Samsung Galaxy M31 Android Smartphone Review

Samsung Galaxy M31 Android  Smartphone Review

Samsung Galaxy M31 comes with a Super AMOLED panel. It’s brightness peaks to 547 nits, And it’s arguably one of the best in the segment, after all this is what Samsung does so well. Next, when it comes to design, The Galaxy M31has an Elegant looking design, not too flashy nor fancy, it just looks elegant which some people might like. It does attract fingerprints & amp; unfortunately, they did not even include a case in the box. Another point that is worth mentioning is that the weight of the phone is impressive because it has a 6000mah battery. And a few things I do not like are, I am not a fan of this oval-shaped fingerprint scanner, yet they continue to put the same thing after so many iterations. 

Speaking of fingerprint scanner, It is quick in unlocking the phone and even the face unlock is quick and it does unlock immediately in pitch dark conditions as well which is impressive. But I would recommend to use the fingerprint scanner because it is more secure. The most impressive part of Samsung Next when it comes to Performance, the impressive aspect is its memory management. Memory management is excellent. Usually, memory management on Samsung phones is not that great especially when you compare it with other phones in this segment but this time they improved it. They made a great choice by including 6GB RAM for the base variant. 

When it comes to the gaming part it is not the best in this segment. When it comes to battery life, this is Samsung Galaxy M31’s USP, no other phone in this segment offers this level of battery performance. It lasted me for 2 days and I think the only way you can kill the battery in a day is probably by playing Pubg all day. The provided charger takes 2 hours 40 minutes to charge the phone from 15-100%, which is probably the only disadvantage of having such a huge battery. 

Now let’s talk cameras, The low light selfie is good, it has got a good amount of detail barring some softening in certain areas like the forehead, apart from that it’s a pretty good low light selfie. Moving to the Daylight selfie they’re really good, especially the wide-angle selfie has no exposure issues whereas if you look at the standard selfie the sky in the background is a little overexposed. Rant starting in 3,2,1. But with portrait selfie you’ll get an average image as there’s no HD selfie available and this is the problem because even if the HD selfie is available for standard selfie, it’s not the default option, I mean you can switch to it, but why does Samsung want its users to take average selfies. I know it just takes a swipe to switch to higher resolution selfie but why not put that as default. Let’s be honest, Whoever from the Samsung’s team decided okay let’s go with it has probably no clue what he is doing. The reason why I am ranting about this is because there are so many people who have complained that an entry-level Smartphone takes better selfies than the M31, seriously go read the reviews. Moving to the rear camera under low lighting conditions, there is noise even in the highlights, I mean I understand if there’s noise in the shadows but there’s noise even where there is ample amount of light. And this applies with the shots taken in night mode as well. So yeah the M31 is absolutely struggling in low light scenarios. But in daylight, this is where the GalaxyM31 shines, the colours are vibrant and sometimes look boosted to my liking, I personally like natural-looking images. Pictures taken Indoors is the same as well, this buddha picture is beautiful and it’s really sharp, very impressed with how it turned out. This is a wide-angle image and It’s wide enough and on par with most phones in this segment. When it comes to 64MP image, the only issue I found is, it doesn’t have great dynamic range, especially for this sunset image, 

Moving to macro shots, It’s just terrible 😒 Is there any other way I could describe it. Here’s a comparison with Redmi Note 8 Pro that was launched in 2019. As you can clearly notice that I am not very close to the subject as well. Yet the M31 is absolutely struggling. 

Next, let’s talk about the video capabilities of the M31. As you can see the video looks Beautiful and It also can shoot in 4K, which many phones do not. Moving to the video from the rear camera, the 1080p footage is too stable. I don’t know for me it felt like the footage is too stable and I’m probably the only one who’s complaining that a video is too stable. 

