This right here is Samsung's Galaxy A8S it's a new phone that was released
only about a week ago in China and it is Samsung's first phone to have a hole in
the screen so it's following that new trend has a 24 megapixel front-facing
camera with an F 2.0 aperture the screen on it is not one of those really
high-end ones from Samsung so it's not an AMOLED panel or Super AMOLED it's
just an IPS and overall it's a above-average screen when I compare it
to the likes of say the u-20 that I just reviewed this phone right here is
powered by the Snapdragon 710 that's a mid-range chipset my version has 6
gigabytes of RAM in 128 gigabytes of storage non expandable so let's take a
look at what you get in the box you get a type C 2 USB cable in white you get
some earphones say the budget kind of cheaper ones but it does have a remote
on it at least so you can control the audio through that and then we get a
Qualcomm quick charge to charges so it's 9 volts max it's not the 12 volts 1.5
amps that you normally get with Qualcomm quick charge 3 which the chipset
supports then we get a sim tool and also a case that case has another TPU clear
style one so it covers all the buttons protects the camera and overall it will
do the job as your first case straight out of the box so the rear of the phone
is made of glass it is very slippery that's probably why they included that
case in the box there we've got a rear fingerprint reader a dual tone single
tone LED flash actually I thought it was jewel but on closer inspection it seems
to only have just the single flash in there and a three camera set up on the
rear so we have the main sensor which is 24 that's the one with a blue around it
and then the one at the top is the 10 megapixel sensor up the top of the phone
you'll find the dual antenna Lions the frame the housing around it feels a lot
and looks a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S a the Samsung Galaxy S 9 it's this the
same kind of DNA they're sharing they're the same style and there's of course a
secondary mic they're used for noise cancellation on the right hand side you
will find the volume up and down and power buttons they are made of metal and
they have a good feel to them and they also do not rattle around on the left
side al Juhl nano SIM tray it does have a rubber gasket around it and then a
button that is to Bixby and then along the bottom you
can see the two antenna lines a single loudspeakers so the earpiece does not
house a secondary loudspeaker in it it doesn't have that function the type C
port and then our main microphone so this is why Samsung included the type C
headphones because there is no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack on this sadly
now with a keen eye you would have noticed that the white isn't quite
uniform here around the top of the bezels and most importantly around that
camera too you'll notice that it's not perfect it's not a perfect white and
when you have a solid color you will see the difference there that it has this
shadow around it so it's slightly darker around the edges and it's just not
uniformed but it's not as bad as for example the view Twenties screen as you
can see here so on the right of the screen that is the a8 s and now we have
the honor of u-20 on the left you can see it's even worse and we get an added
a little bit of light leakage right on that corner just there you can see where
it's extra bright and you can clearly see here the difference in the bezels so
again on the left it's the view 20 and the samsung galaxy a8 s is on the right
of the screen with a larger top bezel and the border that is around that front
facing camera is also quite a bit larger there so to me overall this build
quality is very good it's in fact better than the on up view 20 this one here
just a little bit more refined the II just feel a little bit better in hand
yes it as a slippery phone and I'm pretty sure it's gonna be very fragile
too with that glass on the rear so you should use that case really when you get
it straight away out of the box to save yourself from any damage
now the screen has larger bezels as I pointed out versus the view 20 when you
have a look at them side-by-side you can clearly see that the view 20 there yes
it does have slightly smaller bezels but the better screen overall is actually
the Samsung's here and I'm probably not a surprise to people but Venus ants on
screen it would be a little bit better slightly brighter it's about a hundred
Lux brighter at 530 versus the 430 approximately that you get on the honour
view 20 the gamma is also much better here it's about 2.2 which is almost
spot-on maybe 2.1 but that is really good it's
an IPS panel so it doesn't quite look as good of course as the premium
out there which will have deeper blacks but the blacks on this as you can see
what I'm looking at and even what has been displayed on the video watching
they are quite deep so this is good there's another positive of the screen
so over I feel it's not a bad screen that have gone with yes it does have a
little bit of that and uniformed color distribution with the whites with solid
colors just around you can see there and then of course as I pointed out around
the camera but besides that it's really not a bad screen at all and a good
brightness of that 530 Lux under display settings you will also find this which I
particularly like this is the screen zoom so you can change the scaling and
the font size to your own personal preference it's good to see a lot of
manufacturers are now including this option because we have many phones you
just never had this choice at the time of my review here the phone is shipping
with Android 8.1 I was really hoping that this was going to have Android 9
I'm pretty sure it was advertised having Android Pi it has a security patch level
of December the first so it's only a month out or so so that's not bad at all
it also comes with very few bloatware apps just this right here and a lot of
people probably won't even consider this as bloat so that's it which is really
good considering most of the Chinese phones I review they are crammed packed
