Samsung launched the Galaxy F62 smartphone in the ‘F Series’ in India last month, soon after the launch of M51. This comes with the same quad rear cameras, 6.7-inch Infinity-O AMOLED display, and 7000mAh battery, but replaces the Snapdragon 730G with Samsung’s own Exynos 9825 SoC that powers the company’s flagship Samsung Galaxy Note10 series. Specifications look great on paper. Is the phone worth the price? Let us dive into the review to find out.
Box Contents
- Samsung Galaxy F62 6GB RAM, 128GB storage version in Electric Green colour
- 2-pin 25W charger with Adaptive Fast Charging (5V-3A/9V-2.77A/11V-2.25A)
- USB Type-C to Type-C Cable
- Quick Start Guide and Warranty information
The phone comes with a 6.7-inch Full HD+ Infinity-O Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1080×2400 pixels at about 392 PPI, aspect ratio of 20:9. The display looks bright, thanks to 420 nits brightness, offers good color reproduction and the sunlight legibility is good as well. Since it has an AMOLED panel, it offers true blacks. The screen is protected by Corning Gorilla Glass 3.
Similar to the other Samsung phones, there is Blue light filter, which is now called Eye comfort shield. This is said to reduce eye strain by limiting the amount of blue light emitted by the screen, You can set it for sunrise to sunset and also set a custom schedule. You can change font size and style and select apps that you want to use in the full screen aspect ratio. There is also dark mode, which looks great on the AMOLED screen. You can choose from Vivid or Natural screen modes based on your preference or set the white balance manually. The phone doesn’t have DC dimming or low brightness anti-flicker mode that is present in some AMOLED screen phones in the price range. I didn’t notice any screen flicker issues in low brightness on the phone.
It doesn’t have notification LED, but there is Always on display with tap to show option that shows the AOD screen for 10 seconds after you tap the screen. You can also set a schedule. There are a lot of options to choose from such as clocks, GIF or you can download any AOD from Themes section.
On the top, there is an 32-megapixel camera in the tiny punch-hole and the earpiece is present on the top edge. The punch-hole is slightly bigger compared to some phones, but it is not intrusive. There is also a tiny space in the top left corner for the proximity sensor and the phone also has an ambient light sensor. It has gyroscope and magnetic sensor, otherwise known as magnetometer for VR. There is a small chin below the screen.
The phone has glossy plastic frame which is prone to scratches and smudges, but it is not slippery. On the right side, there is a fingerprint sensor, which doubles up as a power button, just below the volume rockers. On the left side there is a single tray that houses dual nano SIM slots and a microSD card slot that accepts cards up to 1TB. At the bottom, there is a 3.5mm audio jack, USB Type-C port, primary microphone and the loudspeaker grill
On the back, there is a quad camera module arranged in a rectangular array. There is single LED flash below the camera module. Even though the phone has a huge 6.7-inch screen, it is compact to hold. It is 9.5mm thick, same as the M51, and weighs 218 grams, compared to 215g M51. The glasstic back attracts fingerprints and is also prone to scratches with day-to-day use, but change there is a gradient finish that looks attractive. In addition to the Green colour variant that we have, the phone also comes in Blue and Grey colours. It is recommended to get a case since Samsung doesn’t provide one in the box. The overall the build quality is decent, but it can’t be compared to some of the Samsung’s A or S series phones that have a glass back. It is not splash resistant like some phones in the price range.
Camera
It has a 64-megapixel rear camera with Sony IMX682 sensor, 0.8μm pixel size and f/1.8 aperture, compared to Samsung GW1 ISOCELL Bright sensor in the predecessor. The secondary camera is 12-megapixel ultra-wide sensor, and there is a 5-megapixel depth sensor and a 5-megapixel macro sensor with f/2.2 aperture. The phone has a 32-megapixel camera on the front with Sony IMX616 sensor with f/2.2 aperture. There is Live Focus that makes use of the 5-megapixel depth sensor. You can also adjust the bokeh effect before or after the shot. There is selfie portrait option for the front camera that uses software to blur the background. There is also a wide-angle option for the front camera.
It has Auto mode, Food, Night, Panorama, Macro, Pro, Live Focus, Super Slow-mo, Slow motion and Hyperlapse as well as Pro mode to adjust ISO, shutter speed, focus, white balance and exposure manually. You can choose 64MP option from the aspect ratio settings on the top. It also has AR stickers that lets you add stickers. It also has scene optimizer, which is AI mode that automatically detects modes and you can also enable auto HDR option. The Single Take feature can now capture footage, up to 15 seconds of it, and then use AI to produce up to 14 different outputs – 10 photos and 4 videos.
