Samsung Galaxy M31: Big and Durable? | Smartphone Evolution
It is estimated that the battery has a capacity of 6,000 mAh, so the Galaxy M31 can be interesting because it has a rather thin body. Samsung Galaxy Meter series phones have appeared since January 2019, at that time the variants represented the Galaxy M10 and M20.
A month later, there was also a larger Meter series called Galaxy M30, which this phone offers a bigger screen using AMOLED Extraordinary, compared to the M20 and M10 which still uses LCD panels based on technology that Samsung says like PLS TFT. Galaxy M30 appeared in July 2019. In October 2019, the Galaxy Meter series which began with the name Galaxy M30s.
Most of the M30 and M30 are located in the batteries, which M30 has a 5,000 mAh battery capacity, whereas the M30s carry a larger battery capacity, which is 6,000 mAh. Compared to digital cameras. Although with 3 cameras behind, the M30s has a camera with a larger resolution.
Samsung aims to introduce the Galaxy Meter series which provides smart phones with large batteries, but at affordable costs. This time, I'm discussing the Galaxy Meter series opened, is M31. One difference with the M30 is that the M31 is equipped with 4 cameras. The following specifications of the Samsung Galaxy M31.
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| Review the Samsung Galaxy M31: Big and Durable | Smartphone Evolution |
The Design
Samsung wraps the M31 with a plastic body that has a thickness of up to 1 centimeter or 8, 9 millimeters thick. Obtained a battery that has a carrying capacity of 6,000 mAh, until the Galaxy M31 can be obtained has a rather thin body. As a side note, generally it continues to be a large battery until it reaches larger than its body dimensions.
Perhaps the relatively thin body size on the M31 is caused by the size of the screen which is quite large, is 6, 4 inches. Total mobile capacity, not to the thickness of the cellphone. Dimension screen of 6, 4 inches is placed large. But on a cell phone the size of it, my hand can always access the screen using one hand thanks to the elongated aspect ratio (19, 5: 9).
Dialogue about the screen, the Galaxy M31 is equipped with AMOLED Extraordinary panel technology so that it can help the energy efficiency of the battery. The reason, the screen technology does not require dynamic background lighting. This is caused by AMOLED having its own lighting on each pixel, allowing the use of pixels as needed.
In the middle of the top there is a notch with a water drop design, or Samsung agrees like Infinity U. You can all guess what the notch is for. Yes, this is home to a 32 MP resolution front camera. Some people can become choked up with the presence of notches. If you are one of them, you can not eliminate the position note.
The method of eliminating a notch on the Galaxy M31, you are quite opposed to the Settings (this can be accessed in the icon in the menu or in the upper right corner when you see the notification window). After that, go to the ‘Full screen application’ setting. In these settings, press settings Advanced settings' which can be accessed by the method that was changed by the button in the top right corner. Under the 'Advanced settings' option, activate the 'Hide camera cutout' option.
After activating this option, you need to fold the boundary line above the screen. One thing that needs to be replaced, because the Galaxy M31 uses an OLED-based display panel, so that all the pixels that turn black near the front camera notch can be made totally dead. Therefore, the notch really becomes hidden. Yes, involving when activating the 'Hide camera pieces' option is the Galaxy M31 screen no longer has dimensions of 6, 4 inches.
At first I made it clear that the M31 body had plastic material. This body is quite strong for mobile phones in the middle to lower class. The style of the M31 unit that I reviewed has a blue hue and shows a rather shiny (shiny) design. Changing, the rear body of the M31 is not too easily attacked by fingerprints.
You want to see the volume button and the energy button in the same position, which is the right side of the phone. However at the bottom there is a speaker hole speaker, USB port type-audio port 3, 5 millimeters. Lost SIM card tray and micro SD card can be accessed on the left side of the phone. In the M31, Samsung does not practice hybrid design models in the SIM / micro SD card tray. Thus you cannot bet the SIM 2 card slot when inserting a micro SD card.
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Camera
There are 4 turning cameras on the Galaxy M31, the main camera is 64 MP (f / 1.8) resolution, 8 MP (f / 2.2) ultra wide lens camera, 5 MP macro lens (f / 2.4), and finally the 5 MP depth sensor camera. The depth sensor camera has no role for taking pictures, but works with one of the other cameras to show the impact of the bokeh behind the subject.
By default, the main camera with 64 MP resolution uses a lower resolution, which is 16 MP. That is, the Galaxy M31 adopts pixel binning in order to obtain rather bright results when shooting in less bright conditions.
Incidentally when I tested the M31 camera, the weather was rather cloudy and rainy. Therefore, I can distinguish the quality between pictures taken using 16 MP resolution and images with 64 MP. It is clear that 16 MP resolution images are brighter when compared to 64 MP resolution images.
Therefore I suggest that you use the 64 MP shooting mode when the weather is very bright. A 64 MP fashion shoot is more useful than a 16 MP fashion when it comes to sharing greater detail.