full of so many extras you have to uninstall but not here so I've got a
slightly different icon set here the way they've got it looking the UI and I'm
not to go into a lot of detail you've got Samsung's Galaxy sorry Samsung's
knocks on here Bixby their AI assistant Samsung pay you've got all that sort of
stuff on there if you like it that's all been covered by many other people in so
much detail don't really need to go into that what matters to me and probably you
to its performance does it perform well well not really
it's very average that performance here and this kind of surprised me because
I've used other phones with the Snapdragon 710 and I found them to be ok
but this seems to just need a little bit more tweaking optimization I've got the
60 gigabytes of RAM version so with 8 gigabytes that may perhaps be a little
bit smoother but you'll notice here even recent apps it's just not as smooth as
it should be it's running below at times 30 frames per second you just see a
little bit of animation stutters here and there when you're going through your
multitasking when you're exiting outer apps it's not as fluid
as it should be for this chipset I know it's not a high-end chipset we're
reaching its limits here when you do push it really heavy you will see that
and even sometimes when I was installing an app at the same time and also using
the keyboard I'm using Google's G board at the moment I even noticed some lag
with that which was really disappointing to see that should not be happening so
your answer to a score that comes out as expected for this chipset perfectly fine
there and same goes for the internal storage space these are very good
actually almost 500 reads and 200 write sequential and both the random reads and
writes are also very good now GPS works ok the reason why I say ok
is I did notice so when I was moving around that the accuracy would often
jump up to 6 7 and even 9 meters and it wouldn't use all of the satellites that
were around now most mobile phones will not lock on to every single satellite
but this one just compared to other phones seems to use a lot less and
doesn't seem quite as accurate as it could or should be Wireless speeds and
the range no issues here it's performing as it should it's quick the wireless and
also the range is very good no problems with that
you might have just seen when I swiped as well look at that animation stutter
that is actually pretty slow when it was doing that now it's better but it is
something that you'll see often with this phone is just that random sort of
lag and stutter and these are the LTE speeds there so 21 up and down it all
depends of course on your carrier but no issues using this phone here in Spain
good reception this phone also has Google's Widevine level one so this
means Netflix will run in resolutions over standard definition so this is good
now I've been using the phone and plugging it in and that keeps resetting
my battery stats of course but it is looking very good and my testing I've
been able to do for example one hour of Netflix or Amazon Prime streaming or
YouTube and you're only losing about 8% battery life so just looking very good
that's looking like you'd be able to get at least over 10 hours of on-screen time
with us which is great now to fully charge this battery which is the 3400
milliamp hour battery you're looking at just over two and a half hours I mean
it's not the fastest but it's still fine the kind of speeds we are getting now to
demonstrate the face unlocking which is fast
but not as fast as other phones I'll just quickly demonstrate see how long
that took so that was about a second or so it's not bad sometimes it can be a
little slow it all depends on I guess the lighting conditions or things like
that so overall the performance of it is good that's decent it's just not gonna
be the fastest out there the same goes for the fingerprint reader so the
fingerprint reader on the rear here you need to just touch it and it's always on
then it unlocks that only takes about a sick and so that is very quick which is
great it's a deal I just touched it and it was one second or under one second so
about half a second audio quality so no 3.5 millimeter headphone jack so
for some people that's going to be a deal-breaker but you can use bluetooth
there's a way around it they do have that included headset in there now the
voice call quality I find to be excellent it's good no problems with it
whatsoever so that is fine now we've only got that single loudspeaker sadly
this does not double as a loudspeaker which I feel is a bit of an error they
could have made that a secondary loudspeaker but they decided not to for
whatever reason cost saving probably now the speaker output from the downwards
firing speaker here it's fine I wish it was a little louder but overall I think
depending on the content you're looking at the loudness is gonna be okay but
here's that sample
so gaming performance we know the Snapdragon 710 is not a high-end
flagship chipset it's a mid-range er but it's not a bad one the GPU has got
enough power to run all your latest games with fluid frame rates and they're
all gonna be playable you can have no issues there so this is pub key on the
high frame rate setting the HD setting let's see how it runs motors to get a
couple of kills without any issues and the frame rate is keeping up that you
see a few little stutters and some occasional little lag as you expect but
with the HD setting the high frame rate you can see that it is quite fluid it's
smooth and well you can see a bit of lag just then see that little bit of starter
comes into play but overall this is very playable you could of course lower the
settings if you're concerned about that lag and of course how could I not
mention this look at this big massive border we get on the left-hand side
because of the camera now this seems to happen with just some games some games
will fully stretch out but a lot of content it will do this so this is
something that Samsung is going to have to address with software I'm sure they
can just stretch it right out like everyone else does
