Samsung Galaxy A6

The Samsung Galaxy A6 is a budget alternative to the Samsung Galaxy S9. It’s less powerful, a little less pretty, but also costs a third of the price.

For some, the combination of a desirable family name and smart design will be enough. However, that the Moto G6 Play and Honor 9 Lite get you more in almost every area for less money is hard to ignore.

Camera smarts and display definition are the two lacking areas here. A $368, £259 (roughly AU$500) phone without Auto HDR in 2018 is disappointing, and Samsung’s OLED screens highlight the limited screen resolution more than a cheaper LCD phone.

Key features

• 18.5:9 OLED screen with low 1480 x 720 resolution
• Lacks USB-C and camera features
• 16MP cameras on both front and back

Samsung makes several phones for people who can’t afford the Galaxy S9 family of mobiles. The Samsung Galaxy A8 simply takes away some of the flashy extras, without all that much of a day-to-day compromise.

The Samsung Galaxy A6 on the other hand has a few more obvious cuts, made in order to lower the price further. It uses an 18.5:9 OLED screen, but the resolution is just 1480 x 720 pixels, for example.

It does not have USB-C charging either, sticking with dated micro USB instead. And most camera additions are absent too, like optical image stabilization (OIS), advanced processing and Auto HDR.

The compromises here are similar to those seen in the Moto G6 Play, a significantly cheaper phone. However, the core camera hardware here is a little better. The Samsung Galaxy A6 has a 16MP f/1.7 lens rear camera and a 16MP f/1.9 one for selfies.

You can get the phone in 32GB and 64GB variants, but we’re looking at the 32GB version here.

Design

• Aluminum casing
• Slim and fairly light
• Rear fingerprint scanner

Build and design are Samsung Galaxy A6 high points. They are in other recent Galaxy A-series phones too.

However, this is not a glass mobile, the preferred style for not just Samsung but every phone-maker at the moment. Its back and sides are aluminum, with thin non-metallic loops on the back for the phone’s antennas.

These loops are visually important, and stop the Samsung Galaxy A6 from becoming an ultra-plain block of metal. Toughened 2.5D glass, which is ever-so-slightly curved at the edges, sits on the front. And there’s a thin band of plastic between the metal and glass to help avoid display fracturing should you drop the phone.

Is the Samsung Galaxy A6 exciting or dynamic? Not really. However, it’s a refreshing change from glass-obsessed phones, and is also slim and light.

7.7mm thick and 70.8mm wide, the Samsung Galaxy A6 is thinner and just slightly wider than a Galaxy S9. It’s easy to handle.

There’s also a fingerprint scanner on the Samsung Galaxy A6’s back, just below the camera lens. It’s slightly too high, not particularly recessed and not all that fast. But it is reliable and looks good, all-but merged with the camera.

USB-C is the one obvious missing feature. This charger shape is often associated with fast charging, but the reversible connector is the actual benefit. Micro USB can be annoying if you charge your phone by scrambling around under a bedside table at 11:30pm to find the cable.

Micro USB can support fast charging, but this phone does not. You get a standard adaptor in the box and we didn’t see a ‘fast charge’ pop-up when we tried a Samsung Adaptive fast charger either.

Any other compromises? The Samsung Galaxy A6’s side buttons are plastic rather than metal, and its SIM tray design is less clean than Samsung’s higher-end phones.

There’s a tray for your nanoSIM and a much larger one for the microSD, with a blocked-out spot for a second SIM. This suggests the phone may have a second SIM slot in other countries.

Screen

• 1480 x 720 OLED screen
• Rich color
• Slightly fuzzy display image

The Samsung Galaxy A6 has a 5.6-inch Super AMOLED screen with an 18.5:9 shape. More of the front is taken up by screen than in mid-range phones of 2016-2017.

Some parts of the screen are very strong, others fall behind standard at the price. The strong elements are those usually associated with OLED.

Contrast is excellent and color very punchy, if you want it to be. Like other Samsung phones, you can choose between color profiles that dramatically alter the look.

The Samsung Galaxy A6’s standard mode is ‘Adaptive Display’. A screen equivalent of an energy drink, it makes color look vibrant, increases tonal contrast and uses color temperature to maximize perceived brightness.

It’s the color strategy of most higher-end phones. But, crucially, Samsung keeps it under control, so your photos don’t appear more saturated than they are when you check them out in the gallery app. Samsung is a master of OLED phone screens.

Display purists should try the other color modes: Cinema, Photo and Basic. These roughly translate to the Adobe RGB (Photo), DCI-P3 (Cinema) and sRGB (Basic) standards. All three are great. Just pick the one that makes Android look best to your eyes.

Resolution is the main issue. Like several sub-£200/$200 Androids, the Samsung Galaxy A6 has a lower-than-Full-HD screen. It’s 1480 x 720 pixels. Recently we’ve commented that lower-resolution screens like this can still look very good, but the difference is more noticeable here.

First, we have to pay more in this case. At the price, just about every other manufacturer offers a 1080p resolution.

