Samsung Galaxy M20 review

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Battery life

One of the biggest talking points of the Galaxy M20 is its gigantic 5000mAh battery, which also rare from Samsung. On top, we’ve spoken about the quest to balance raw power and battery life earlier. Having a big battery on a budget phone has slowly become a parameter which more brands like Moto, Asus have also been following after Xiaomi. 

Over a day’s usage, you get more than 12 hours of battery life on each charge after a busy day. Which also means if you’re traveling without a power source for 24 hours, the M20 can easily sail you through the journey if used calculatingly. The best part is that the Galaxy M20 supports Samsung’s adaptive fast charging via USB Type-C and also brings along a 15W fast charger in the box. During our tests, the phone went up from 30% to 80% in 60 minutes. 

Camera

The Galaxy M20 comes with a dual camera setup on the back having a 13MP primary camera on the back with f/1.9 aperture paired with a 5MP secondary sensor with f/2.2 apertures. 

Rear Camera

With everything that the M20 has to offer, a set of quality snappers would have made it a perfect phone to buy at its price. It has f/1.9 aperture and a 13MP sensor, but images are not the best we have seen with these settings. This could be due to inceptive camera software or similar, but at this point in time, it doesn’t match with the specs it has on paper.

Low light images are marred by noise. The M20 can still create good-looking scenes, but they’re not as good as we expected them to be. Colour reproduction is decent, though details and sharpness are just about average.

Normal shot

Wide-angle shot

On the other hand, daylight shots are quite impressive. Colours are slightly oversaturated, but most would find that attractive as it pops out of the display. You can expect high contrast and vibrant photos, though details are soft when zoomed in and there’s subtle noise too. The camera works best in bright sunlight, but anything less leads to a sub-par result.

Live focus mode (Day light)

It’s fair to say that it can shoot pretty Instagram photos and keep your social media needs in check. It’s just a sizeable step down from slightly pricier Samsung’s phones. The big deal is that it can click wide angle shots using the second lens, which is a rare feature on any smartphone of this price. 

The live-focus (bokeh) pictures come out quite impressive in M20. The software does a fine job at detecting depth and edges to give you a proper blur in pictures. 

Front camera

Day-light selfie

The 8MP front camera on the M20 is reminiscent of Samsung’s usual practices. The phone practically loses every detail on the face if you have shaky hands, but creates a brighter photo than most front cameras would do. It lacks details and you will end up clicking unimpressive shots in low light. Still, it has the screen flash option as a solution to the problem. But that doesn’t help much in low light. 

In good light, the result is just about decent. The selfies do not look close to the source and the skin is smoothened, which means more compromise on details. In short, the selfies might make you look good, but it’s still not the best solution for selfie fanatics.

Check the Galaxy M20 camera samples below

Image 1 of 20

Verdict

To sum up, the Samsung Galaxy M20 is a consumer’s phone. We’ve used the word balanced throughout the review, as it’s the best word to define the smartphone. 

At Rs 12,990, the 4GB RAM and 64GB storage variant offers great battery life, respectable performance, impressive multimedia performance and a lot of other positives. Of course, there are a few shortcomings like average camera performance and older version of Android, but none of them are actual deal breakers. 

Who is it for?

Although Samsung’s pitching the Galaxy M20 as a millennial’s phone, we feel it’s more than just that. In fact, it seems like an ideal proposition for masses in India ranging from the young age to elders. It’s handy, has a big display and a big battery – this answers most concerns of a majority of Indian smartphone users. Millennials? We think Samsung has to work towards solving the camera issues to make it a perfect fit for the social media generation. 

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