This is a rather fine phone, not like some that are almost too large to hold, this fits easily in the adult hand. Like other recent phones it arrived courtesy of Vodafone. As I am aware of certain black spot areas south of London these areas always get tried for phone and also 4G coverage as part of my tests on the phone and service offered by Vodafone.
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It is 14.5x7x.7cm and weighs 159grams. The viewable screen is 11.4x6.4cm which gives the notional diagonal imperial measurement of 5.2 inches. The edge to edge display shows 1920x1080 (portrait) resolution.
This is the first phone from Vodafone that did not immediately work correctly, I was able to do the basic setup of country, then input by Wi-Fi and put in Gmail settings. My next task is to make a phone call to my landline which allows me to work out the phone number of the phone, this however failed. So I opened the SIM slot on top of the phone to find it empty. At this point I had not found the second SIM slot on the side where the SIM was but although I was send a second SIM this did not help as the fault lay elsewhere so back to square one with a new unit which has worked correctly throughout the review period.
So going around the phone, the top has a SIM slot (slot 2), the right side has on/off button, the base has 3.5mm socket for headphones and USB ‘C’ port for charging and extra storage. The left side has a dual SIM slot (slot 1) and Micro SD Card slot, further up the left side are volume up and down controls. The face has the camera just above the screen towards the right for those all-important Selfies and in the centre of the top the unit’s speaker. The back has the main camera towards the top in the centre with the LED flash (torch) to its right. Both cameras are 16MP and for video you get full HD 1920x1080 @ 30FPS.
This is one of the recent clutch of always on mono screens that show day and date, the next line is a digital clock, next line battery state and the final line four small icons. You need to touch the on/off button to return to front screen and this needs to be swiped within seven seconds to stop it returning to the mono always on screen.
Colour to me is not normally important the faulty phone was a lovely Gold colour and the replacement Black this however had a problem that was nothing to do with the phone it shows finger marks especially on the back and far as I remember the Gold one did not.
According to Samsung this can be submerged in up to 1.5metres of water for up to 30 minutes, this is ideal for those cannot be parted from their phone even for a few minutes, I did not test this feature myself.
The battery is 3000mAh so should last a couple of days of normal use between charges. The Secure data folder might suit some with families. You get 15GB of storage when you setup a Samsung account.
The processor is an Octa Core offering running at 1.9GHz and you have 3GB RAM and 32GB ROM with 23GB available. It can support up to 256GB of external memory.
My only real moan is that the shiny black shows finger marks hardly a huge problem but in my limited use of the Gold one it did not so I would choose that colour other choices are Blue or Peach.
The Samsung A5 is available from Vodafone in Blue, Black or Gold on pay monthly for £32 monthly (£20 upfront) which gives unlimited calls and texts as well as 1GB of data month, other plans are available.
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