Samsung Galaxy A80 review: You spin me right round
Cool and quirky, the Galaxy A80 isn't for everyone, but if you like it, you'll love it.
Note: This article was first published on 22 August 2019.
Look ma, no holes!
Spin baby, spin
Recognising that not everyone has or wants to splash over a grand on a phone, the Galaxy A80 is Samsung's latest attempt at the rapidly growing mid-range market. It wades into battle sporting a large 6.7-inch Super AMOLED display, a Snapdragon 730 processor, and a swivelling triple-camera module.
But to be accurate and honest, the Galaxy A80 isn't the first rotating or swivelling camera on a phone. Samsung and various Japanese makers were already packing them in circa 2003. Of course, you remember Nokia and the N90, right? Meanwhile, the motorised rotator was first given unto us by Oppo with the N3 back in 2014. Even today, there's competition in the form of the ASUS Zenfone 6, whose camera flips up instead.
The camera system pops up from behind the display and swivels. Now, where have I seen this before?
At the same time, after ages of being run roughshod over by Chinese makers in the mid-range, Samsung is finally delivering more competitive products in the form of its new double-digit A-series. There are four models at the moment - Galaxy A30, A50, A70 and the top-end A80 we've here for review.
For sure, the Samsung Galaxy A80's motorised rotating camera is a showstopping feature in this segment where Chinese makers from Oppo to Xiaomi are now playing the pop-up cam game. But is it enough to turn the tables on the competition?
Design (and rotating camera)
If you like your objects bright and shiny, the Galaxy A80 was made for you.
It's been ages since I've seen a phone as positively glossy as the A80. We received the Phantom Black colourway, whose mirror finish means it’s not exactly black nor phantom. If this shade isn't to your tastes, there's also Ghost White and Angel Gold — essentially white and rose gold. You can check here how those colours compare in our previous hands-on article.
The glossy finish is certainly pretty, if not eye-catching, but it’s a fingerprint and also provides little grip. Coupled with the fact that the A80 weighs a hefty 220g — That's heavier than a OnePlus 7 Pro, heavier than an Oppo Reno 10X Zoom Edition, and only beaten by the massive Huawei Mate 20X at 232g — it makes the A80 positively slippery. This problem can be easily alleviated with a phone case, which, thankfully, Samsung provides. It's nothing to shout about but at least it's color-matched and will tide you over until you find case that you really like such as one with higher drop protection standard.
The Samsung Galaxy A80’s perfectly curved edges and complete lack of any texture make it extremely slippery. Note also how the rear is devoid of any markings.
Thee arrangement of parts within the swivel module is a trigger for OCD folks like me: the flash LED, yellow as it is, is also off-centre and sticks out like a sore thumb.
The Galaxy A80 charges via USB-C. It doesn't do wireless charging and it doesn't have a headphone jack.
And now for the camera assembly: it doesn't just rotate, like on the Oppo N1. No, the entire top section lifts until the camera module is clear of the top front - and then it flips over. At least two motors are powering this operation, as the animated GIF below seems to show: the slider moves up first before the camera swivels.
Unnecessarily complicated? Maybe. Undeniably cool? Quite.
It's pretty sweet to see it in action and to show off to your friends. However, long-term reliability is a bit of a concern. It also doesn't help that it doesn't have any form of fall protection unlike the Oppo Reno. And lastly, because of this swivelling mechanism, the Galaxy A80 has no dust and water resistance.
The Galaxy A80 has a triple camera setup. We'll talk about its imaging performance later but the three cameras are:
- 48-megapixel main camera, F2.0, FOV: 80˚
- 8-megapixel wide camera, F2.2, FOV: 123˚
- 3D depth camera, F1.2
Display and fingerprint sensor
Look at that! Save for a slight chin at the bottom, the bezels are also impressively thin, an effect reinforced by the lack of a plastic frame around the display.
With no selfie camera in the way (and with an in-screen ear speaker), the A80's gorgeous 6.7-inch Super AMOLED panel takes pride of the full front face of the phone. It’s as vibrant as we’ve come to expect from Samsung’s AMOLED technology, and also has pretty good sunlight readability.
Some Chinese manufacturers would do well to take note of how Samsung rounded the corners of the display in lock-step with the corners of the phone. A small detail for some perhaps, but details matter at this price and when this segment of the market is so hotly contested.
