Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) review: Standing tall

Gallery

The TouchWiz gallery orders photos by time, but you can switch to folder-based Album view. Sharing options include wireless printing, Android Beam and Wi-Fi Direct, but no DLNA (or other way to send an image to your TV).

Timeline view • Album view

Several image editing tools are available - from basic cropping, to collage making, to a more capable editor (which supports image correction, effects and drawing).

Editing an image

An additional option lets you pick several photos and stitch them into an animated GIF.

Music player with advanced EQ features, FM radio

The Galaxy A5 (2016) gets the full-blown Samsung music player. This includes the SoundAlive tool, which has an intuitive interface to tuning the equalizer (a manual 7-band equalizer is available for more knowledgeable users).

The Samsung music player with advanced functionality

Adapt Sound is even simpler. It tunes the EQ to your hearing and your particular pair of headphones by playing multiple frequencies and asking how well you hear them. Smart Volume automatically adjusts the volume of tracks from multiple sources.

The player itself has a straightforward UI with most functions available as shortcuts on the Now Playing screen. You can browse files by folders, which is great if your library doesn't have well-organized ID3 tags.

The Galaxy A5 also has an FM radio built in (something many Galaxy flagships do not). It can record radio broadcasts (though this may be disabled in some regions). There's no RDS though, so the app won't show the name of the station.

FM radio with broadcast recording, but no RDS

Video player

The video player is the only app that works in pop-up window, a feature dating back to the Galaxy S III.

You also get full subtitle support with advanced features to modify their appearance.

The app lets you play only the audio (if you just want to listen to a music video) and to play the audio via Bluetooth (if you have a BT-enabled speaker handy).

Browsing videos • Watching a video • Adjusting the subtitles

There's an "Editor" option too though that may be overstating it - it just lets you trim the video.

Again, there's no DLNA or another wireless method of sending the video to a bigger screen. No wired ways to do it either.

Audio output starts off strong, loses some brilliance with headphones

The Samsung Galaxy A5(2016) showed perfect clarity in the first part of our audio quality test. When attached to an active external amplifier, the smartphone produced great scores top to bottom and things were pretty great in terms of loudness too, for a great performance.

Plugging in our standard headphones did cause some damage - volume dropped to only average, stereo crosstalk rose to a similar rating and some distortion crept in. It’s still a very good performance, but no longer up there with the best.

Here go the results so you can do your comparisons.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016)	+0.02, -0.07	-94.3	92.2	0.0065	0.010	-95.0
Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) (headphones)	+0.42, -0.01	-93.4	87.1	0.029	0.254	-53.0
Huawei G8	+0.02, -0.08	-93.4	90.1	0.0028	0.012	-93.4
Huawei G8 (headphones)	+0.10, -0.03	-92.9	89.8	0.0048	0.071	-78.2
LG G4	+0.04, -0.07	-93.4	93.3	0.0021	0.050	-92.6
LG G4 (headphones)	+0.93, -0.13	-91.4	91.9	0.013	0.244	-50.4
Samsung Galaxy S6	+0.01, -0.04	-95.6	92.8	0.0024	0.0094	-94.5
Samsung Galaxy S6 (headphones)	+0.02, -0.05	-92.6	91.9	0.0025	0.042	-83.4
HTC One M9	+0.02, -0.06	-94.8	93.0	0.0049	0.026	-93.7
HTC One M9 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.05	-93.7	92.7	0.0082	0.030	-91.6

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016) frequency response

You can learn more about the tested parameters and the whole testing process here.