There’s also a particular problem with the Samsung Galaxy A6’s screen type. Samsung OLEDs use a pixel structure called PenTile, where pixels share sub pixels. LCD screens don’t share sub pixels.

As a result, the Samsung Galaxy A6’s screen looks a little fuzzy, particularly when displaying small fonts. You’ll get used to the day-to-day effects of this fairly quickly, but play a game like PUBG and small player names will be hard to read.

The Samsung Galaxy A6's screen is also not as bright as Samsung’s high-end phones, and doesn’t use any dynamic techniques to improve visibility on a bright day. That said, it’s no worse than any other phone at the price in this respect.

Battery life

• No fast charging
• Efficient screen
• Solid general stamina

The Samsung Galaxy A6 has a 3,000mAh battery. This doesn’t sound too large for a phone with a 5.6-inch screen, but remember it has a relatively low display resolution, 1480 x 720 pixels.

Samsung’s OLED screens are about as efficient as you’ll find in a phone too. Playing a 90-minute video on the Galaxy A6 at maximum brightness takes just 9% off the battery.

This is even better than the 12% the Samsung Galaxy A5 from 2017 lost. But that older phone has a 1080p screen, explaining the difference.

Such a result suggests the Samsung Galaxy A6 will be an ultra-long-lasting phone. However, it’s a little more ordinary with mixed use. You’ll get a full day and change between charges, the basics of what we expect for ‘good’ battery life.

You can stream a little video, a few hours of audio and use plenty of WhatsApp without the phone running out of juice in the early evening. However, it won’t last two days with such treatment.

The Samsung Galaxy A6 also lacks some fundamentals we expect to see in a phone at the price. It uses a micro USB socket to charge, rather than USB-C, and doesn’t support fast charging.

A full charge takes around two hours, a good chunk longer than the Moto G6. There’s also, predictably, no support for wireless charging.

Camera

• Good daylight images with uncomplicated scenes
• Lacks Auto HDR, spoiling performance with high light contrast
• Okay low light images

The Samsung Galaxy A6 has great-sounding camera hardware. A 16MP sensor with an ultra-fast f/1.7 lens sits on the back, a 16MP one with an f/1.9 lens on the front. Both are Samsung sensors, the S5K2P6, a 1/2.8-inch sensor. Each sensor pixel measures 1.12 microns.

At their best these cameras can take great images for a lower-cost phone. And, as usual for a Samsung, shooting feels responsive. The Samsung Galaxy A6 is faster to shoot than a Motorola Moto G6.

However, you don’t get the shooting intelligence of Samsung’s pricier phones. At this point, some of the omissions seem as out-of-date as the phone’s low-power GPU, which we'll get to on the next page.

Auto HDR is the biggie. Most phones use HDR much of the time when we take them out for a shooting test. It reduces blown highlights and brings out shadow detail for a more pleasing photo.

The Samsung Galaxy A6 has a separate HDR mode, but just about every rival also has Auto HDR. We shouldn’t have to head to the mode menu to turn it on, and we imagine most users won’t even think to do so.

As a result, this phone struggles with scenes featuring high light contrast. This one factor more-or-less determines whether you’ll get a good shot or not. Standard scene without tricky lighting? Great shot. Bright white clouds or other stark light differences? Bad photo.

Thanks to the wide lens aperture, the Samsung Galaxy A6 camera excels with close-up nature images. It provides a nice, native shallow depth of field effect. However, there’s again another issue. Despite having phase detection, focus locking of close subjects is too slow.

Night photography is better than some in this upper-entry-level class thanks to the fast lens. However, it’s also worth bearing in mind that this wider aperture really just helps to offset the relatively small sensor pixels.

Low light photos tend to look clear enough, but are also soft and low on detail. We find the dedicated ‘Night’ mode actually tends to make your shots softer too. Auto works better much of the time.

The Galaxy A6 would be one of the better ‘affordable’ phone cameras if it had a good Auto HDR mode. It doesn’t, so it isn’t.

Our assumption is the Samsung Galaxy A6 either lacks the CPU or ISP (image signal processor) power to make HDR shooting feel fast. Shooting ‘manual’ HDRs seems to support this, as it takes a second or two per image.

There are serious CPU-related limits on video too. You can only shoot at up to 1080p, 30fps. There are no high frame rate or 4K options, and no software stabilization either. It’s just too basic.

The front camera can take great images. After all, it uses a reasonably large, high-res sensor. However, there’s far too great a disparity between images, as the slightest bit of handshake destroys fine detail. This becomes an issue when shooting indoors, even in fairly bright rooms. Only about one in five images looks entirely sharp.

You can apply background blurring with selfies. This works reasonably well, although the level of blur is set, and not that dramatic.

Camera samples

Interface

• Android 8.0
• Samsung UI
• Solid enough general performance

The Samsung Galaxy A6 runs Android 8.0 and has Samsung’s own Android interface. This is one of the best custom UIs you’ll find.