In totality, the details produced by the M31 camera are fairly good. The reason is, every drop of water when it rains is clearly visible. Not only that, the leaf pattern on the edge of the track is quite natural although not very special. In terms of performance auto exposure (AE) M31 has been quite qualified. But unfortunately the sharpness of detail in the leaf texture is not very good.
In terms of autofocus or AF speed, I can say that the Galaxy M31 camera has qualified for a newcomer class of mobile phones. This advantage can be proven when I take pictures of vehicles speeding on the highway with pretty good results. I also don't really face the shutter lag problem.
As I mentioned earlier, there is an ultra wide lens in one of the four turning cameras. Of course, this lens is useful for shooting a wider field of view when compared to the main lens.
Some ultra wide lenses have distorted results on the edges in the results, the Galaxy M31 is no exception. Luckily this phone provides a 'Lens correction' feature so that photos that are distorted can be overcome, but this option does a little cutting on the results of the photo (cropping).
A kind of majority of cellphones at this time, Samsung also crammed the artificial intelligence technology on the Galaxy M31 camera. In order to measure the superiority of AI in the M31, I used the AIMark benchmark, AIBenchmark 3, and PCMark Computer Vision.
PCMark Computer Vision measures the performance of features in identifying photos. These measurements are based on the open-source photo recognition model, namely TensorFlow, ZXing, and Tesseract. TensorFlow for identifying photos, ZXing for reading barcodes and QR codes, Tesseract, in contrast, for identifying the personality of letters in photos. In this test, features are required for reading English and Mandarin reading.
In contrast AIMark 3 and AIBenchmark 3, both are more environmentally friendly than PCMark Computer Vision. AIMark 3, for example, carries out photo recognition simulations, bokeh simulations, object recognition simulations in the style of self-driving car algorithms, enriching images, and testing the memory limits of a cell phone to digest a file.
After carrying out tests on the three artificial intelligence (AI) benchmarks, the Galaxy M31 was able to collect a score of 4455 points in carrying out the AIMark benchmark, while the AI Benchmark could be achieved with a score of 6742 points and PCMark Computer Vision at 2832 points. These values are far below the basis of Realme 6's performance with 12431 points for AIMark, 13820 points for AI Benchmark, and 7628 points for PCMark Computer Vision.
A kind of majority of cellphones at this time, Samsung also crammed the artificial intelligence technology on the Galaxy M31 camera. In order to measure the superiority of AI in the M31, I used the AIMark benchmark, AIBenchmark 3, and PCMark Computer Vision.
PCMark Computer Vision measures the performance of features in identifying photos. These measurements are based on the open-source photo recognition model, namely TensorFlow, ZXing, and Tesseract. TensorFlow for identifying photos, ZXing for reading barcodes and QR codes, Tesseract, in contrast, for identifying the personality of letters in photos. In this test, features are required for reading English and Mandarin reading.
In contrast AIMark 3 and AIBenchmark 3, both are more environmentally friendly than PCMark Computer Vision. AIMark 3, for example, carries out photo recognition simulations, bokeh simulations, object recognition simulations in the style of self-driving car algorithms, enriching images, and testing the memory limits of a cell phone to digest a file.
After carrying out tests on the three artificial intelligence (AI) benchmarks, the Galaxy M31 was able to collect a score of 4455 points in carrying out the AIMark benchmark, while the AI Benchmark could be achieved with a score of 6742 points and PCMark Computer Vision at 283 2 points. These values are far below the basis of Realme 6's performance with 12431 points for AIMark, 13820 points for AI Benchmark, and 7628 points for PCMark Computer Vision.
When I am located inside a room and want to shoot outwards which are more exposed to light, so I must wear HDR fashion. The comparison between active HDR fashion and active HDR seems to be quite significant. Where when HDR fashion is active I can still see the style of the trees and their leaves without the constraints of over-exposure.
If you want to take photos of subjects from close up, use the macro lens behind the Galaxy M31. This camera material is not equipped with an AF system, so you must implement it by aiming at subjects with the correct distance.
When it was night, so it was time for me to test the performance of the Galaxy M31 when there was little light. Without using the Night Fashion feature, the results are just not very good with noise constraints in the black zone, the sharpness is also not qualified. Conversely after I activate the Night Fashion feature, the results are brighter, but the cruelty to the photos is always helped.
No less remember I tested the Galaxy M31 video stabilization performance. The ‘Video stabilization’ feature that can be activated in the settings menu is not able to reduce the video shake when I record while walking. Fortunately, the Galaxy M31 is equipped with a bonus stabilization called 'Amazingly steady' which can be activated in the camera interface menu. The results of this feature can reduce video shocks when I walk. Even though there is a jitter problem, it can still be forgiven.
Performance
Samsung is strengthening the Galaxy M31 with the Exynos 9611 (10 nm) octa-core processor. This processor goes into an entry-level that is claimed to be suitable for playing games because of improved graphics processing performance. Exynos 9611 has a GPU Arm Mali-G72 MP3 with a clock speed that is greater than its predecessor.