So who should be buying the Samsung GalaxyM31? Well, let’s see, Do you want a Gaming phone? Then M31 is not the phone for you. Do you want a camera-centric phone? Then the M31 is not a great option. Do you want a great display? Then yes the M31 is arguably the best option in this segment. Do you want a phone with great battery life? In that case, no other phone is better than the M31. But what’s the point of having great battery life when the phone is average at doing everything else? You can probably have great entertainment experience thanks to the Super AMOLED display & Huge battery.  But apart from that theM31 is mostly average in all other departments. But if you want a phone that is the best value for your money, then Poco X2 and Realme X2 are two of the best phones in the mid-range segment.  Thank You.😀😀😀😀

POCO X2 Android Smartphone Full Review

POCO X2 Android Smartphone Full Review

Here is my take on the POCO X2 after using it for 3 months. it also gives the Smartphone some time to mature. By that time some of the early bugs are ironed out with software updates, and it also gives us a fairly good idea of how the hardware is going to hold up over time. Before getting started, let us gets a few things straight, this is not the successor of the POCO F1. It did come out almost 18 months after the POCO F1, but it doesn’t come with flagship specs. If we are being honest, it not even a POCO phone, to begin with. It is, in fact, a re-branded Redmi K30. But being re-branded doesn’t take away what it actually offers.

 So what does the POCO X2 offer? A 6.67inch display with 120Hz refresh rate, Snapdragon 730G processor, 64 megapixel Sony IMX686 sensor as its primary camera, a 4500mAhbattery, and Glass sandwich design, at a starting price of Rs.16,999. This is the new price after the recent hike in GST rates by the Indian Government. I got this phone on the launch day at Rs.15, 999, but even at its new price of Rs.16, 999, POCO X2 offers you a lot of value for your money. Well now that you know I like this phone. 

Let us start with the design and build quality. To begin with, it is a huge Smartphone with a 6.67-inch display and it has gorilla glass 5 at the front and back. So design-wise, it is already a huge leap over the plastic back of the POCO F1. I was never too fond of the plastic back on the F1, so big thumbs up to POCO for putting the glass back on the X2. It makes it feel so much more premium for its price. I have said that it is a big phone, but how big exactly is? Here is a size comparison with the iPhone11 Pro Max which is the biggest of all the iPhones Apple launched last year; this should give you some idea of the scale. While this size means we do get a big display and more room inside the device for a bigger battery. But I still think phones with 6 or 6.2-inch displays are the right size for most people hands. It does get a slight curve to the back, which makes it a bit easier to hold, but for my average-sized hands, it is definitely a 2handed Smartphone. Now the frame where you actually hold the phone looks like anodized aluminium, but it is in fact made of polycarbonate or plastic. The chases inside the phone are aluminium, but this frame is Plastic. We get Gorilla Glass 5 protection at the front and back, and in my experience, it is surprisingly resilient against scratches. On some of the other phones with gorilla glass5, I have seen a few micro scratches show up with time, but not on the POCO X2. At the back, the camera module is surrounded by this circular optical illusion, which looks like a dome or a carved sphere from certain angles. It is a nice design choice to separate the POCO X2 from all other glass back phones. These Cameras stick out quite a bit, and the phone does rattle a bit if you place it on the table, but only if you tap on top left or right corner. But when a phone is placed on a table, you are more likely to tap on the bottom part, and while doing so, it doesn’t rattle. If you want it to stay flat, just put the case that comes in the box. It protects the camera hump, and has a lip at the front to keep the display raised and protected. This case also helps the back from gathering fingerprints, so most of the time; I used my phone with it. At 208 grams, it is not exactly on the lighter side, but the weight is distributed very well throughout the phone, so it doesn’t feel top or bottom-heavy. It sports a P2i nano-coating, which means it is splash resistant and can withstand some light drizzle, but don’t use it in heavy rain or don’t take it for a swim, because it is not completely waterproof, and any kind of water damage is not covered under warranty.