It has slick, natural-feeling transitions, is responsive and looks good. How the apps menu works is the main difference between this and the standard Android look. The app drawer is arranged into pages rather than a vertical scroll. You can even get rid of the app drawer entirely if you want.

Bixby Home is the main extra part of the interface. This is a feed of ‘cards’, showing updates from the apps installed on your Samsung Galaxy A6.

It seems fairy pointless unless you’re among the 0.2% of people who haven’t yet found ways to waste time on your phone. But it is also relatively inoffensive. Bixby Home sits to the left of your standard home screen, so doesn’t get in the way.

There are numerous pre-installed apps, including a Samsung suite and Microsoft’s office apps. Samsung Health is the one we tend to use quite a lot when reviewing Samsung phones. This is a fitness tracker app, like Google Fit or Fitbit, that also lets you log your food consumption and even caffeine intake.

The Samsung Galaxy A6 also has a ‘Secure Folder’, which lets you password protect files you don’t want anyone else to see.

On the lighter side, the UI supports themes, like most other interfaces. You have to dig around to find free ones, though. Samsung likes money: who’d have thought?

Movies and gaming

• Mixed performance in games, some bad
• Not the sharpest screen
• Loud speaker with brash treble

The Samsung Galaxy A6 is a reasonable phone for media and games, although not the best you can get for the money. A Motorola Moto G6 Plus offers a larger, sharper screen and a lot more power.

Gaming performance also varies between titles. Asphalt 8 runs very well on the Samsung Galaxy A6, but there’s an obvious unstable frame rate in Minecraft and PUBG. Tencent’s PUBG also runs at ‘Low’ graphics, showing quite how little spare power is available in this phone.

Thanks to the low-resolution PenTile screen, graphics also look less sharp and detailed than in rivals. High color saturation is a benefit for gaming, but we’d prefer better performance and higher resolution.

The same applies for movie-watching. A bigger, sharper screen is better than a smaller, more colorful one.

The speaker is loud at least, but the treble is brash, so while you'll be able to hear things comfortably through it the sound quality isn't always the best.

You have 32GB of storage here, around 22GB of which is accessible. This is a decent amount, but some phones at the same sort of price have 64GB, including the now-discounted Honor 9, Moto G6 and Moto G6 Plus. Some regions are getting a 64GB version of the Galaxy A6, but that of course will push the price up.

Performance and benchmarks

• Poor GPU
• Dated CPU

The Samsung Galaxy A6 has a Samsung Exynos 7870 chipset. It has been used in several Samsung phones including 2017’s Galaxy A3 and 2016’s Galaxy J7. This is the most expensive phone to date to use the CPU.

The Exynos 7870 is an octa-core Cortex-A53 CPU. This is the style and number of cores we expect at the price. As is the 3,530-point Geekbench 4 score. However, its GPU is weak.

It’s the single-core version of the Mali-T830. This is only a third as powerful as the Adreno 508 used by the Moto G6 Plus.

As we saw when playing games, the real-world performance varies depending on context. Asphalt 8 runs great, the GPU a good fit for the action on a lower-resolution screen. However, with games like Minecraft and PUBG, where the number of objects on screen can scale up in a half a second, it struggles.

We also imagine Gameloft may have put extra effort into optimizing Asphalt 8 for this CPU.

If the phone was cheaper this wouldn’t register as a major issue. However, several other phones at the price are much more capable.

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy A6 would be a good phone if it was cheaper. It is a stretch at the price, however. A 720p-grade screen, low-power graphics processor and dated camera processing are hard to accept.

Still, if you just want a Samsung Galaxy phone that feels quite expensive and doesn’t cost too much, the Galaxy A6 will do the trick.

While not great at more advanced tasks, its day-to-day performance is perfectly adequate.

Who's this for?

The Samsung Galaxy A6 is for people who want a Samsung Galaxy but can’t afford the Samsung Galaxy S9 or Samsung Galaxy A8.

Should you buy it?

You can get more phone for less money elsewhere, in particular from the Moto G6 family of phones. 

The Galaxy A6 is a tough sell unless you are set on owning a Samsung Galaxy. It can handle the basics well, but we deserve a little more for the money.

First reviewed: July 2018There are numerous alternatives to the Samsung Galaxy A6, including the following two handsets:

Moto G6

The Moto G6 may be perceived as a lower-end model because it comes from a budget range, but it's actually better than the A6 in most respects.

It has fast charging, a better CPU, sharper screen and a camera with Auto HDR. As it’s cheaper too, it seems a better choice than this arguably overpriced Samsung.

• Read our full Moto G6 review

Honor 9 Lite

Now a good deal cheaper than the Galaxy A6, the Honor 9 Lite represents better value. It has a sharper screen, more powerful chipset and a glass back. That rear isn’t necessarily better than the A6’s aluminum one, but it is a more ‘current’ style.

That Honor offers better value than Samsung is no surprise, but it’s something to consider before buying into the Samsung brand at this price.

• Read our full Honor 9 Lite review

First reviewed: July 2018