46 MARCH2020|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE385
2019 WASSUPPOSEDtobethe year of5G,
but with extremely limited coverage and
compatible handsets leaning towards the
ultra-high end, it’s not been easy to take
advantage of those faster mobile data speeds.
The Galaxy A90 5aims to break down at least
one of those barriers: although it’s still an
expensive smartphone,it’s hundreds of
pounds cheaper than the Galaxy S10 5G.
The A90 5G still has all the good looks of
apremium Galaxy phone.The bezels are
minimal and the back panel is comfortably
curved glass, and outside of alack of wireless
charging, the design does well forpracticality,
too. There’s amicroSD card slot, supporting
cards up to 512GB, as well as an in-display
fingerprint sensor.
To save abit of money, the A90 has aFull
HD+ (2,400x1,080) screen rather than pushing
for4Kresolution. This is fine: 1080p is sharp
enough even on a6.7in screen, and it helps
with battery lifeaswell as cost. What’s more,
it performs brilliantly,with 99% SRGB colour
gamut coverage,and auto-brightness can
reach as high as adazzling 458cd/m^2.
SNAP BACK
Unusually foraEuropean-released Samsung
phone,the A905Garrives with aQualcomm
Snapdragon chip rather than Samsung’s
Exynos equivalent. In this
case,it’s the Snapdragon
855, which is soon to
be replaced by the
Snapdragon 865, yet
remains lightning fast:
in Geekbench 4, the
Galaxy A90 scored 3,373
in the single-core test and
10,728 in the multicore
test. That puts it behind
the much pricier Galaxy
S10 5G forsingle-core
power,but slightly ahead
formulticore.
Gaming performance
is also functionally
identical. In the GFXBench
Manhattan 3offscreen
test, the A90 5G scored 98
to the S10 5G’s 96fps, and
both produced 60fps in
the onscreen test. This is
all arelief; the lower price
compared to the S10 5G
hasn’t hurt CPU or GPU
performance at all.
SAMSUNG GalaxyA905G
★★★★★
£640•From http://www.amazon.co.uk
VERDICT
Amostly high-quality Android handset, but once
again the commitment to 5G feelspremature
ANDROID9.0SMARTPHONE
Even better, the
Galaxy A90 5G actually
lasts longer than its
stablematefrom a
single charge,partially
thanks to that
lower-resolution
display. In ourbattery
benchmark it managed
an excellent 23h 38m,
outperforming the
20h 41m of theS10 5G.
TheGalaxy A90 5G
comes with atriple
camera array
consisting of amain
48-megapixel, f/2.0
lens, supported by
an 8-megapixel
wide-angle lens and
a5-megapixel depth sensor (both f/2.2).
HAPPY SNAPS
Despitethe comparatively narrow aperture,
the A90 5G takes apretty good picture.
Outdoors, it captures fine details just as
well as the OnePlus 7T (Shopper383), and
indoors we’d saythe A90 5G is very slightly
better: it seems to capture colours and
details just that tiny bit more faithfully.
Video performance,
however,isaweak spot.
The A90 5G lets you
tinker with the waythat
video is recorded, letting
you capture footageat
720p,1080p or 4K
resolution, with the
option to up it to 60fps at
1080p.Doing so loses
stabilisation, which wasn’t
exactly stellar in the first
place,and essentially
makes footageunusable.
We also witnessed some
unfortunateblurring on
the 60fps footage, which
is apityasthe quality of
images was pretty
reasonable,despitesome
crushing of the blacks.
The lack of
stabilisation, however,is
unforgivable.Weknow
that the Snapdragon
855 is capable of
recording stabilised
footage at 4K, so the
weak performance
here is just sloppy.
There’s also the
question of whether
5G is worth investing
in yet. Right now,
the answer is still no;
even in central
London it can be
hard to find
somewhere with 5G
coverage,and even
when we did, the peak
308Mbit/s download
speed we measured
is well below the
technology’s 10Gbit/s
maximum. This also
dropped as faras
163Mbit/s in some areas, so while even the
slowest 5G is much faster than 4G, it’s also
rare and inconsistent.
UNTIMELYMANNER
Fortunately,the Galaxy A90 5G is still agood
smartphone even without its apparently key
feature.With the Xiaomi Mi Mix 5G (Shopper
381) still unavailable in the UK except on
contract, we’d saythis is the best-value option
if you want an unlocked 5G handset.
Still, there’s no escaping the fact that
the underlying infrastructure just isn’t there
yet, and you’ll spend the majority of your
time on 4G and Wi-Fi anyway. Forsimilar
moneyyou could have the OnePlus 7T Pro
(Shopper384) or the standard Galaxy S10
(Shopper379), the latter of which has
dropped below £600 from some vendors.
5G remains promising, but it will be worth
waiting six months and re-evaluating: by the
summer,there should be more phones to
choose from and, crucially,better coverage.
AlanMartin
Battery life
0% -50 Reference + 50 + 100
Seepage98for performancedetails
PROCESSOROcta-core2.8GHzQualcommSnapdragon855•
SCREEN SIZE6.7in•SCREEN RESOLUTION2,400x1,080•
REAR CAMERAS48 megapixels, 12 megapixels,5megapixels•
STORAGE128GB•WIRELESSDATA5G•NFCYes•
DIMENSIONS165x76x8.4mm•WEIGHT206g•OPERATING
SYSTEMAndroid 9.0•WARRANTYOneyearRTB•DETAILS
http://www.samsung.com/uk•PART CODESM-A908BZKABTU
SPECIFICATIONS
23h38m
