Samsung A5 - #NotTheNorm

There are many factors one must consider before choosing the mobile communication device that is right for them. For starters, what does your star sign say? Is mercury in retrograde? Maybe it's not the right time to be investing in electronics. Do you have telephonophobia? If so having a phone around you at all times would spiral your life into psychotic decay. Are you a celebrity who uses mobile phones as missiles to whip personal assistants into shape? Then the weight and material is important. Are you obsessed with the noun ‘Amoled’ because you've seen the term ‘Amoled display’ on all these Samsung ads and now you are just dying to get your hands on one despite having no idea what it means? Well then, we're getting closer to finding the right phone for you. And if you have, like most people in our day and age, Nomophobia (fear of being out of mobile phone contact) and treat your personal assistant with some respect, then the Samsung A5 - part of Samsung’s new affordable A-series - may be just the one for you!

The first thing we like to do when we get our hands on a new phone to review is throw it as hard as we can at our editor’s face. Now we have faced problems with this in the past. Whateverberries are simply too bulky to get the right kind of velocity on the throw and it will fall short. On the other hand, iWhatevers’ screen shatters to bits on impact with said editor’s face, falling with a faint “I’m sorry, I cannot find any results for that,” echoing into oblivion.

The A5 though, wow, full metal body. It sounds cool, like Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and it feels even cooler. It’s the first ever fully aluminum framed Samsung smart-phone and it is without exaggeration the slickest feeling phone we have ever laid our grubby little hands on. It’s light, incredibly light at just 123 grams. It’s durable; physically and emotionally, and it’s shape is uncomplicated, no superfluous curves - just a beautiful one piece oblong with a 5 inch display that slips perfectly into our slim jeans, but more importantly flies through the air with majestic pace before hitting editor straight on target without as much as a scratch on the frame or screen.

Second, let us get to this mythical theatrical pixel performance that goes by the name Amoled. The A5 which runs on Android Kitkat 4.4 has SUPER AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 720 x 1280 pixels. Amoled means Active-matrix organic light-emitting diode. Got it? No? Okay, basically it is a hybrid display technology that pairs the active matrix backplane from a traditional TFT display with an OLED display. As a result of their active matrix natures, AMOLED displays have faster pixel switching response times than do traditional OLED displays, which are prone to ghosting when displaying fast moving animations. Fehemt keda? La2a? Yoooh! Tayeb. Essentially the display generates a brighter and more dynamic picture, with rich colors, deep and crisp picture rendering - perfect for playing Selfie with its 13 Megapixel camera, flapping birds and watching Smurfs, or whatever you kids are into these days.

Since we now have full confidence in the phones physical ability and aesthetics, we decided to test out another of the Samsung A5’s superpowers; its wide selfie feature. Unfortunately due to our aggressive nature as exemplified above we don’t have many friends to test it out with, but if we did, the wide selfie feature would allow us to squeeze more people into a selfie than we could ever dream of, all those awkward moments of getting the tallest guy to the front or the shame of using a selfie stick vanish with this idiosyncratic style of shot. It worked splendidly; the shots were so wide we felt lonelier than ever…

The Samsung A5 is available in midnight black, pearl white, champagne gold and platinum silver. Find out where your nearest Samsung dealership is here.