Oct 9, 2019

Disappointing phone at a lucrative price

HERE'S MY REVIEW OF SAMSUNG GALAXY M30s
I bought this phone during the Amazon Great Indian Festival Sale in Sep/Oct 2019. I had not been purchasing Samsung phones since the past 5-6 years due to their low value-for-money over Chinese companies like Xiaomi, Huawei and Realme, but got interested in this phone after watching tons of positive reviews on YouTube, and considering the price at which Samsung was offering these specs.

However, the phone has turned out to be a major disappointment after using it for 2-3 days. Let's go over various aspects of this device one-by-one.

BATTERY (3/5)
The battery of this device seems to be highly overstated. So much so that my 1-year old Honor phone with 3750mAh battery with an inferior processor and an inferior display gives me a better backup than this phone. I would estimate the actual battery capacity to be closer to 3000mAh than to the stated value of 6000mAh. You can see the battery percentage drop every 2-3 minutes as you use the phone, even with moderate brightness and simple tasks like browsing or reading news.

FINGERPRINT READER (3/5)
The phone comes with a physical fingerprint sensor on the back. Even 3 years ago, these fingerprint sensors used to be extremely fast and accurate. This phone's fingerprint sensor is extremely inaccurate and works only after 2-3 attempts. It's evident that Samsung has cut corners even in the most basic aspects.

DISPLAY (3/5)
Even though Samsung claims the display is a sAMOLED, the viewing angles are pretty bad. If you try to view the phone display from the side, you'll immediately notice significant color distortion. This is most clearly noticeable when the display is showing a white colored background.

STORAGE (3/5)
Even though Samsung claims this phone comes with a fast UFS 2.1 based storage, there's a significant delay saving 48MP pictures. The slow saving speed is closer to what you'd get with an inferior eMMC storage rather than UFS 2.1.

CAMERA QUALITY (3/5)
I took some pictures in broad daylight and found issues with sharpness of the pictures, even when properly focused and camera resolution increased to the maximum allowed 48MP. Even the portrait photos (which Samsung calls Live Focus) are a hit-or-miss. Need to play around with the camera more, but the initial impression is disappointing.

SOFTWARE (3/5)
Samsung's One UI is filled with numerous bugs. At the time of writing this review, it is 9th October already, but Samsung hasn't moved beyond 1 August Android security update. Also, basic things like a convenient shortcut for taking screenshots is missing in One UI. The local search (which Samsung laughably calls Finder) is terribly slow and inaccurate.

OVERALL RATING (3/5)
This phone is a big disappointing. It's sad to see Samsung using fake specifications to lure potential buyers. This strategy may boost Samsung sales for a short time, but will wean away customers from Samsung permanently.

WHERE TO BUY THE PHONE FROM
Even though we wouldn't recommend that you buy this phone, it is available for purchase from Amazon.in: https://amzn.to/35kcd9u