Samsung Galaxy A30 review

Display

Beyond any doubt, the huge Super AMOLED screen is the Galaxy A30's main selling feature. It's the same large 6.4" Super AMOLED screen of 1080p+ resolution as seen on the A50. The actual pixel count is 2,340 x 1,080, making the aspect ratio quite tall (19.5:9). The pixel density is more than enough at 403ppi.

The A30 has the so-called Infinity-U panel, meaning it has a U-shaped notch at the top for the selfie camera. The screen is of the usual high-quality we've grown to like. We measured about 430 nits of maximum brightness in manual mode and 550nits in Auto when the ambient light sensor exposed to bright light. We measured a minimum brightness of 1.9nits.

As we've come to expect from Samsung Super AMOLEDs, the display on the Galaxy A30 is capable of accurately reproducing different color spaces depending on content and selected display mode. The Basic mode stays true to sRGB (average DeltaE of 1.6), AMOLED Photo is for Adobe RGB applications (average DeltaE of 1.8), while AMOLED Cinema adheres to the DCI-P3 color space (average DeltaE of 2.2). Of course, the default Adaptive mode makes no claims for accuracy and posts an average DeltaE of 3.4 against a DCI-P3 target with a maximum deviation of 9.

Battery life

The Galaxy A30 has a large 4,000mAh battery inside, just like the A50's. It supports 15W charging, and the supplied charger will refill about 30% of the A30's depleted battery in half an hour.

In our testing, the Galaxy A30 achieved some respectable results. We clocked north of 11 hours on our Wi-Fi web browsing script and 14 and half hours of looping videos in airplane mode. The 3G talk time is over a day - an excellent score as well.

Adding to the mix the very good standby performance the Galaxy A30 posted an overall Endurance rating of 92h.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating above denotes how long a single battery charge will last you if you use the Samsung Galaxy A30 for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. We've established this usage pattern so that our battery results are comparable across devices in the most common day-to-day tasks. The battery testing procedure is described in detail in case you're interested in the nitty-gritty. You can check out our complete battery test table, where you can see how all of the smartphones we've tested will compare under your own typical use.

Loudspeaker

The Galaxy A30 has a single loudspeaker located on the bottom. It scored a Below Average mark in our three-pronged test when it comes to loudness, and it is very quiet - it's been a while since we've seen a phone rank this low. The output is okay for the class but won't impress with rich sound.

Audio quality

The Samsung Galaxy A30 had a fine performance in the first part of the audio test. With an active external amplifier, it posted excellent scores and had above average volume levels .

While the loudness didn’t suffer when we plugged in headphones, a few of the scores took a hit - most notably the stereo crosstalk and to a lesser extent intermodulation distortion and frequency response. The overall performance was very close to the Galaxy M30, suggesting a shared audio chip, but the A30 comes just behind its sibling likely due to slightly different wiring.

Samsung Galaxy A30 frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.