However, in-display fingerprint sensor tech is one aspect of the new A-series that Samsung needs to work on. I have an A50 in my office that either refuses to unlock or takes ages to do so, and even though the A80 is faster, it's still not as fast as the leaders in this class of phones.
The A80’s in-screen fingerprint sensor is some distance behind the competition in accuracy and speed, especially at this price point.
It also didn't like my (admittedly calloused) thumb, despite enrolling and removing it twice. If using your fingers to unlock the phone is important to you, make sure you try it out in stores first.
Speaking of unlocking the phone, there isn't any form of face unlock on the A80. Presumably this is to preserve the longevity of that swivelling camera mechanism. But it's worth noting that rivals with swivelling cameras, like the ASUS ZenFone 6, supports face unlocking. Not that it's a recommended method (it's more for convenience than for security), but just something you might want to note. So it's not much of a loss on the Galaxy A80.
Software
In the low-end and midrange, One UI is Samsung's ace in the hole, giving the Korean company a significant advantage over the often visually jarring, unpolished software interfaces of Chinese competitors. The A80 has it atop an Android 9.0 base.
OneUI’s visual language looks friendly without being cheesy and is consistent throughout all parts of the software.
OneUI is approaching the level of customisation previously only seen in Chinese phones. For example, the placement of the brightness slider (above or below the toggles) can be adjusted in the notification shade.
However, there are still incongruous design choices, such as headers taking up nearly half the screen for no logical reason. But I'm being nitpicky here.
My sole nitpick would be that One UI seems rather resource-heavy. Performance — which we'll talk about in detail next— was certainly adequate, but I've seen faster phones that cost less.
Performance, benchmarks, and battery life
It didn't seem like so long ago that the phrase "mid-range Android smartphone processor" meant putting up with eight merely adequate Cortex-A53 cores clocked at 1.8GHz (think Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 625 on everything from (Mi) A1 to Zenfone.) Day by day, though, phones in this segment are closing the gap with flagship devices.
You could throw a stone into a phone shop and easily hit something like this - something such as the Samsung Galaxy A80. It runs the game-optimised Snapdragon 730G, and its two Kryo 470 cores, running at 2.2GHz, are derived from ARM's fastest architecture at the moment, the Cortex-A76. That's similar to what's on the Snapdragon 855! These are helped out by six more A55-derived Kryo cores clocked at 1.8GHz.
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We’ve pitted the A80 against other recent mid-rangers in these tests (be it price-point matched or target-segment matched devices), and also thrown in Huawei’s Honor View 20 which uses Huawei’s flagship chip, the Kirin 980. See, I told you mid-rangers were behaving like flagships now.
JetStream 2
Do note that those two Snapdragon 67x phones are already plenty fast for the mid-range. Since the Jetstream benchmark is new to us, we didn’t have an Honor View 20 and had to put in a OnePlus 7 Pro for comparison. The A80 is not far off.
In Jetstream 2.0, which tests browser JavaScript performance across a range of real-world situations, the A80 saw off the Snapdragon 67x-equipped Vivo V15 Pro and Pixel 3A XL - the former by quite a margin. The OnePlus 7 Pro, with its flagship-class Snapdragon 855 processor, was the runaway leader here.
Geekbench & Antutu
Antutu and Geekbench measure system performance over a variety of factors in real-world usage scenarios, such as CPU performance, RAM, and storage. And again, the performance of the A80 led the Snapdragon 67x-series devices but expectedly fell behind the Kirin 980 in the View 20.
3DMark
Now for graphics performance in 3DMark. Compared to the "vanilla" Snapdragon 730, the 730G actually has a faster-clocked Adreno 618 GPU (825MHz versus 700MHz in the 730) and faster "big" cores. Here, the A80 slotted in nicely above the 600-series devices but was still outperformed by the Honor View 20.
In Sling Shot Unlimited, the A80 slotted in nicely above the 600-series devices but still below the Honor View 20.
Battery life
On the power side of things, despite the huge 6.7-inch AMOLED display and moderately-sized 3,700mAh battery, the A80 was able to keep going for over 14 hours! It comfortably outlasted its rivals by at nearly 1.5 hours. This may be due to better driver and hardware optimisation or the newer Hexagon 688 DSP in the Snapdragon 730G chip.
My eminent colleagues and I know that benchmarks don't lie, but they don't tell the whole truth, either. I think the phone could feel more snappy in daily use. One UI is not to blame for this, and it seems to me that other factors like touch response latency appear to be at play.