The phone has Cam2API support, but there is no RAW support since it uses an Exynos processor.
Coming to the image quality, daylight shots are good, and the camera captures a good amount of detail, creates well exposed photos with good dynamic range and detailing, and dynamic range can further be improved enabling HDR mode from the settings, which automatically turns on HDR when needed. Even though the phone has a 64-megapixel sensor, the final output has 16-megapixel resolution, which is common in phones with large sensors. Autofocus speeds are fast and accurate. Ultra-wide shots from the 12MP camera is good in daylight. Even though the edges look a bit curved due to the ultra-wide lens, ‘Shape Correction’ is automatically applied that automatically crop the edges, still some images look a bit curved at the corners, which is common in wide-angle lenses.
Macro shots from the main camera is good, and there is a dedicated macro camera mode, but there is no touch to focus option in this mode since it is fixed focus, so you have to keep it in 5cm distance. Live focus is good at detecting the edges. Low-light performance is good, which can be improved further with Night mode that offers more details, but you need to keep your hand steady, since it takes two to three seconds to process. 64-megapixel shots have good amount of details, but the colours are not vibrant, and the images are about 15 to 18MB in size. Images with flash is good and is not overpowering.
The 32-megapixel front camera is good in most cases. Wide-angle mode takes images in 10-megapixel resolution after pixel binning, while the normal mode takes images in 6.5-megapixel. Software blur in the live focus mode doesn’t have good edge detection which is common in most phones with a single camera.
Check out some camera samples.
It can record videos at maximum 4K resolution at 30 fps from both front, rear and ultra-wide cameras, even though the processor is capable of shooting 1080 60 fps and 4K 60fps videos, there is no option for it. It can shoot slow motion at 720p at 480fps and there is also super slow motion, which shoots an 8-second video with 6 seconds of slow motion, and also lets you add custom music for the slow motion part. You can also enable EIS for 1080p videos. Video quality is good, and the audio crisp since it has a secondary microphone.
Software, UI and Apps
Coming to the software, the phone runs on Android 11 with Android security patch for February 2021. On the top of Android 11, it has the latest Samsung One UI 3.1, which brings several new features.
The advanced features option has Games Launcher that gathers your games downloaded from Play Store and Galaxy Apps into one place for easy access, smart pop-up view, Screenshots, direct share, motion gestures like lift to wake, double tap to wake, smart stay, smart alert that vibrates when you pick the phone up after missing calls or receiving messages, easy mute by putting your hand over the screen or turning your phone face down, one-handed mode that lets you use the phone easily with one hand, finger sensor gestures to open and close the notification panel using the fingerprint sensor, palm swipe screenshot capture, swipe to call or send messages. Dual messenger lets you sign in to a second account of social media apps and the Panic mode lets you Send SOS message by pressing the Power key three time.
The Device maintenance option lets you manage your device’s battery life, storage, RAM usage, and security all in one place. Out of 128GB (UFS 2.1) in our unit, 108GB is free. Out of 6GB LPDDR4x RAM, about 5.4GB is usable and 3GB is free when default apps are running in the background. Since this has UFS 3.0 storage, we got sequential read speeds of about 1437.18MB/s.
Apart from the usual set of utility apps and Google Apps, the smartphone comes with Facebook, Netflix and Microsoft apps such as OneDrive. There is also Samsung Max, My Galaxy and other Samsung apps. You get the option to install apps when you are setting up the phone, which you can choose not to. Unlike the Galaxy M series phones this has Samsung Pay via NFC, Samsung Pass, Secure Folder, Bixby Voice/Vision, Samsung Cloud, Easy Mode and Samsung Knox.
Fingerprint Sensor and Face unlock
The fingerprint sensor is present on the side, and it immediately unlocks the phone just by keeping your finger so that you don’t have to press it. You can add up to 3 fingerprints, and adding fingerprint is easily with few swipes. It has support for Face recognition, which doesn’t work well if the lighting is poor in the room, if you are hats, or use heavy makeup. Both these are protected by Knox security.
Music Player and FM Radio
YouTube Music is the default music player. It has equalizer, Dolby Atmos, UHQ upscaler, Surround and Tube Amp Pro sound effects that can be enabled from the settings. All these improve the audio when listening through earphones. It has FM Radio support with support for recording. That said, audio through third-party headphones is good. Loudspeaker output from the mono speaker is decent, but stereo speakers would have been better.
