Samsung Galaxy A05s review

A larger display, now with FullHD resolution

The display is one of the major upgrades to the entry-level Galaxy A device this year. For starters, compared to the panel on the Galaxy A04s, the one on the A05s has grown a bit and now measures 6.7 inches in diagonal. The aspect ratio is still the familiar 20:9.

More importantly, however, the display of choice this year has a FullHD resolution of 1080 x 2400 pixels up from the HD+ display on the A04s. This is quite a noticeable jump up in sharpness from around 270 ppi to around 393 ppi in the new model. The difference is definitely noticeable in person.

Unfortunately, that's about the only praise we can offer for the display on the Galaxy 05s. It does not get particularly bright. We measured a maximum of 468 nits of brightness on the slider. It's usable outdoors but definitely not comfortable.

There is still automatic brightness adjustment, which works well, but the display can only reach the aforementioned 468 nits or so even in bright light. Contrast could be better, too, since the blacks on the panel shine quite a bit of light. We measured 1418:1.

Color accuracy is not a particular strong suit of the Galaxy A05s either. The phone comes with absolutely no color settings. There are no modes, no white point or color temperature adjustment.

Expectedly, the Galaxy A05s does not have HDR video support. Not on its display, nor in terms of video decoding.

HDR support • Widevine • Netflix playback capabilities

On a more positive note, the phone has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification, allowing apps like Netflix to offer up FullHD video streams to saturate its display resolution.

High refresh rate handling

The Samsung Galaxy A05s has a 90Hz maximum refresh rate. Unfortunately, while it does provide some benefits to perceived smoothness within the UI, it is not a great high refresh rate implementation since the actual pixel response times of the display are quite low. There is a lot of ghosting and smearing as objects move on the screen. It almost looks like the sort of visual artifacts one would get from overclocking a panel aggressively beyond its native refresh rate capabilities.

There is more weirdness still with the high refresh rate handling on the Galaxy A05s. For one, there are no settings available to control the refresh rate. There are no modes and no way to manually drop down to 60Hz, which is a bit of a weird omission.

As reported by the system itself, the phone definitely supports refreshing at either 90Hz or 60Hz. The A05s is almost entirely locked to 90Hz operation. That includes the UI and most of the apps. The only notable exceptions we noticed are some video playback scenarios. Unfortunately, not all of them, but most of the time, the phone will detect a video being played and automatically drop down to 60Hz to save power.

Samsung Galaxy A05s working at 90Hz most of the time

Naturally, we also tried high refresh rate gaming, with mixed success. Half of the games we tried ran at 90Hz, while the other test titles unfortunately dropped to 60Hz. It's not like the Galaxy A05s has much power to throw around to push high frame rates anyway, but having the option would have been nice.

High refresh rate gaming

All things considered, we have to say that the high refresh rate behavior of the Galaxy 05s is tolerable, but nothing more than that. We don't particularly mind that the phone operates at an almost constant 90Hz refresh rate since we have already tested that this small jump over 60Hz rarely affects battery endurance. We wish the automatic video playback detection was more consistent and wouldn't mind having a bit more manual control over the refresh rate either on a system or a per-app level.

Battery life

The Galaxy A05s has a large 5,000 mAh battery. As you might know, we recently debuted our new GSMArena battery test 2.0 and the new Active Use Score metric. You can read all about it here.

The Galaxy A05s did pretty well in our battery testing. Nothing spectacular, but still a solid showing. It managed excellent call endurance numbers, and its video streaming and web endurance are not half bad either. The gaming component leaves a bit to be desired.

Charging speed

The Samsung Galaxy A05s charges at a pretty decent rate, though it is hardly the fastest around or in its price bracket, for that matter. Samsung rates the phone as capable of 25W charging, which is a nice little upgrade over the 15W intake limit of the Galaxy A04s and other Samsung devices like the Galaxy A14 5G.

Since that is the case, and unfortunately, you don't get a charger in the box with the Galaxy A05s, we paired it with one of Samsung's 25W PD+PPS chargers. Monitoring the charging curve, we saw the phone take in as much as 24W with this charger, so the two seem to play nice.

The Galaxy A05s managed to get from zero to 24% in fifteen minutes and then 43% in 30 minutes on the charger. A full charge took right around 1:26 hours. It's not too shabby at all for a budget device.

Speaker quality

The Galaxy A05s only has a single bottom-firing speaker and it is not particularly impressive, either. It only managed an AVERAGE loudness score in our test. And it barely inched out of the BELOW AVERAGE territory.

Its frequency response is decent, but there is nothing to phone home about. The mids and voices, in particular, come through enough, arguably the important bit. Plus, we need to remember how inexpensive this A05s is and adjust our expectations accordingly.

In terms of additional audio features, the Galaxy A05s does have Dolby Atmos and Dolby Atmos for gaming support built in. Both of these equalizer features only work with headphones and Bluetooth headsets, though.

Sound options and features

Samsung's Separate app sound feature also exists. It allows you to select an app and redirect its audio output to a particular device different from the current main output device of the phone. It's a really neat feature.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.