Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) review: Bite-sized

Gallery

The gallery integrates with Samsung Cloud to automatically sync your photos. The ones on your phone are split into three categories - Pictures, Albums and Stories. Pictures is just a timeline view, while Albums is the folder-based view.

Stories are collaborative online projects - you can invite people to add their own photos and videos to the Story gallery and create a cool slideshow.

Gallery: Pictures • Sync settings • Albums • Stories

The built-in editor is fairly powerful, going from basic tools to straighten photos through image correction to downloadable image effects.

The built-in image editor is powerful and extensible

Video player

The video player is part of the gallery. It supports subtitles with customizable styles and can play in a pop-up window.

Video player • Player settings • Subtitle settings

Music player and FM radio

The Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) comes with Google Play Music by default. The app should be familiar, it can play locally stored music as well as stream from Google's library (and you can cache music over Wi-Fi to save mobile data).

Google Play Music

For non-streaming music, we prefer the Samsung app, which we downloaded from Galaxy Apps. Even if you stick to the Google app, however, you can head to the settings for Samsung's excellent SoundAlive equalizer, a manual 7-band equalizer, an automatic equalizer (Adapt sound) and even a UHQ upscaler.

The A3 has something the S7 does not - an FM radio. It supports RDS and broadcast recording (subject to local regulations).

FM radio • Recording a broadcast • Recordings • Settings

Audio output is excellent

The Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) showed some impressively clean output with an active external amplifier with no weak points to its output. The volume was high and the clarity was basically perfect.

Plugging in a pair of headphones did well controlled damage to stereo quality and introduced a bit of intermodulation distortion. None of those was too bad though and since the other readings remained excellent and volume didn’t drop a bit, it made up for a very solid showing here.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017)	+0.03, -0.01	-94.7	93.2	0.0039	0.025	-92.3
Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) (headphones)	+0.37, -0.07	-92.6	91.7	0.015	0.254	-62.5
Motorola Moto M	+0.02, -0.11	-90.5	90.3	0.0033	0.012	-91.4
Motorola Moto M (headphones)	+0.38, -0.12	-90.5	90.7	0.0030	0.219	-61.8
Lenovo K6 Note	+0.04, -0.09	-92.7	93.0	0.011	0.020	-86.8
Lenovo K6 Note (headphones)	+0.08, -0.10	-92.3	93.1	0.012	0.086	-75.2
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4	+0.02, -0.10	-94.5	90.9	0.0019	0.0086	-94.9
Xiaomi Redmi Note 4 (headphones)	+0.37, -0.25	-92.2	89.6	0.0087	0.274	-53.6

Samsung Galaxy A3 (2017) frequency response

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