The phone comes with Widevine L1 support out-of-the-box so that you can enjoy HD content on Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hotstar and other streaming apps.
Dual SIM and Connectivity
The connectivity options include, Wi-Fi 802.11 ac (2.4GHz + 5GHz), VHT80 with VoWiFi for Jio and Airtel, Bluetooth v5.0 and GPS with GLONASS. It has support for USB OTG and NFC that works with supported payment apps. It has 4G connectivity with support a lot of bands and has Voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and WiFi-Calling or Vo-WiFi support for Reliance Jio, Airtel and more, but it doesn’t have support for LTE-A or Carrier Aggregation even though the . The dialer and messaging have familiar UI. Since this is a dual SIM phone, you get option to select either SIMs when calling or sending text message. Moving on, the call quality is good, and we did not face any call drops and the earpiece volume was loud. Speaker output during calls were good as well, but compared to the competitors which have stereo speakers, audio from the single bottom-ported speaker is average.
The Galaxy F62’s head SAR is 0.739 W/Kg, which is less than 1W/kg, even though the limit in India is 1.6 W/kg (over 1 g). This is less than the M51 which was 1.381 W/Kg.
Performance and Benchmarks
This is the first mid-range Samsung smartphone to be powered by Exynos 9825 7nm EUV (extreme ultra violet), which has tri-cluster architecture that uses two custom Exynos M4 cores clocked at 2.73Hz for ultimate processing power, two Cortex-A75 cores clocked at 2.4GHz for optimal performance, and four Cortex-A55 cores clocked at 1.95GHz for greater efficiency and has an integrated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). It has Mali-G76 MP12 GPU with support for Open GL ES 3.2, Open CL 2.0, as well as Vulkan 1.0 graphics, up to 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 128GB UFS 3.0 storage.
This is faster than most mid-range Snapdragon and MediaTek processors in the price range when it comes to CPU, but the GPU is not that powerful. We did not face any issues or frame drops in the graphic-intensive games. It gets a bit warm on intensive gaming and 4G data, but it doesn’t get too hot to handle. That said, check out some synthetic benchmark scores below.
Battery life
The 7000mAh battery offers brilliant battery life that lasts for 2 days even with heavy use. With average use it should last for three days. I got close to 9 hours of screen on time during my use with use of camera, videos and apps like Instagram, YouTube playback, Chrome browsing etc. mostly on Wi-Fi and ocassionally on 4G for over 2 days. Adaptive battery saving and other options will let you increase the battery life, but the performance might be affected.
In our One Charge rating, the Samsung Galaxy F62 scored 21 hours and 02 minutes, which is better than the M51 with the same 7000mAh battery, thanks to the Android 11 optimizations and more power-effecient processor. Samsung has offered USB Type-C and 25W fast charging, same as the M51. Charging with the bundled charger takes about 1 hours and 50 minutes to reach 100% from 0%, and 0 to 50% took about 50 minutes.
Conclusion
Overall, the Galaxy F62 is another solid mid-range smartphone from Samsung in the F series that retains the brilliant Infinity-O AMOLED display, 7000mAh battery from the M51 while boosting the performance with the flagship processor, adding features like Samsung Pay and Knox security. There is still no glass back, the phone lacks a splash-resistant body and stereo speakers that are a few things that needs to be compromised.
Alternatives
OnePlus Nord is an option at a slightly higher price is good option if you need a 90Hz refresh rate AMOLED screen and 5G support. The latest Redmi Note 10 Pro Max is another option if you need 120Hz refresh rate AMOLED screen, better build quality and better cameras at a cheaper rate. If you have more budget, the iQOO 3 after the price cut.
Availability
The Samsung Galaxy F62 comes in Laser Green, Laser Blue and Laser Grey colours, and is priced at Rs. 23999 for the 6GB RAM with 128GB storage and Rs. 25999 for the 8GB RAM with 128GB storage version, and is available from Flipkart and Samsung.com online as well as Reliance Digital stores and select Jio stores across India. As a part of launch offer buyers get Rs. 2500 instant cashback with ICICI Credit and Debit cards so the effective starting price of the phone is Rs. 21,499 which is a good deal.
Pros
- Brilliant Infinity-O Super AMOLED screen
- 7000mAh battery with 25W fast charging
- Good cameras
- Smooth performance
- Samsung Pay, Knox security and Secure Folder
- Dedicated Dual SIM and microSD Slots
Cons
- Back is prone to scratches
- Average low-light camera performance
- No stereo speakers
- No 60fps 1080p or 4k recording
- Might be huge and bulky for some
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