Samsung Galaxy A71 Prices & Plans

Samsung Galaxy A71 Review

Before diving into the details in this review, I want to begin with a honest question for the good folks at Samsung: how in the world do you expect to sell $2,000 smartphones when your $700 phones are this good?

This question has been rattling about in my brain meat for the entire time I've spent with the Galaxy A71. Every time I took a great photo or every night I went to bed with over 50% battery remaining, I wondered, why would anyone need to spend more on a smartphone? And this just six-months after being so underwhelmed by the Galaxy S20 Ultra.

The A71 is a smartphone that exemplifies the state of the smartphone market in 2020. The premium tier models are now overstuffed with marketable guff, like Space Zoom and folding screens, but in the real world most us of just want the basics executed really well. We want a fast phone to do phone things, a decent camera in our pocket and enough battery life to not worry about going without power. This perfectly describes the A71.

On paper, there are significant differences between the Galaxy A71 and the more popular Galaxy S20. For starters, the Galaxy S20 has Samsung's best screen, a 6.2-inch 1440 x 3200 pixel Dynamic AMOLED screen -- and it's gorgeous. The A71 has a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED panel with two million fewer pixels (1080 x 2400), and you know what? It's gorgeous too. The colours are rich and the text is crisp, and you'd need superhuman eyesight to really tell the difference.

When it comes to processing power, you absolutely can tell the difference. Not that the A71 is unusably slow, it is just noticeably slower. The Qualcomm 730 chipset does a great job, but launching some apps can take a moment, the Chrome web browser was a regular example, and I found that the camera took a moment to warm up before it could handle quick-fire photo taking.

Beyond these momentary periods of lag, the A71 handled all tasks thrown at it. Music, podcasts, video streaming and gaming.

There are two areas of this phone where Samsung goes big: it's four lens camera array and the 4,500mAh capacity, and both are great reasons to buy this phone. The battery life is particularly impressive given it is better than the S20 both on paper and in daily use.

The 4,500mAh battery is one of the biggest batteries you can buy in a phone at this time and it's 500mAh larger than the unit in the S20. The thing is, the A71 also has fewer power vampires than the S20 and as a result we routinely enjoyed up to two days battery between charges. In terms of actual screen-on use, we often saw between eight and nine hours per charge.

It's worth pointing out here that if you're considering buy the A71 5G, your battery life experience could vary from our 4G only review unit. Not only does the 5G variant of the A71 have the extra, battery-draining networking feature, but it also runs on Samsung's Exynos processor, which may or may not impact the battery in ways different from our experience. 

The four lenses on this phone may seem like overkill, but the results speak for themselves. The primary camera is a 64MP sensor with phase-detection autofocus. It is paired with a 12MP ultra-wide angle lens, a 5MP macro lens and a second 5MP sensor for depth measurements.

In practice this all translates into really solid photos when shooting at up to 2x zoom, or when using the ultrawide lens. Beyond 2x and the results are less impressive when the digital zoom becomes a lot more noticeable.

What was most interesting to me was how much easier it was to take photos with the A71 compared with the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Though blessed with 100x Space Zoom (and at three-times the price) the Ultra was plagued by auto-focus issues, which drove me crazy. The A71 keeps things simple and is a far more reliable camera as a

Samsung Galaxy A71 - Camera Samples

But for all of the things we love about the A71, it is hard to overlook the fact that this is also a pretty boring smartphone.  It looks and feels a lot like the Galaxy S10+ in its size and style. Which itself looked and felt a lot like the Galaxy S9 from the year before.

The A71 is also held back slightly by Samsung's sub-par biometric security. I have both face and fingerprints set up to unlock the phone and I still enter my PIN more often than I should have to. And for some strange reason, you can only enter three fingerprints.

Samsung Galaxy A71 - Final Thoughts

It may not be the world's most exciting smartphone, but the A71 is one of Samsung's best handsets of the year. While the S20 and Note 20 both struggle to justify their eye-watering price tags, the Galaxy A71 feels just right. It has all of the bits a good smartphone should have, at a price that doesn't exclude phone lovers the way a $2,000 phone might.

Though the strongest competition for the A71 isn't from more expensive Samsung handsets, but from other outstanding mid-range handsets -- namely the excellent Google Pixel 4a. These phones have a lot in common; they share the same Qualcomm processor and have equal storage and RAM. But what sets the Google Pixel 4a apart from most other phones is Google's class-leading photographic AI. The Samsung has a larger screen, zoom camera lenses and better battery life. Both are very worthy phones to consider. You can check out our Pixel 4a review here.