With smartphone prices increasing at the flagship level, it’s not a surprise if you find yourself unable to get the phone you really want. Luckily, mid-range phones have been getting a lot better recently and often have a good amount of the style and features from their more expensive brothers.
Price
We don’t know when the Galaxy A30 will be released but Q2 seems like a reasonable estimate. We’re told it won’t come to the UK, though, which is a shame. There’s an estimated price of between 200- and 300 Euro for the A30, which puts it at the lower end of the mid-range market. We’ll have to wait and see if that rings true. If it does, then it will rival the impressive Moto G7 and Moto G7 Plus.
Design & Build
The Galaxy A30 and A50 have teardrop notches in the display. So you get a small section of the screen missing at the top in the middle unlike the punch-hole notches on the S10 phones. You might actually prefer the way the A range phones do it but it’s just personal preference. What we would say is that if you haven’t had a phone with a notch yet, you’ll likely get used to it quicker than you might expect. Much of the design is similar, although the A30 has a plastic rear cover rather than glass even though it might look like it’s real. It might not be as premium but it still looks and feels nice. There are various colours available including black, white, blue and red. The samples we took at look at shimmer in the light and give a pearlescent effect. Even at this low price, Samsung offers some good design elements including USB-C, a headphone jack (don’t take it for granted) and IP68 waterproofing. One of the main design differences between the Galaxy A30 and the more expensive A50 is that you get a fingerprint scanner on the rear of the phone rather than embedded in the screen.
Specs & Features
Like the A50, the Galaxy A30 has a 6.4in SuperAMOLED screen with a Full HD+ resolution and a tall 19.5:9 aspect ratio. There’s a small notch at the top to house the selfie camera and no embedded fingerprint scanner. There’s reasonably low-grade core specs here but nothing that’s unsuitable for the price. An Exynos 7885 (same chip as the Galaxy A8 from last year) along with either 3- or 4GB of RAM. Then there’s either 32- or 64GB of storage with a microSD card slot to take up to 512GB. While the A8’s benchmark results weren’t great, we found the phone smooth enough in the real world so we expect the A30 to be similar. With a different screen, we’ll have to wait and see though. Moving onto cameras and the A30 has a single 16Mp camera at the front. One less than the A8 but it will be a lot cheaper. The rear also has a 16Mp camera with an f/1.7 aperture partnered with a 5Mp depth sensor for Live Focus blur. The cameras seem ok, but we’ll need to test them out somewhere other than Samsung’s brightly lit stand at MWC. There’s tough competition in this area from rivals. There’s little else on the spec sheet to highlight but the A30 doesn’t come with NFC which will put off some buyers. The A30 has an above average 4000mAh battery, which should mean the phone will last a day fairly comfortably. We need to test this out if we can get a review sample, of course. It also comes with 15W fast charging so you can top it up without having to wait around for long.
Early Verdict
The Galaxy A30 will be tempting for anyone looking for Samsung design and reasonably decent specs with a tight budget. Of course, the A50 looks better for possibly not much more. We’ll have to wait for final pricing and also test out key features like performance and cameras, but this could be a decent Moto G7 rival.
Related stories for further reading
Best phone deals Best SIM-only deals Best phone network All smartphone reviews Best smartphones How we test smartphones Best new phones coming soon
Tech Advisor’s Reviews Editor, Chris has been reviewing all kinds of tech for over 10 years and specialises in audio. He also covers a range of topics including home entertainment, phones, laptops, tablets and more.
