Review: Can Samsung’s $749 midrange phone meet all your needs?
At $749, Samsung’s A72 may meet your needs in spades, at an affordable price.
Samsung’s Galaxy A72 is a mid range phone that may satisfy the needs of most people. And you’ll pay $749, hundreds less than for a premium handset.
Welcome to another market battleground between the major smartphone makers. It’s the mid range market, where the population is increasingly attracted to, as the price of premium iPhone and Samsung Galaxy phones continue north.
You can expect a $500 or more saving. That’s based on a Samsung Galaxy S21 5G in Australia costing $1249 and an iPhone 12 about the same. Top-end premium handsets with extra storage and camera features cost hundreds more.
If $749 is still too much, there’s the A32 ($499), A32 5G ($499), A52 ($599), A52 5G ($649 and $749) in this new A-series rollout.
I’ve been trialling the top end A72 which features a four-lens camera system - a four lens configuration is amazing for a mid range handset. Its major downside is no 5G, but that might not bother you at all.
The A72 has a contemporary look with only a narrow frame around its big 6.7-inch display. The camera module on the back housing the four lenses is slightly raised and the plastic back does show fingerprints, but it’s not that glossy so it’s not that noticeable. Phones come in blue, black and an attractive light violet.
You get a full HD AMOLED screen, something that even Apple didn’t provide a couple of generations ago with the iPhone.
The A72 has an 8-core processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of internal storage which is more than adequate in this era, where much of our data is stored in the cloud. You can insert a microSDXC card for more storage. Its slot doubles as a second SIM in the SIM tray. There isn’t eSIM support in software on this model to date.
The A72 has a big 5000 milliampere hour battery that brings with it the promise of decent battery life.
In terms of CPU and GPU, the A72 isn’t the raciest phone around but it’s not slow by any means. I ran the AnTuTu benchmark and the A72 scored 344,294 - CPU 105694, GPU 85955, memory 61246 and usability 91399.
It scored a tad more than the Galaxy Note9 of 2018 and just shy of the Galaxy Note 10 Lite released in January 2020. We thought these were great phones at the time.
Samsung offers both face recognition and on screen fingerprint authentication. They work okay but are not as fast as with the premium S21. The on-screen fingerprint sensor can be sluggish.
The phone uses the Android 11 operating system and you get version 3.1 of Samsung’s One UI software overlay. It offers the Samsung’s Edge menu when you swipe left from the right hand edge to view a side menu. That’s a nice touch. You can split the screen and have two apps running side-by-side.
Android 11 brings with it screen recording when you swipe downwards from the top, wireless support for Android Auto, and better controls when playing music sent from the phone to your speakers.
I ran our usual battery test looping a 1080p video at 50 per cent brightness and the big 5000 milliampere battery delivered an insane 21 hours 30 minutes of playing time.
Unlike many premium phones, the A72 has a 3.5mm audio port for plugging in your headset, and there’s a charger plug in the box - with output to about 25 watts depending on the charging mode.
It might seem a small issue - but previously Samsung’s plug came with the USB port on the side, and therefore took up two spots on a power board. I found this annoying. Now there’s a smaller USB-C port at the top. You get a USB-C to USB-C cable for charging.
There’s also NFC and support for Samsung Pay so you can pay by phone at the supermarket.
The USB-C port on the phone lets you add faster USB-C external drives and the A72 had no trouble powering a small external hard drive. I could access its contents through the files menu. The phone has dual speakers at the top and bottom and the sound quality is surprisingly good.
Cameras
A four lens camera system on the back is something to behold on this and the cheaper A52 handsets in the new A-series range. All have a 64MP, F/1.8 main camera, a 12MP ultra wide lens and a 5MP macro lens.
The A52 has a 5MP depth sensor but the A72 swaps this for a 8MP telephoto lens which delivers 3X optical zoom and up to 30x digital zoom. Sadly hybrid zoom is very ordinary. However there’s lots to like about the camera.
There’s a high resolution 32MP F/2.2 selfie lens at front which delivers quality shots and if you choose the wide-angle setting, you can fit lots in the shot apart from yourself.
Samsung has made it easy to take photos with the A72 four-lens system. The lenses work seamlessly together to let you pinch and zoom with your fingers from 0.5X to 30X to frame photos exactly as you wish. When you separate your fingers to zoom the shot, a zoom dial appears to make this even easier.
The camera app offers plenty of shooting options, but not too many to make things complex.
Shots within the optical range from 0.5X to 3X offer decent natural colour, a surprise as some Samsung phone cameras tend to oversaturate images. You will get great family snaps with the A72.
I took this phone to the big park across the road to see how it fared taking landscapes of the foliage, waterways, small waterfall and lake. Can this camera display the beautiful textures?
It did a good job reflecting the rich textures, ripples and reflections in the water, but I thought shots were a tad overly sharp. Panoramas looked good, and the camera took some decent UHD video at 30 frames per second.
Samsung has included the ‘single take’ option found on its S21 models. Captured 10 seconds of the moment, and the camera will automatically create media with different styles, angles, and formats.
Pro, food, night, macro, portrait, slow motion and hyper lapse are among other camera options.
This phone took some great night shots using its dedicated night mode - as good as any I have seen. Areas that are quite dark showed up brightly in these shots.
If anything, the night mode is too good, showing some objects lit up as if it was day, rather than portraying the sombre subtly of the night. Nevertheless I was impressed.
Unless you need premium photography features, you won’t experience buyer’s remorse by paying $749 for this phone, as you might with a real cheapie costing $300, that reminds you every day how limited it is.
The A72 illustrates that in 2021 you can enjoy a wide variety of quality features on a smartphone under $800.
If the price is still too much, you can choose the A32 and A52 and accept more compromises.
A downside with A72 is the lack of 5G but a 5G version is expected later if you really need it.
There are other cheaper options such as the 6.5-inch Realme 7 5G (c $400) and the Oppo A15 (c $200) if your budget is less.
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