Samsung Galaxy A5

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) coming soon

A new Galaxy A5 smartphone is on the horizon. The first phone from the South Korean manufacturer since the Note 7 explosion debacle, the latest A5 looks to be a significant upgrade from last year's model, sticking to the mid-range price point.

For starters, this year's A5 will be running Android 6.0 Marshmallow straight out of the box, an octa-core 1.9GHz Exynos processor and 3GB of RAM. There's also twice the onboard storage at 32GB. You can see the specs breakdown below.

	Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)	Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017)
Android version	Android 5.1 Lolipop	Android 6.0 Marshmallow
Display	5.1in 1,920 x 1,080 Super AMOLED	5.1in 1,920 x 1,080 Super AMOLED
Processor	Octa-core 1.6GHz Exynos 7580	Octa-core 1.9GHz Exynos 7880
Memory	2GB RAM	3GB RAM
Storage	16GB	32GB

What does this mean if you're thinking of picking up the 2016 A5? Well, it might be best to wait until the release of the latest model - at the very least, last year's handset should see a nice price reduction. The latest should be a better performer too, should you care about that. We'll be reviewing the 2017 Galaxy A5 very soon, watch this space.

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) review

From a distance, you could almost mistake the new Galaxy A5 (2016) for Samsung's year-old flagship, the Galaxy S6. The A5 has a slightly boxier, more rectangular profile than its S6 cousin, but with its metal frame, squared off sides, front-facing fingerprint scanner and gorgeous glass rear, it's not exactly hard to see which phone the A5 gets its good looks from.

Thankfully, the one thing the A5 (2016) hasn't inherited from the S6 is its premium price, as you can currently get one for around £290 SIM-free or £23-per-month on a contract. That puts it in prime Nexus 5X and OnePlus 3 territory, but there's no denying which smartphone I'd rather have in my pocket given the choice. Of course, its glass back means it's rather prone to picking up messy fingerprints most of the time, but its hard, slim frame does feel immensely comfortable in your hand and its narrow bezels make it easy to grip despite its somewhat slippery rear surface.   

The most pleasing thing about the A5 (2016), though, is that it doesn't fall into the same spec-sharing trap as last year's A5, which was essentially just a larger version of the miniature Galaxy A3. This year's A5 still has plenty in common with the A3 (2016), most notably its design and rear camera sensor, but it stops short of using the same processor, which was one of the main reasons why last year's A5 wasn't quite such good value as the 2015 A3.

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) review: Performance

This time Samsung's used an octa-core 1.6GHz Samsung Exynos 7580 chip and 2GB of RAM for the A5 (2016), which gives it a significant boost in speed over its A3 (2016) sibling. In Geekbench 3, for example, the A5 (2016) scored 727 in the single core test and 3,558 in the multicore test, the latter of which was around 1,400 points faster than the quad-core-based A3 (2016).

It's still got some way to go before it beats the OnePlus 3, which had respective scores of 2,371 and 5,416, but it's more or less on a level playing field with the Nexus 5X and just about inches in front of the Moto G4. Indeed, Samsung's Android 6.0.1 TouchWiz interface felt lovely and quick during day-to-day use, and scrolling through menu settings rarely left me waiting for anything to happen. Web browsing was also very smooth, and it showed few signs of stuttering even on media-heavy web pages despite its somewhat mediocre Peacekeeper score of 631.

Where the A5 (2016) stumbles slightly is its gaming performance. With a score of just 295 frames (or 4.7fps) in the offscreen Manhattan 3.0 test in GFX Bench GL, the A5 (2016) isn't best suited to playing intensive 3D games. Hearthstone, for instance, wasn't wholly unplayable, but animations and special effects were very jerky and caused the game to judder quite a bit before I could lay down my next card. Simpler games like Threes, though, were absolutely fine, so it should still be able to handle the vast majority of Google App Store games.