Some people at Samsung might be having a grand time trying to get the company’s smartphone models straight, especially when marketing the phones. Things get even more complicated when talking about the Galaxy A series, which has graduated from using a single digit and a year to double digits, with or without a year qualifier.
And perhaps to spice things up, Samsung earlier this year introduced a new phone that, by the time of introduction, further blurred the lines between its tiers, making it resemble what we now know as the Galaxy S20.
To be fair, the Galaxy A51 does follow a more or less popular Galaxy A50 that even made its way to us yesteryear. While that was almost easy to pass up and identify as a mid-range phone, the Galaxy A51 could be making head turns due to its drastically different design from any other Samsung phone in the market, apart from the S20, at least on the back and the sides.
Up front the Galaxy A51’s screen has a small punch-hole camera in the middle of its forehead. All the buttons have been moved to the right side and, fortunately, no return of a separate Bixby button. The most noticeable change, however, is the L-shaped camera formation inside a rectangular 3×2 bump on the corner, making it the first in the Galaxy A family to sport four cameras.
The headline sensor of which is 48-megapixels with an f/2.0 lens. It’s joined by a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera, a 5.0-megapixel macro camera (f/2.4), and a 5-megapixel depth camera (f/2.2). The ultra-wide has a 123-degree field of view, while the macro camera can shoot as close as 40mm away. Basically, the macro camera helps you take more detailed and vivid close-up photographs, while the more powerful wide and ultra-wide lenses will improve the clarity and vividness of your normal pictures.
If that design sounds or looks familiar, that’s pretty much what the Galaxy S20 looks like. Back when it was introduced one would’ve thought Samsung could be testing the market’s reception to the new design, though it was far too late for Samsung to make changes as it launched a month before the flagship. Suffice it to say, if you ever wanted to get your hands on the S20 but budget didn’t permit – the A51 is your lucky ticket.
That said, the phone’s innards are naturally mid-range. Inside, there’s an octa-core processor, 4GB of memory, and 128GB of storage. The latter can be augmented by up to 512GB with a microSD card. An in-display fingerprint sensor, 4,000 mAh battery, and USB-C fast charging round out the key specs. That batter was good enough to last us just under 10 hours of heavy use connected to a mobile network.
Its worth noting that clearly this isn’t going to knock the Galaxy S20 Plus (because that’s a fave) off its pedestal. Still, it’s also a fraction of the price of that Android flagship. The Samsung Galaxy A51 will set you back R6 999 in either Prism Black or Prism Crish Blue.
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