Source: techradar.com
The Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite entered a very saturated mid-range smartphone market with the Galaxy Note 10 Lite. This allowed the Korean giant to close the niche of flagships with slightly reduced characteristics. If the S20 is too expensive for you, the S10 Lite can be a viable alternative.
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If you can live without options like 5G, higher refresh rates, water resistance, wireless charging, optical zoom, then you can save a lot of money. This is what Samsung engineers were guided by when creating the S10 Lite.
The build quality remains the same. You get a great AMOLED display, a very good camera, a big battery, and headroom (the fastest mobile processor in 2019).
Design
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Samsung has been releasing premium smartphones for years, so there are no surprises from the S10 Lite – it’s a nice looking smartphone, but falls short of the flagships of 2020.
The display has become flat, but still impressive. This is a large screen with a diagonal of 6.7 inches with a resolution of 1080×2400 pixels and an aspect ratio of 20:9. It supports HDR10+. In fact, many people prefer flat displays that don’t fold around the edges. The diagonal could be called large if the trend towards huge diagonals did not persist everywhere.
Despite its affordability, the price tag has not been reflected in the materials: it still feels premium and well-built. We especially liked the prism effect on the back. By the way, it is made of plastic.
The smartphone has not been certified for IP68, so there is no need to wait for protection against water and dust.
The power button is on the right and duplicates the Bixby launch button. The volume buttons are a little higher. Below is a USB-C port and a single speaker. The fingerprint scanner is built into the screen.
Display
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We have already mentioned that the display diagonal on the Galaxy S10 Lite is 6.7 inches and the resolution is 1080×2400 pixels. This gives a density of 394 pixels per inch, which is much less than on the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus. However, you can see individual pixels only by bringing the smartphone close to your eyes.
There are no major flaws in the display. For all activities, it fits equally well: from surfing on youtube to viewing photos and navigating. Deep blacks and high brightness are obvious benefits of an OLED display that you can see right away.
In the settings, you can choose a natural display mode and more saturated, as well as manually adjust the temperature through the slider.
Samsung hasn’t specified a refresh rate for the display, so it’s most likely the default 60Hz. On the current flagships, higher rates are held in high esteem: 90 and 120 Hz. As with pixel density, you won’t feel the difference unless you’re moving from a smartphone with a high refresh rate.
Camera
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At this stage in the evolution of smartphones, we can safely talk about the small difference between the best mid-range and flagship cameras: everything that is not in the low price range will shoot relatively well, and the Galaxy S10 Lite is no exception.
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The Galaxy S10 Lite comes with a 48-megapixel main sensor, 12-megapixel ultra wide-angle camera, and a 5-megapixel macro camera. The front camera is a single 32-megapixel camera. The only thing missing is the optical zoom. Ultra-wide does not distort angles and colors. In general, his work can be assessed as a solid five.
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In general, the composition of the cameras is very good. The corners are sharp, the colors are bright, HDR works correctly, the detail is not lame. Perhaps the colors are slightly oversaturated compared to the best camera phones, but again, you need to make allowances for the price.
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In other words, the Galaxy S10 Lite is capable of good shots. They are done quickly, autofocus does not slow down. All types of photos come out decently. The resulting pictures are more than enough for posting on the social network.
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Low-light shots also lack detail. However, the less light, the more dirt and smearing will be. There is a night mode in which you need a little more time to take pictures. With it, you can achieve lightening of particularly dark areas, but the noise in places comes out very strong.
Sure, the S10 Lite doesn’t have the best camera on the market, but it gets the job done.
Hardware stuffing
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Under the hood, the Galaxy S10 Lite has a Snapdragon 855 processor (the best processor for Android smartphones last year), 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of internal memory. The latter can be increased thanks to the microSD card slot. Not the top specs in 2020, but not the weakest either. The power is definitely enough for most people.
There is no 5G on this smartphone, but this is unlikely to be a big problem given the uncertainty in the timing of the launch of these networks in USA. And almost everyone should have enough modern LTE.
Keep in mind that the components in the Galaxy S10 Lite were flagship in 2019, so you really get good performance for a reasonable price. This is also confirmed by tests. In Geekbench, the smartphone scored 717 points in the single-core test and 2521 points in the multi-core test. In the OpenCL test, he got 2411 points. This puts the device on par with the Galaxy S10 and Note10.
Performance is, of course, not only about tests. Even a whole bunch of open tabs and heavy applications will not make this smartphone slow down. Games load quickly and run smoothly.
Battery
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Battery life is difficult to estimate reliably, since all people have different scenarios for using a smartphone. Our S10 Lite was dropping at 60% every day, which is pretty good.
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Undoubtedly, a lot of factors affect the duration of work from a single charge. The battery capacity is 4500 mAh. The Galaxy S20 Plus has the same capacity. In our two-hour video playback test, the smartphone went from 100 percent to 86, which is a very good result. When averaged, this gives approximately 14 hours of continuous video viewing.
When using navigation or in games, of course, you will not get such autonomy, but even for one day of intensive use it will definitely be enough.
In what cases is it worth taking?
- If you value money and do not buy flagships, but at the same time you need a smartphone with good characteristics
- You need a large and clear display
- Battery life is critical
When should you stop buying?
- You need 5G support. It is unlikely that 5G networks will appear everywhere in USA in the near future, but anything can happen
- You need the best camera. The camera on the S10 Lite is not bad, but clearly not the best among smartphones. If you need optical zoom, then it is better to look at the flagships
- You need a clean version of Android. OneUI isn’t bad, but it comes with some of Samsung’s apps.
Verdict
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The Samsung Galaxy S10 Lite is a well-balanced smartphone with all the features you need at an attractive price. It will be a great alternative to flagships for fans of the brand and for those who do not like and do not want to buy devices from Chinese manufacturers for any reason.