The most marketed feature of the POCO X2 is the Reality Flow 120Hz high refresh rate display. It is an IPS LCD panel, and it supports HDR10 playback. Although it is an LCD panel and not an OLED one, it does manage to reproduce very accurate colour and wide viewing angles. While it is not the brightest LCD display, it gets bright enough to be easily viewable in outdoor lighting conditions. The highlighting feature here is the higher120Hz refresh rate. This makes the phone feel so much smoother and faster. Now I have shown it to a few of my friends and there were mixed reactions. Some of them noticed the difference right away, and others didn’t even feel that it is anything different, even when I switched it from 60 to 120Hz in front of them. I for one can tell the difference between60 and 120Hz, and I am glad that companies are pushing this tech out to sub Rs.20, 000 Smartphone. If you don’t like this mode or if you want to prolong the battery life, you can switch back to 60Hz. It’s a huge display, so it is great for playing games and consuming media. There are dual punch hole style cutouts because there are 2 front-facing cameras on this phone. Through software, POCO makes it look like it is a single pill-shaped cut out like on the Samsung Galaxy S10 Plus. But these are in fact 2 separate cutouts, and there is a screen between the two, which is coloured black via software. While this might lead many people in believing that it is a longer cutout, the effect would have been more believable it was an AMOLED display. The notch is still smaller than what we had on the POCO F1, and after a day or 2; I didn’t find it to be intrusive at all. It is definitely noticeable because we are used to looking at the top right to check the battery %, but as I said, it is not too intrusive. Now since it’s an LCD panel we don’t get an in-display fingerprint sensor. Frankly, I am glad for this because the in-display fingerprint sensors on budget Smartphone are not that good, to begin with. So the fingerprint sensor on the POCO X2 is placed on its side, under the volume up and down buttons, and it also doubles as a power button. 

From within the settings menu, you can either set it to read your fingerprint when you press the button, or you can even make it read your fingerprint just as you tap on it, which is a bit faster. This fingerprint sensor is very fast and accurate. Although it is more accurate than the in-display fingerprint sensor and is easier to reach then the rear on, I still think it is placed a bit high for my hands to comfortably reach it. Since it’s a tall phone, I would have liked it to be placed a cm or so lower. Anyways, I still like this placement. We already saw that the volume buttons are above this fingerprint sensor/power button. At the top, there is a noise-cancelling microphone and an IR blaster, which lets you use this phone as a remote controller for your home appliances. On the left side, there is the SIM card tray. It is a hybrid SIM tray, which means you can either use 2 nano sim cards or a nano-SIM card and a microSD card at a time. And at the bottom, we have the speaker grill on the left, a microphone, USB type C port for charging and data transfer and everyone’s beloved 3.5mm headphone jack on the right. I am more of a wireless audio person, but if you like listening to your music via wired earphones, output via this audio jack is of very high quality. The speaker on this phone can also get pretty loud, but just like with most budget Smartphone, it lacks the depth at higher volumes and might sound a bit tinny. 

Coming to the cameras. Primary one gets the 64-megapixel SONY IMX686 sensor with F/1.8 aperture and a 26mm lens. Then there is an 8-megapixel sensor with a13mm ultra-wide-angle lens and F/2.2 aperture. Followed by a 2-megapixel sensor with F/2.4aperture and a macro lens. And finally, there is another 2-megapixel depth sensor with F/2.4 aperture. To put it in simple terms, Cameras on the POCO X2 are the best on any Smartphone under Rs.20,000. Now the macro camera is getting quite a bit of heat since the last couple of weeks. Sure it's just a 2-megapixel sensor, but when you think about it, it needs to capture a very tiny part of the scene, and as far as the focus is set properly, it doesn’t really matter how many details are in the remaining part go the image, because most of the times those parts are out of focus anyway. I definitely agree that having higher resolution would be better, but I don’t think this kind of lens needs to have a multiple digit megapixel count. You might not agree with me, and that is totally fine because if you know what you are doing with it, even a 2-megapixel macro camera can take amazing looking images. Although it gets 2 front-facing cameras, and one of them has a 20-megapixel sensor, selfies from the POCO X2 are not the best. There are some other Smartphone at a lower price, which does a better job than this. But it makes up for it by taking amazing videos. POCO X2 can take electronically stabilised4K 30fps videos, and these videos look specialized. 

