Samsung Galaxy A16 4G review

Android 14 with One UI 6.1

The Galaxy A16 4G boots Android 14 with Samsung's latest One UI 6.1 software layer on top. Samsung recently redesigned its software support scheme, and the Galaxy A16 4G became eligible for a whopping six major Android upgrades. The Galaxy A15 5G was upgraded to be eligible for 4 OS updates.

Compared to competitors, this is a very strong positive in favor of the Galaxy A16 4G as long as you trust the budget hardware available here to run Android smoothly six years from now.

In case you were wondering, Samsung's Galaxy AI isn't present on the A16 4G. It is still relegated mostly to flagship devices, though Samsung has been broadening the reach of the features a bit lately. Not quite this much, though.

One UI

Some of the notable One UI 6 novelties include a redesigned Quick Panel, better notification visualization, an improved and simplified camera app, and more powerful gallery and editing tools.

The Galaxy A16 4G gets a pretty feature-complete version of One UI 6.1. You are getting the same general UX and even most of the features of the Galaxy S series. The A16 4G notably lacks an Always On display feature, though.

The good news to all Galaxy users is that the list of software features reserved for the flagships has been shrinking in recent years and currently includes niche things like Samsung DeX.

Everything else is typical One UI - lockscreen, homescreen, widgets and icons, theme handling, multi-tasking (available in both pop-up and split-screen state), and default apps.

You can read more details about OneUI 6 in our Galaxy A25 review.

Performance

The Galaxy A16 4G has the same Helio G99 chip by MediaTek as the Galaxy A15 4G. This year Samsung is offering the phone with up to 8GB RAM, up from 6GB RAM on the A15. The base version is still the same - 128GB storage with 4GB RAM.

The Mediatek Helio G99 is a 6nm chip with an octa-core (2x2.2 GHz Cortex-A76 & 6x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) CPU setup and a Mali-G57 MC2 GPU.

For memory, the Galaxy A16 5G comes with either 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage. As far as we can tell, the storage chips used here are of UFS 2.2 speed, which is not ideal but certainly better than budget eMMC chips. Storage is expandable via a microSD card. Our review unit is the base 4GB RAM and 128GB one.

The performance is adequate for the entry-level class with a capable processor and okay-ish GPU scores. Surprisingly, the Helio G99 inside the A16 4G seems to run smoother, with fewer hiccups and slowdowns than the Exynos 1330 inside the Galaxy A16 5G, which we also recently tested. An upgrade to the Galaxy A25 would still be reasonable if you are looking for gaming on a budget device, though.

The sustained performance is expectedly great on entry-level devices. The Galaxy A16 4G kept 83% of its maximum CPU and 98% of its maximum GPU performance when put through prolonged stress tests.

Thermal throttling

The Galaxy A16 4G has adequate hardware for the class, but 4GB RAM is the bare minimum for Android to breathe. And you can feel it on the base version of the A16 4G - some apps have noticeably long load times, and there is the occasional lag and/or stutter. Still, all things considered, the A16 4G does a solid job for this market segment.