Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) review: Alphabet soup

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 • Pictures zoomed all the way out • Albums • Settings

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.

You can download the standalone Video app from the Galaxy Apps store, but all of its functionality is already present in the gallery.

Video gallery • Player • Settings • Subtitles

Music player

The Samsung Galaxy A5 (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

You get comprehensive control over the listening experience thanks to the SoundAlive equalizer, a manual 7-band equalizer, an automatic equalizer (Adapt sound) and even a UHQ upscaler.

Sound customization

Samsung's own Music app can be downloaded from the company's own app store too. It may look a bit sleeker than the utilitarian Google app, but it's limited to offline content only.

FM Radio

There's an FM radio on board as well, another area where A > S. It can't find the names of the stations (you can do it manually), but supports favorites and sound recording.

FM radio

Audio output is very good

The Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) did very well when hooked up to an active external amplifier. Its loudness was well above average and its clarity was outstanding.

Volume remained just as good when we hooked up a pair of headphones, but the quality deteriorated a bit. Stereo rose and some intermodulation crept in - neither is too bad and the overall output is pretty solid.

Anyway, 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 (2017)	+0.02, -0.32	-93.1	93.3	0.0039	0.0032	-90.2
Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) (headphones attached)	+0.29, -0.09	-88.3	87.7	0.015	0.232	-60.2
Motorola Moto Z Play	+0.04, -0.02	-93.0	93.1	0.0018	0.0085	-93.8
Motorola Moto Z Play (headphones attached)	+0.05, -0.02	-92.7	92.8	0.0023	0.054	-52.4
Oppo R9s	+0.01, -0.02	-93.3	93.2	0.0010	0.0070	-93.5
Oppo R9s (headphones attached)	+0.19, -0.35	-92.3	92.2	0.0098	0.295	-58.3
Meizu MX6	+0.10, -0.03	-94.2	94.0	0.0019	0.0064	-89.3
Meizu MX6 (headphones attached)	+0.30, -0.07	-92.5	93.0	0.810	0.271	-31.3
Asus Zenfone 3	+0.03, -0.30	-86.6	83.6	0.0017	0.049	-91.1
Asus Zenfone 3 (headphones attached)	+0.06, -0.03	-92.4	92.4	0.0018	0.021	-88.2
Xiaomi Mi 5s	+0.01, -0.03	-89.6	90.2	0.0029	0.040	-85.5
Xiaomi Mi 5s (headphones)	+0.71, -0.31	-82.9	84.8	0.229	0.559	-48.0
ZTE Axon 7	+0.06, -0.10	-92.4	92.3	0.0015	0.0093	-80.9
ZTE Axon 7 (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.11	-92.3	92.3	0.0011	0.012	-77.0

Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) frequency response

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