When the SAMSUNG GALAXY brand started operations, they entered the market with their budget devices but now you mostly find mid to high range devices in this lineup.
The GALAXY E5 is such a budget device with a 5-inch Super AMOLED display which is a SAMSUNG special coupled with a SNAPDRAGON 410 processor and running on stock ANDROID KIT KAT (version 4.4.4).
I’ll do a quick GALAXY e5 review so that you can decide whether it’s worth investing in 2020.
Samsung E5 Specifications
The Review
Design and Display
No matter the price something I always value in a SAMSUNG smartphone is the feel and design. Just like APPLE products have a premium feel, Samsung too does a brilliant job.
The E5 has a GORILLA glass 4 front screen with a plastic rear panel and frame. The GORILLA glass screen is super resistant to scratches and 80% of the time can survive drops onto rough surfaces from about a 1-meter height.
I’ll always trust a device backed by CORNING because I suffered from cracked screens till I switched to GORILLA Glass displays. This drastically reduces the chances of your screen shattering when dropped. While the e5 has Gorilla Glass 4 which itself is quite strong I’m thrilled to see what Corning comes up with the new Gorilla Glass Victus .
Now back to the E5, you’ll see the typical old SAMSUNG design which they used for most of their devices with the one central home button and the common 69% screen to body ratio.
The device weighs 4.23oz (120g) and has its dimension set at 5.57 x 2.76 x 0.29 in (141.6 x 70.2 x 7.3 mm). I can’t complain about the weight and it’s actually towards the light end of the weight spectrum when compared to other GALAXY devices like the Galaxy Amp Prime 3 which has a similar screen size of 5-inches.
I was quite surprised by the quality of the display. The SAMSUNG SUPER AMOLED display does wonders to the color gamut, depth, and sharpness of the images.
Processor and Software
Moving on to the core, I expected an EXYNOS chipset but instead found a SNAPDRAGON 410. The 400 series of QUALCOMM is the entry-level SoC which mostly is found on budget devices. It was made to replace the two S4 Play chipsets.
The 410 is SNAPDRAGON’S first 64-bit processor which was released in 2013. It’s pretty outdated. Unfortunately, the 410 doesn’t make it to the top of the 400 series where you’ll find the 460, 450, and 439.
The processor is supported by a strange RAM capacity of 1.5GB.
1GB too less and 2GB too much?
Straight out of the box you get ANDROID KIT KAT(version 4.4.4) and you can upgrade to ANDROID 5. I think the stripped-down ANDROID Go would have been a superb OS for this device but it was only released two years after the E5 launch.
You also get a 16GB storage which can be expanded using a MicroSD card which does into the shared slot with the nano sim.
Battery
The E5 has a non-removable lithium-Ion 2400mAh battery. SAMSUNG claims the battery can last for about 9 to 10 hours of continuous internet usage over LTE or WIFI.
I doubt that this claim is true because even smartphones nowadays with much larger battery capacities struggle to hit this mark. The battery might have been quite good back in 2015 but for today’s standards is quite a dealbreaker.
Final Verdict
The display and the design of the device are quite brilliant for the price and the two drawbacks that I see are the battery and processor used.
You probably are thinking, isn’t that like the 2 main important aspects of the device?
True, but I’m not saying that it’s completely useless. In comparison to today’s standards, the processor and battery don’t hit the mark. However, for basic use and to accomplish simple daily tasks the device is more than capable. Nothing too rough though.
