Samsung Galaxy A16 Review: Wise, smart, and old school at heart!

The Galaxy A16 is Samsung’s latest offering in the highly competitive mid-segment section of the Indian smartphone market. The phone comes with a starting price of $249/Rs.18,999 for the base variant and has some Samsung staples – a brilliant, tall AMOLED display, a big-ish battery, a decent main camera megapixel count, and years of assured software updates. And while this is a good combination, it is an extensively tried and tested (read ‘dated’) one – it is basically the kid who is wise and old school at heart. So, does this make the Samsung Galaxy A16 the boomer smartphone of this segment, or can it actually prove its mettle and be the zoomer that it was born to be?

Samsung Galaxy A16 looks and design: Old school but solid, oh so solid!

To call the design of the Galaxy A16 ‘inspired’ would be an understatement. It speaks a design language that many Samsung smartphones are fluent in, but this one comes with some even more old-school touches. You get the tall display on the front and the shiny, reflective, glass-looking plastic back with three individual circular protruding camera lenses placed vertically, one below the other, while a tiny circular flash resides beside them. The Samsung logo is placed in the same but muted color on the lower side of the back. The back catches smudges way too easily, and keeping it tidy-looking is a task.

The Samsung Galaxy A16 comes with a 50-megapixel main sensor, which is coupled with a 5-megapixel ultrawide lens and a 2-megapixel macro one. The main sensor is the one true star of the Galaxy A16 show. It takes binned 12.5-megapixel images by default and captures very good detail in daylight conditions with a decent dynamic range. You can opt for a higher megapixel count in the settings, which would result in even more detailed but heavier files. The colors reproduced lean a bit towards the warmer side but do not look too unnatural in any way.

Human subjects are captured well, and portrait mode mostly works well, too, with a good depth of field and impressive edge detection. This is not the same for animal subjects, unfortunately – we tried taking images of our ‘very still’ dog, but there was a certain loss of clarity. The quality of images dips a bit in low light as the details get a little muddy and the edges of subjects get a bit softer, but Samsung offers a solution to this issue through its special ‘Nightography’ Night mode. It visibly sharpens low-light images and adds some oomph to otherwise washed-out colors. The phone can only record videos in 1080p but does well enough in sufficient light – nothing exceptional, but very acceptable.

The ultrawide sensor is mediocre at best. It does capture ‘more’ in terms of areas, but details get heavily compromised even in good light conditions, let alone low light. The 2-megapixel macro is not impressive at all, either. It just adds some functionality to the camera setup. That said, both these secondary cameras reproduce colors similar to the main camera, which is a major plus.

The Samsung Galaxy A16 houses a 13-megapixel camera in its waterdrop notch on the front. The camera captures skin texture well but the colours turn out a little disappointing. The quality dips further in low light, which means details get softer and colors get even paler, which is odd given Samsung’s history of slightly oversaturated photographs.

Samsung Galaxy A16 performance: Smooth sailing sailor

Displays are one of Samsung’s strong suits, and this tradition continues with the Samsung Galaxy A16. It sports a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED full HD+ display with a 90 Hz refresh rate and delivers deep blacks and punchy colors. The brightness is capped at 800 nits, but it never felt unreadable or dull, even under a harsh sun. While the 90 Hz refresh rate is lesser than the 120 Hz that is being seen in this price zone, we still would have it over the basic 60 Hz anyday. It makes your scrolling experience smoother.

The phone runs on MediaTek Dimensity 6300 chipset. This was paired in our model with 8 GB RAM and 256 GB storage, which can be expanded up to 1 TB using a microSD card. You are not going to get sky-high benchmarks here, but the phone does pretty well in every day, non-pushy circumstances. You can easily browse, text, and view content on the device without facing any lags, but push the Galaxy A16 a little, and its struggles come forth. The phone can get a few hiccups even if you try slightly intense multi-tasking, which means while light game titles cruise without any troubles, hardcore gamers will be met with disappointment, even in compromised settings. The phone temperature also gets noticeably high when pushed. It does not get alarmingly warm but can be uncomfortable.

The Samsung Galaxy A16 comes with a single loudspeaker, which is loud enough but definitely can seem disappointing given some phones in this price segment offer stereo speakers. The phone sports a physical fingerprint scanner on the side, which we initially had a bit of difficulty in locating (our thumb naturally went to the contouring on the side to unlock the phone), but once we got the hang of it, its accuracy and swiftness colored us impressed. The general performance of the phone was quite nice in terms of call quality and connectivity, and you also get a 3.5 mm audio jack on the phone, which gave us some audio relief.

Samsung Galaxy A16 Battery: Decent driver

The Samsung Galaxy A16 runs on a 5,000 mAh battery, which may seem like a big enough number on paper, given that the phone seems designed to be power-efficient rather than a performance beast. We could see slightly more than a day of normal usage on a single charge, which is kind of par for the course, although we expected a little more. Charging speed is also very much on the lower side. The phone comes with 25 W wired charging support, which is very ordinary as compared to what the competition has to offer. It goes close to 50 percent in nearly 30 minutes but takes about an hour and a half to go from zero to a hundred. This, coupled with no charger in the box, makes battery matters a bit disappointing.

Samsung Galaxy A16 software: Feature rich and promising with assured updates

The Galaxy A16 is the first Galaxy A series device to come with six years of assured OS updates, which makes it future-proof in software terms. The phone comes with Android 14 out of the box with OneUI on top. There are a number of third-party apps on the device, and the UI is feature-rich as well, but it is not overwhelmingly loaded like some of the other Android skins in the market. The promise of six years of OS upgrades sounds like a major plus on paper, but we wonder how well the phone’s performance is going to age with these future updates, given that it is not all that power-packed right out of the box. That said, it is wonderful to see long-term software updates being promised at this price point.

Samsung Galaxy A16 review verdict: A very dependable Jack of all trades

With a starting price of $250/Rs. 18,999 (8GB/ 128 GB), the Samsung Galaxy A16 comes across as a smartphone that is a good daily driver but is not a phone that will wow you in any one department – a jack of all trades, but master of none. Its performance is satisfactory in most zones, making it a solid, dependable smartphone. And it needs to be dependable, for it is surrounded by very fierce competitors.

The Poco X6 offers power-packed specs; it has a better processor, better refresh rate, stereo speakers, more megapixel numbers, and faster charging support. The CMF Phone (1) not only has a distinct design but also comes with 120 Hz refresh rate, clean UI, faster processor, and slightly faster charging speed support. Then there are the likes of the OnePlus Nord CE 4 Lite and Redmi Note 13, which are well-established smartphones in this segment. The Galaxy A16 is a phone for those looking for a dependable phone more than anything, and that too from an established brand.

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