A part of why the POCO X2 is so good at taking images is the image signal processing capability of the Snapdragon 730G processor. It is paired with Adreno 618 GPU for smoother graphics, and you can choose from either 6 or 8GB of RAM, coupled with either 64, 128or 256GB of built-in storage. Overall performance of this phone is very smooth. App opening and switching is a breeze, and since the G in the 730G processor stand for gaming, the gaming performance of this phone is really good. Games that support higher refresh rate of120Hz on a Smartphone are just s treat to play on this phone. POCO X2 not only shows better benchmark scores than the competing phones in its price range, but the overall daily performance also shows that it is a very capable Smartphone. There are a few frame drops in the 120Hz mode if you are pushing it for a long time, but it doesn’t happen too often. This was a major issue when the phone was new, but with software updates, POCO has fixed the issue. The phone does get a bit warm if I use the camera for a long time or after playing a few games, but I won’t say it got so hot that I would be worried or anything like that. A little bit of heat is expected, especially in the summer season, like we are in right now. As long as we are on the topic of issues, many people had a few of them with the battery on this phone. 

There were complains that even with a 4500mAhbattery, their phone won’t last long enough on a single charge and that they even faced ideal battery drain. While I got 5 and a half to 6 hours of screen on time with 120Hz mode on all the time, I think I could have made the battery last longer by switching to 60Hz. I still think the battery optimization should have been better because a battery this large should last for at least a day and a half. But then again, I was comparing its battery with the Note 9 Pro, which had a much larger battery. I did face the ideal battery drain issue, where my phone was losing close to 13-14 per cent of battery overnight, this issue has since been fixed, and overnight now it looses just 2-3% of the battery. When it’s time to charge it up, we get a 27watt charger in the box, which is pretty quick. Although there is a glass back, there is no wireless charging, but for this price, we don’t even expect phones to pack in this feature. POCO X2 packs in all the necessary sensors like the ambient light and proximity sensor, gyroscope, accelerometer, IR sensor, GPS, Bluetooth 5.0, wifi 5.0, dual VOLTE and it also gets FM radio, which is very important to some people.

 Coming to the software side of things. Even if this is technically a Xiaomi phone, POCO X2 runs a version of MIUI 11 that is specifically tweaked for POCO Smartphone, on top of Android 10. Now since it is still technically a version of MIUI 11, there are a few aesthetic similarities, but the POCO launcher has a few new features of its own. Well, first of all, there are no spam ads on the UI of this POCO X2. That being said, you will still see the seeds if you open Mi browser or Mi videos app, so the best thing to do is download Google apps like chrome, as soon as you get this phone, and never use the preinstalled Mi apps. There is an app drawer, where apps are classified according to their category or you can even group them by colours if you think that makes it for you to find them. This not unique to the POCO X2, as the POCO launcher is available on the Google Play store, and you can install it on any android Smartphone. There are a few good features on this UI, but I am still not a big fan of MIUI in any form, so given a chance I would definitely install a different launcher on this phone, and make it look more like Google Pixel. While the experience was not all that smooth when this phone first came out, there have been a few software updates since, and everything seems pretty smooth now. So my overall experience has been pretty smooth with this phone. I did not encounter any performance issues or excessive heating issues, so it has been smooth sailing for me. Ya about the frame drops I mentioned, as rarely as they occur because the normal experience is so smooth, those drops stand out like as our candy to my eyes. And if POCO or Xiaomi could just stop the shady ads and ton of notifications altogether, the experience would be so much better. The best thing you can do now is to not use their apps altogether, and turn off all the notifications for their apps. If you are ready to use a huge phone, and you want the best Smartphone under Rs.20,000 right now, I think you are going to love the POCO X2. Big display with 120Hz refresh rate is not only amazing for playing games, but it offers an overall amazing experience with very good brightness levels and a good amount of contrast with accurate colours.

