to-day tasks ranging from web browsing to playing games with ease.

We played several rounds of PUBG Mobile on the phone at HD graphics and high frame rate, and the gameplay was surprisingly smooth. The large display compliments gaming experience further but the phone can get warm after playing on it for long.

Samsung Galaxy A70 runs on Android 9.0 Pie based OneUI 1.1. The interface is designed keeping in mind one-handed usage, hence elements in the notification panel are positioned at the bottom and cover around 60% of the screen only, while the date and time is displayed on the top. Apps like Messages and Settings menu have also undergone similar changes.

Swiping left from the homescreen brings up the Bixby glance screen which has widgets like app suggestions from Galaxy Store, news sourced from UC news, popular Youtube videos, schedules and weather information, all on a single page. The phone comes pre-loaded with apps like Netflix, Microsoft Office Mobile, OneDrive, Amazon, Daily hunt and Prime Video among others.

We think the OneUI is a step in the right direction but it still needs a lot of tuning. Otherwise, the general perfromance of the A70 is great for most people.

Battery life

Samsung Galaxy A70 is powered by a huge 4,500mAh battery which supports 25W fast charging, a first for the company. The Super Fast Charging adapter is packaged in-the-box which is an added plus. 

As a part of our tests, we drained the phone out of battery and it was able to recharge from 0% to 100% in around 2.5 hours.

Rest assured, the phone will likely last for a day and a half, maybe more if you’re a casual user.

Image Credit: TechRadar

Image Credit: TechRadar

Verdict

With all that power under the hood, the Samsung Galaxy A70 is perhaps the perfectly balanced phone. It doesn’t go overboard with too much power and has a set of decent cameras, not to mention its luminous design. It is a solid mid-range smartphone with the right specs in the right places.

Using the phone daily is a breeze as it zooms past the tasks allotted by users and remains ready to go, always. You can depend on it to a certain extent, more so than every other phone in the A series and as we mentioned earlier, it is one of the best phones to consume videos on.

Certainly, there’s so much to improve here and Samsung could have done more in the camera department as well as in optimizing the interface, but the A70 remains a great phone, albeit with some chinks in its armour.

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