or perhaps because this phone currently is not supported by pub key looking now
the stock camera app so this is pretty straightforward it's exactly like other
Samsung phones it's very similar to my samsung galaxy s 9 plus that I have is
my main phone but we've got this edit option here so that's similar to when
you swap over to the two x lens on the samsung galaxy s line plus but they've
just done it differently with the icon there so you're showing you got like a
wide shot then the one that goes in so it's a two time zoom it's using that 10
megapixel lens and then I start off if you've seen x 2 and then you are able to
go and just zoom right up if you want to now swiping up or down on the screen
you've got all the different modes here so you've got the beauty modes and
you've got life focus with the blurred backgrounds that you can change after
you've already taken the shot pro mode not a lot of settings in here at all so
we just got white balance and then ISO ISO goes only up to 800 now I find the
cameras on this phone to be a little disappointing the focus on the rear
camera is very hit and miss of reminds me of the old Xiaomi phones they
should have gone with a sensor I feel with dual-pixel phase detection and not
just phase detection but anyway here are some samples from the camera
here's a sample from the front-facing camera so we get a fixed focus here
there's no autofocus on it a little bit of a crop in fact no no crop really with
this it can shoot in an odd resolution with the screens 19 by 9 aspect ratio
something like twenty thirty eight by ten eighty eight max res and you can see
that there is no electronic image stabilization with the front-facing
camera so it's gonna be a little bit rocky the audio quality I find to be
good and the image quality as well as good it's fine I don't really have too
many complaints to find it it's okay it's not too soft it's not too sharp and
having the fixed focus means we don't have that focus issue with it pulsing in
and out like I do with my Galaxy S nine plus there's video now with the a8 s and
you can see it does not have any electronic or optical image
stabilization in 4k if you turn on 1080p then it is smoothed out quite nicely it
does an okay job you will notice that the focus I have been having issues with
it that it hasn't really been that good it can be very slow so it's not there we
go it's locked under my hand now and sometimes it can be off like now and
there we go it's got it again and overall pretty disappointing quality
here if only they could really enable that electronic image stabilization here
with 4k would make it a lot more usable they Mike's the whatever the mic slave
feel is acceptable it's fine it's not bad and overall if you use a Steadicam
or a gimbal or something like that then you can get usable 4k quality from this
it's just that focus at times does annoy me and this at the front-facing camera
in low lights you can see it gets a lot more grain and the frame rate seems to
be okay the viewfinder that when you are using the front-facing camera gets a
huge amount of lag because it's constantly always trying to brighten
things up low light not amazing quality we're seeing a lot more green as
expected this is very challenging conditions for any smartphone camera at
least the frame rate is keeping up there okay guys so we have a very decent build
on this it feels premium in hand it's very similar to say the Samsung Galaxy
s8 the build quality so good there the screen is not perfect it's an average
screen it has IPs and they've made some compromises really I feel with it and
with the hole that they've put in there hopefully when we have the flagships
we're going to have a much better screen than this one but of course those ones
from Samsung we'll be using their Super AMOLED panels
so the front-facing camera can produce in okay photo you get the portrait
photos and things like that and overall it as good the face
unlocking is fast for the most part just like the fingerprint unlocking very
quick there it's running Android 8.1 it's not the latest version of Android
and it doesn't have the latest security patch either so hopefully Samsung is
going to up their game with that and release some new patches bring us up to
Android Pi but also effects and improve the performance of this which I find
truly to be super disappointing on this because I have used snapdragon 17 mobile
phones before this one is running choppy you run into lag and I've even seen as
far as lag with input when you're typing so I want to put something in and Google
search and I was installing something at the same time there was a noticeable lag
everything sort of froze up for a second and then the text all appeared again and
that to me is completely unacceptable considering the price of this here the
camera quality is also a letdown and will often over expose on the rears you
sing with my photo of the camera what the sorry the clock tower there from the
cameras that it overexposed it a little bit there the focus can be all over the
place it has very poor focus Samsung in my opinion should have gone with one of
their 12 megapixel dual pixel phase detection autofocus cameras this one has
only phase detection autofocus and very hit and miss and video it can be a real
pain the video quality so we don't have in 4k any electronic image stabilisation
the microphone quality is definitely good it's fine it's a lot better than
the likes of the honor view xx that I have only just recently reviewed but I
feel that if you're going to be spinning the same kind of amount of money that
both of these phones cost that you probably want to go for the view xx pro
so make sure you check out my review of that one which is right up here and let
me know down in the comments what do you prefer do you prefer a tear drop notch a
wide notch normal not CH or do you think that this is the way to go with the hole
in the screen that we're starting to see now should we have more phones with
holes in the screen is this the best option or do you think pop-up cameras or
sliders is the way to go let us know in the comments and thank you so much for
watching this review bye for now