The Samsung Galaxy A12 is designed as a phone for anyone who puts price and battery life first, because it excels on both fronts – it’s one of the cheaper smartphones you’ll find, and also has a bigger battery than most at 5,000mAh. Display Size: Measured diagonally, the screen size is 6.5" in the full rectangle and 6.4" accounting for the rounded corners. Actual viewable area is less due to the rounded corners and the camera cutout. Right out of the box, the phone feels sluggish with stuttery animations and apps that take a couple of seconds to open. Granted, it does catch up with itself after a period of use, but it’s certainly not ideal for multitasking, despite the relatively generous 4GB of RAM it’s endowed with. In practice this large size means you can get up to around 20 hours of web browsing or 21 hours of video on a single charge, which in real terms means the Galaxy A12 will comfortably last a day and may even stretch to two for lighter users, which is well above average for battery life. Memory size - User memory is less than the total memory due to storage of the operating system and software used to operate the phones features.

Network: The bandwidths supported by the device may vary depending on the region or service provider. If you need more power on a similar budget, look to something like the Moto G9 Power or the Nokia 5.3. There’s also of course no 5G with this phone, but nor is there with any similarly priced rivals. Camera There’s also no water resistance rating here, but we’d have been very surprised to see one at what this costs, so that’s not really a mark against it, just something to bear in mind. PowerFrankly, I don’t think I’m alone in preferring phones with just one really good camera like the Pixel 4a, rather than needing to keep up with the Joneses with barely used peripheral lenses. But regardless, the Samsung Galaxy A12 has four: a 48MP (f/2.0) main camera, supported by a 5MP (f/2.2) ultra-wide lens and two 2MP (f/2.4) snappers for depth-sensing and macro photography. These gut impressions are confirmed by the benchmarks. As you can see in the graph below, Geekbench 5 has it performing quite a bit worse than all the rivals I highlighted in the beginning, but it’s an especially poor performer compared to the three Chinese branded handsets – two of which use a superior MediaTek chip. Battery Capacity: Typical value tested under third-party laboratory condition. Typical value is the estimated average value considering the deviation in battery capacity among the battery samples tested under IEC 61960 standard. Rated (minimum) capacity is 4,900mAh. Actual battery life may vary depending on network environment, usage patterns and other factors. Bought 2 years ago, it is still a smartphone that can keep up with the current models. It doesn't always have to be the latest and most expensive smartphone. I do not miss any function. The battery lasts all day (5000 mAh). It has enough memory (64 gb) for numerous apps. I have installed a lot of apps and it still works smoothly and relatively fast (4 RAM memory). If it slows down, you should run the memory cleanup and optimisation under Device Maintenance. Very good photos for the price (with 4 lenses, main camera with 48MP). With the macro camera you can shoot detailed photos. For example, I was able to photograph a bumblebee in flight to the flower and it looks like a professional. The selfie camera with 8MP is okay. The display is big enough at 6.5 inches, so I often stream videos and movies on it. Only that the display is broken after 1 fall despite armor film, annoys me (also with previous Samsung phones).

The Samsung Galaxy A12 has a quad-lens camera, which is more lenses than you sometimes get at this end of the market. It’s also substantially more than, say, the Galaxy A10. The Samsung Galaxy A12 also has a 3.5mm headphone port, which is notable only because this is becoming increasingly rare on phones. If you’ve migrated to wireless headphones then it won’t much matter, but those who still have wired ones will likely appreciate its presence. As you might guess from the narrow aperture and the low price of entry, photography on the Galaxy A12 is a mixed bag. In bright conditions, photos are quite good, with a decent composition and enough detail to be worthwhile. Yes, you can certainly do better by spending more money, but the pictures are clear enough for sharing, and you can get good results in the right conditions. The 6.5-inch edge-to-edge screen featured on the Galaxy A12 makes it an appropriate model for users that prefer big screens but don't like dishing out high prices that are usually associated with these models. Combined with the four lenses on the rear side, the phone gives off a relatively premium feel at the first impression. However, this feeling goes away as soon as you touch its plastic body, operate its slow processor and interact with its 720 x 1,600-pixel resolution LCD display during your daily tasks. Battery Life and Performance Basically, the delay between pressing the shutter button and a picture being taken means that anything that’s prone to any kind of sudden movements – think birds, babies, cats or dogs – will almost inevitably be a blurry mess by the time the phone finishes capturing the image. It’s here in spades.

The Samsung Galaxy A12’s beauty is only skin deep, thanks to laggy day-to-day performance

Charging is done at a respectable 15W. That’s classed as fast charging, and while many pricier phones have double the charging power or more, you still won’t be waiting around all day for this to juice up. Of course, there’s no wireless charging here. That makes it good for watching videos on – whether short TikTok ones or long Netflix content – as well as for viewing photos, using apps, and playing games. Having said that, it’s definitely one of the weaker points of the Samsung Galaxy A12. While it should be fine for general day-to-day performance, this isn’t a phone that’s going to do well for more than casual gaming or other demanding tasks, so think about what you’re going to be using your phone for before buying it. For any content that you submit, you grant SAMSUNG a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully transferable right and license to use, copy, modify, delete in its entirety, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from and/or sell and/or distribute such content and/or incorporate such content into any form, medium or technology throughout the world without compensation to you.

Much of that is down to the outstanding things other manufacturers are doing on a budget, but Samsung’s entry-level handsets have been able to hold their own in the past. It’s hard not to pin the disappointment entirely on the MediaTek Helios MT6765. Exynos and Qualcomm handsets never felt this sluggish.Being a basic phone there’s not much to talk about on the features front for the Samsung Galaxy A12. It runs Android 10 at the time of writing, so its software is one generation behind, but Android has reached the point where the new versions don’t typically add a lot, so that’s not a huge problem. Actual user memory will vary depending on the mobile phone operator and may change after software upgrades are performed. The Galaxy A12 comes in at 164 x 75.8 x 8.9mm and 205g, so it’s on the large and hefty side – as we said above, this isn’t one that you’ll necessarily be able to comfortably use with one hand, unless you have particularly big mitts.