Snapdragon 730G processor ensures a smooth experience overall, and the cameras are simply the best in this price range. POCO has proved that if there is an issue on the software side of things, they are fast enough to push out updates to fix it. All of this makes the POCO X2 the perfect Smartphone for anyone willing to spend Rs.17,000. That is it for this video guys. Please subscribe our website with email id in given subscription option given (right hand) on the page. So, that you can get out the latest review on time without any delay. Take care.😊😊😊😊

Nokia 7.2 Android Smartphone Review

Nokia 7.2 Android Smartphone Review

The Nokia 7.2 is closer to the entry-level end of the smartphone pool, which is actually saying a lot considering its feature set. At just over $300 from stores like Wal-Mart and newegg.com, you may find your needs met by the phone which puts the "ok" in Nokia.

 I'll explain it (upbeat music). Right now the most important thing you need to know about the Nokia 7.2 is that it is an Android One phone. If you don't know what that means, you're going to get an Android phone which is guaranteed to receive at least two years of updates to the Android operating system, which ensures you have the latest features and security improvements during that course of time. This also means you're not gonna get a bunch of carrier or manufacturer bloatware, so you'll be getting as close to the stock, pure Google Android experience as possible. Besides being a Pixel phone. The Nokia 7.2 ships with Android 9.0 Pie but the official timeline for it to be updated to Android 10 is sometime in the first quarter of 2020. We'll see. So, now that you understand what makes this an Android One device, let's take a look at the hardware and see if that helps you decide if it's the one for you.

 I'm reviewing the charcoal variant of the phone, which is also available in cyan, green and ice. The phone is wrapped in Gorilla Glass 2.5D, which isn't the high suspect for Gorilla Glass, but it's okay. You'll get a 6.3 inch full HD plus LCD display, that's 1080x2280 pixels, which is this tall 16x9 aspect ratio. It does support HDR 10 and I have to say, that this is not a bad looking display at all. The phone is available with either four or six gigabytes of RAM. My version is the one with 128 gigabytes of internal storage, and six gigabytes of RAM. The volume rocker and power button are on the right side of the phone. One of the design elements on the phone I enjoyed was that the power button doubles as a notification LED. It pulses and glows white when you have new notifications, but if you aren't feeling that, you can turn it off in the settings. On the left side of the phone, you'll get a micro SDXC slot, and depending on what you buy, you'll have either a single or dual SIM slot. Below that is the Google Assistant button, which I turned off as I always do, because I have a tend encrypt activate it by accident often. Top of the phone, you'll find a microphone and 3.5-millimetre headphone jack. Bottom of the phone, you'll find a mic, a USB-C charge port and the speakers. The phone comes equipped with a 35 hundred milliamp-hour battery, which Nokia says you should get two days out of, but I didn't find that to be true for me. With their adaptive battery technology, your battery life should get better over time, but initially, my results were just mediocre with me hitting about 20%left at the end of my days, which should be obviously a lot higher if you're gonna get two days out of it. 

