Samsung Galaxy A72 – Long Term Review
The Galaxy A72 is a big phone, and for those with little hands you may find this one a little bit of a slab to handle. But it’s a smartphone that has for the most part of the last three months, ticked all the right boxes that the average consumer would want in a smartphone.
It costs about N190k which translates to about $380. It follows the hugely popular Galaxy A70 and A71 from 2019 and 202 respectively.
Pre-review
When I look at the Galaxy A72 against the Galaxy A70 and A71 before it, it’s obvious that Samsung has pretty much stayed true to the value offering promised by the A series. The A70 was one heck of a phone, it had all the right specs for the price point it came in at and everyone I know that uses that phone today, are still happy with their purchase. The A71 was a rave amongst Samsung fans, it again had an excellent price to feature ratio and the sales from the A71 were quite robust.
Those phones were very balanced mid-rangers, and left most people who bought them quite happy. But does the A72 meet up to what the A70 and A71 offered and is this a phone you should consider purchasing?
Battery
The A72 is a three month old phone with a non-removable 5000mah battery that support 25watts of fast charging. I can boldly say that this phone has pretty much got an impressive battery life. At 5000mah you’re pretty much covered for a full day of use and I haven’t noticed any degradation in the last quarter. I charge just once a day and don’t have to think about charging until the next day. This is a huge convenience. I don’t know about you, but that just saves me the headache of multiple charges in a day.
You can juice up the battery in just about an hour using the 25watt charger.
Screen
The Galaxy A72 has got a great screen and it’s probably the best features of this phone. It’s a 6.7 inch, 1080p, 90Hz super AMOLED display that has a peak brightness of 800nits and it’s got a 20:9 aspect ratio and has a pixel density of 394.
The display on the A72 looks great, it’s an AMOLED screen so yeah, you get all the vibrant colors and videos look great on that 6.7 inch screen. Being a 6.7 inch 1080p screen, it still look pleasing to the eye and you’d be hard pressed to see the pixels on this screen.
You’ve got options to set this display to 90Hz or 60Hz. While 60hz might save you a bit of battery life, I’d advise you just set it to 90hz and forget it as this gives a sliver of extra smoothness to the device. Although not that noticeable.
Overall, the screen on the Galaxy A72 is beautiful and you’d probably have no complaints about this one.
Performance and Variants
Now speaking of performance and variants, you have two versions of the A72. One comes with 6GB RAM and 128GB of storage and the other ships with 8Gigs of RAM and 256GB of storage, and both variants also supports micro SD card expansion, c’mon now, this is Samsung giving you all the options to make it really difficult for you to ignore this phone, so essentially, you’re covered for the next two to three years on this phone with regards storage.
It’s also weird that Samsung includes this option in this phone and not on their flagship S21 series. Interesting!!!
Multi-tasking is handled with grace and gaming is also no problem here. We’ve got the snapdragon 720G CPU and Adreno 618 GPU running all the calculations and graphical processing here and it performs decently. It scored decently on AnTuTu benchmark which places this phone at par with the likes of the Redmi Note 10 Pro and Nokia 8.3 5G. Gaming was mostly smooth extra thanks to the 90Hz display, although you notice performance drops in extended play times.
Surfing round the OS, you’d get good performance but there were times when I could notice frame stutters and sometimes the phone gets stuck and will need a few seconds to clear its head. But performance overall was good. I’d give a score of 7 out of 10.
Build and Feature
This device comes with an IP rating of 67 for dust and water protection which is a good thing cos this gives you some measure of comfort knowing that you won’t have issues if you mistakenly drop this phone in water.
The A72 also ships with stereo speakers to give a more immersive and really loud output via the external speakers.
This phone also has a 3.5mm headphone jack and a USB C charging port.
You’ve also got FM Radio, NFC, Bluetooth 5.0 and a host of other sensors to basically make this phone irresistible.
Cameras
Now one of the main things consumers look out for when planning to buy a new phone are the cameras. I mean it’s pretty much a requirement when buying a new phone, people want phones with good to great image quality. But does the Galaxy A72 meet up with regards image quality? Well, Yes. This phone packs 5 cameras. Four behind and one in front.
The selfie camera is a 32MP f/2.2 26mm wide angle camera. It takes pretty clean images with balanced colors and also gives you the ability to fit in more people in your selfie shot. Images from the selfie cam were decent I was mostly happy with the output, although I noticed a little bit of a blue hint in the images produced. The selfie cam will shoot videos at a max of 4K@30FPS.
Flipping over to the rear, we have a much better camera island design compared to what we got with the A71. This island houses a 64MP f/1.8 wide angle lens, an 8MP telephoto lens with OIS, a 12MP ultra wide lens and a 5MP macro lens.
Look, we are at that point where shelling out a $1000 dollars for a smartphone is becoming less viable. With phones like the A72 and with the results from this phone, you’re pretty much covered. Images from the main 64MP camera were sharp and very colorful. It handle dynamic range and highlights pretty well and I had really little to no complaints.
The telephoto lens also has OIS built in and can zoom up to 3x optically and the images from the 3x zoom look sharp and pristine.
You have basically the same camera app from the flagship devices and should be familiar with this one as long as you’ve used a Samsung camera app before. You have all options to the far right and can also head into the camera settings to tune more camera options such as video stabilization.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the only downside to this phone I can think of is its size, I think it’s too big and Samsung could have shaved off some millimeters on the left and right of this phone.
That aside, for $380, which is 1/3rd of the price of a Galaxy S21/Ultra, you’re getting a sweet deal with this phone. It’s got beautiful design and specs and features that should keep you happy for another two to three years. I think the Samsung Galaxy A72 is a well-balanced mid-range smartphone that doesn’t break the bank.
So if you’re thinking of buying the S21 or S21 ultra, you can save yourself some money and do a whole lot more with this phone and the change from the $1000 you’d spend on the higher model. I thinks it’s also safe to say Samsung stayed true to their value proposition with the Galaxy A72 and it gets a recommendation from me.
If you’re looking for other options that perform similarly to this device, you should take a look at the Redmi Note 10 Pro and the Nokia 8.3 5G. Those phones are pretty compelling. But the Samsung Galaxy A72 has been a great phone these past three months and you should definitely give this phone a chance in your next purchase.
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