Camera & imaging
If there was ever an unbeatable combination in mobile photography, it would have to be well-specced cameras that swivel from front to rear. Done right, this would obviate the need for selfie cameras with their limited apertures, tiny pixels, and lack of autofocus.
The Galaxy A80 offers reasonably convincing specifications by pairing Sony’s IMX586 48-megapixel sensor with a wide-angle 8-megapixel f/2.2 unit, but also adds a ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensor, which promises perfect bokeh without inconsistent edges on contrasty items such as hair and plants.
What’s more, Samsung has even made it work in video recording. Is the proof of the pudding in the eating, though?
When Samsung’s automatic Scene optimiser function works, it works well. Colours are pleasant without being over-saturated or contrasty, unlike the Chinese competition. (Click on image to see the original full-size image)
And where the lighting is sufficient, there is very little difference in colour and contrast between the wide-angle and the main cameras. (Click to see the original full-size image)
But there are times it doesn’t, food shots being a common example. Check out unnatural white balance and colour cast. (Click to see the original full-size image)
Under warm lighting, there is a slight red colour cast. (Click to see the original full-size image)
The A80 has a great HDR algorithm which delivers a nicely balanced look, but it’s let down by relatively high levels of sensor noise. Just check out the lower left side of the shot. (Click to see the original full-size image)
The heavy noise reduction required to keep this sensor noise in check leads to substantial detail loss in low-light situations, like so. (Click to see the original full-size image)
And the software tries to fix this loss of detail by applying an almost grossly unnatural amount of edge sharpening. (Click to see the original full-size image)
While the camera is a mixed bag, the TOF sensor is the A80’s trump card, enabling it to deliver precise bokeh in both photos and videos.
Notice the precise blurring at the hair edges. However, the shot is slightly shaky, a result of the lack of optical image stabilisation. (Click to see the original full-size image)
Though I think I'll stay off the Beauty optimiser, thank you very much.
Bottom line: the A80’s camera works well enough in the daytime and produces great portraits and unique video bokeh courtesy of its ToF sensor, but the photos become unsatisfying as light levels drop. Samsung really needs to learn how to optimise these high-megapixel sensors for low-light. And don’t forget - with a swivelling camera, it’s a double-edged sword; what’s true of the main camera is true of the selfie one too.
Final words
The swivelling camera is cool and provides some tangible benefits, but there are also compromises.
It’s hard to give a clear nod to the Samsung Galaxy A80’s headliner feature. On the one hand, I appreciate what Samsung has tried to do with the rotating camera in a market full of finicky and ugly pop-ups. On the other hand, all that swivelling engineering is somewhat wasted on the camera itself, which lags its 2019 competition in terms of detail, dynamic range, and low-light performance.
Additionally, the mechanism comes with quite a few compromises. It means that the phone has no dust/water protection, and any sliding mechanism also comes with added concern over the durability of the mechanism. If you don't take a ton of selfies, this probably isn't an issue, but it's still an extra something that can potentially break down on your phone.
The A80 is also bulky and heavy. The last phone I used that was this heavy was the Huawei Mate 20 X, which, has a larger 7.2-inch display, so the weight is somewhat justifiable. Admittedly, this is more of a personal niggle than anything else but it's something that I feel its worth mentioning, bearing in mind that that there are numerous phones with similarly sized displays that weigh far less.
A rather fine phone that's let down by its high price.
Then we come to one last hurdle: its recommended retail price. At S$898, the Galaxy A80 is only a hundred or so bucks away from the street prices of the Oppo Reno 10x Zoom and Huawei's P30 Pro. In fact, you could actually get Samsung's own S10+ for less than the retail price of the Galaxy A80. These are all phones in a different speed class, and more importantly, they come with arguably better camera performance. So, if you are willing to increase your budget and shop around, there are some deals out there.
That said, at RRP at least, it's hard to recommend the Galaxy A80. However, street prices are now as low as S$650, thus making it a much more palatable option if you don't mind looking for options outside of the official retail partners.
To be fair the Galaxy A80 counters with a gorgeous display, high build quality, decent all-round performance, amazing battery life, and a polished user interface. Compared to its immediate competition, it feels like a more polished and well-thought-out product, even if there are some compromises and it is missing some features. For readers shopping in this segment, the Samsung Galaxy A80 is worth considering if you appreciate a large display and appreciate a more polished look and feel than the Chinese competition.
N.B.: Samsung also has a BLACKPINK-themed Galaxy A80 for hardcore fans of the Korean super girl group.