Let's talk about these cameras next. The front of the phone is where you'll find a 20-megapixel quad pixel camera, which takes some pretty solid portrait and your standard selfies. Portrait modes can produce some very nice selfies, with beauty mode activated. But that software-based background blur can be aggressive at times. As you can see in some of these photos around my beard, and the sides of my forehead where the light blooms where it hits. In addition to that, you get a pro model on the front camera, which is something you don't see on many phones. And something I am a big fan of. You will also have some options to choose from in that front-facing camera, which will affect how background lighting looks as it's blurred out. I played with this in a few different environments and I found that unless you have very specific lighting, this isn't gonna be a feature which you'll probably use all that often. The back of the phone, you're gonna get Zees Optics for the 48-megapixel wide-angle lens, and an 8-megapixel ultra-wide lens. Additionally, you'll have a 5-megapixel depth sensor lens for effects. The images from the 48-megapixel lens produce photos with solid colour reproduction. But in low light, they can be a bit noisy, but the overall noise I experienced with the camera, is persistent there. The interesting difference found in the photos in terms of noise was that the use of portrait mode seemed to produce deeper blacks with less noise in low light conditions. You lose some image sharpness by utilizing portrait mode, but as you can see, in these image comparisons, you will notice the deeper blacks of the bars, while also seeing that the lettering in the signs is not as sharp. Overall, the camera's produce images which I think most people will be happy with. If you are a photographer looking for a solid point and shoot, you're probably not looking here anyway. If there's anything overtly negative to point out about the camera, it's that it actually has noticeable lag as you move through the different modes and it isn't long, but it isn't instant like some competitors. (Easy listening music) The software experience with the Nokia 7.2 is actually better than okay. 

The fingerprint sensor around back, it worked reliably and consistently, and the face unlocks functionality was fast and reliable as well. Though the phone uses the Snapdragon 660 chipset with Adreno 512 graphics processing, moving between screens and animations are smooth and fast. As a reviewer, I get to play with a lot of phones. Many of the high-end flagship models, so using this phone you do notice that it isn't quite as fast as some costing hundreds more, but we also have to remember, I think that the average user doesn't have as many phones go through their hands. And a phone like this, which may seem slower than others, still moves at a clip fast enough that you aren't going to be waiting for apps to launch. It isn't instant, but it isn’t 56k dial-up either. You've got mail! The overall interface uses a card-based design language. This is an Android One device after all. So swiping from the bottom to the top of the navigation bar, the dot will open up the app drawer when you're on the home screen. And going only a quarter of the way up brings you to the app switcher, which also shows your five recently launched apps on the bottom of the screen. Moving between apps in the app switcher is lightning fast. Pressing the home button takes you back to the home screen.

 Swiping left to right also switches you between apps with wonderful quickness. This phone does not have rise to wait but does have tap to wait, which I found to be hit or miss. I'll chock that more up to muscle memory on my part than anything because these taps to wait for phones have a rhythm to them. And it could just be me getting used to the cadence, which will wait for the phone consistently. When getting into the notification, shade options, and the menu options, you'll find that there is not a whole lot to look at. Some phones allow you to customize everything to the nth degree, but you're not really going to see that with this phone. With the Nokia 7.2. I don't think that's a negative thought. Some folks don't want to spend all their time playing with icon shapes and colours and that's okay. One oddity in the menu with this phone though, and this is, you see this in a lot of Android One stock, close to stock Android phones is when you switch to dark mode, the menu stays white. Notifications, the shade goes dark automatically but that's it. When in the display settings, it allows you to change the theme to the "dark theme", emphasis on the word "theme". Shouldn't that mean that everything else on the system level is affected? Nope! Want dark mode in your messages app? You have to enable it. Phone dialer. Enable it. Chrome. Enable it. And therein lies the disconnect. This is an Android One phone, but it is still a Nokia device

So, some system apps follow super changes while others which seem like system apps, due to the lack of bloatware and Nokia OS enhancements, well, those others may seem like system apps, but they're Google apps. And you'll have to go into each one, one by one, and turn on dark mode. (upbeat music playing softly) Okay, okay! Maybe not. Maybe not. So, "OK" is in the middle of "Nokia" and that kinda says it all for this device. It's pretty much stock Android with no user interface enhancements. And for those who don't want to spend their lives customizing their phone, that's "OK". Photos overall are "OK". Battery life, for me, it so far has been "OK". But at around $300, your bank account will be "OK" after you buy this phone. Instead of nagging you for spending money, you didn't really have, on a phone with 300 features you aren't really going to use. Okay?  Thank You. 😊😊😊😊