The GPU, which was formed on the basis of the 2nd generation Bifrost architecture, has various processing methods such as MSAA (Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing) which is predicted to be able to create greater detail in its class. Do not miss the technology ASTC P (Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression) and AFBC (Arm Frame Buffer Compression) which are claimed to be able to carry out graphics rendering more effectively by reducing the use of memory bandwidth.
For synthetic testing, I used the 3DMark and PCMark applications. Like data, 3DMark is useful for measuring Central Processing Unit (CPU) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) expertise, especially in digesting photos and videos. This would be very useful for calculating, whether the phone would be delicious to use for playing games or the opposite.
Meanwhile, PCMark is used to calculate how reliable the features are for daily activities. PCMark simulates the daily activities of mobile users, such as browsing websites, editing readings, and editing photos and videos. This application also tests how lightning the phone can write information to memory or simply read it.
In the 3DMark test, the Galaxy M31 scored 2093 points in the Sling Shot and Sling Shot Unlimited tests. In contrast to the Sling Shot Extreme test, this phone carved a value of 1587 points for OpenGL ES 3.1 and a score of 1554 points for the Vulkan test.
From these figures it can be said that the Galaxy M31 has a superior performance when compared to the Galaxy A51 which has a score of 2057 points for 3DMark Sling Shot and 1500 points for Sling Shot Unlimited. For 3DMark Sling Shot Extreme, the A51 achieved an OpenGL ES score of 3.1 and Vulkan with a score of 1587 points and 1554 points, respectively.
Like data, between Samsung Galaxy M31 and Galaxy A51 have the same processor (Exynos 9611). Not only that, both of these phones have the same RAM and ROM capacity (6 GB and 128 GB).
Not only in 3DMark testing, the performance of the Galaxy M31 also exceeds the performance of the Galaxy A51 when implementing the PCMark application. Gaaxy M31 carved a score of 5552 points, while the Galaxy A51 scored 5125 points.
Not only benchmark testing, but also testing the M31's performance by playing the PUBG Mobile game. In the FPS-type game, by default this phone has HD graphics settings and a High Frame Rate. With this configuration setting, I feel the gameplay is quite easy for a cellphone in its class. But unfortunately, I feel the screen response to my finger movements is not very sensitive.
Even so, the scourge on the screen response was not very disturbing and in totality I was able to control my personality easily. Near the first 15 minutes of play, I have felt a warm feeling arise in the M31 reverse camera zone. But the warmth is still within tolerance. There is a slight problem with frame rate shrinkage when I play the game for more than 1 hour. I felt the shrinkage of the frame rate again when playing for close to 2 hours, instead it tends to be more frequent. However, for me not very choked up.
I also tried playing PUBG Mobile with the highest graphics settings. In the case of Galaxy M31, the highest graphics settings are HDR (one level above HD), and Ultra Frame Rate. In this configuration, the first time I played, the cellphone did not show any indication of obstacles.
However, after close to 10 minutes I played, the warmth behind the phone has been felt, the temperature increase is much faster when compared to when I played the game for 15 minutes on the default graphics settings. After that, the gameplay feels broken and over time the frame rate shrinks. Screen response is also not as accurate as when I played PUBG Mobile using the default graphics settings fashion.
Battery
As I explained earlier, the Galaxy M31 has a battery capacity of 6. 000 mAh. To test its durability, I implemented the PCMark application by controlling the screen brightness level of 80%, and the volume at 50%. Interestingly, with a large capacity, the Galaxy M31 battery can only last for 9 hours and 47 minutes. This duration is clearly inferior when compared with the battery life of the Pro 6 Realme feature which has a capacity of 4300 mAh battery, but can last for 13 hours 29 minutes.
Apart from testing the battery resistance energy benchmark which is not very impressive, in everyday usage I feel the M31 battery is quite economical. The reason, when watching video streaming on the YouTube application with a screen brightness level of 50% for 1 hour 30 minutes, the battery of the Galaxy M31 only decreased by 6%. And if you watch YouTube videos for 2 hours 12 minutes, the battery energy decreases by 10%.
No less remember I calculated the battery energy used when playing the PUBG Mobile game. From the condition of the battery 100%, playing the game for 1 hour, the battery energy used up is 9%. Conversely when I play the game for 2 hours, the energy absorbed is 20%.
Armed with a large battery capacity, do not be surprised if the Galaxy M31 is also supported by the fast charging feature. With 15 watts of charging energy, I calculated that the battery of this cellphone could be fully charged from the dead completely in 2 hours 27 minutes.
Conclusion
So, with a very large battery, is the Galaxy M31 suitable for playing games? The answer is yes. However, you are required to use graphic settings by default if the game you want to play is listed as a heavy game such as PUBG Mobile. This setting may be going to last close to 2 hours until the performance of the phone is somewhat shrinking because it starts showing graphics that are somewhat broken. My advice, lower the graphic settings one level at the bottom of the default settings so that the game is safer.
Concerning the camera, I highly recommend you stay away from the 64 MP shooting mode because it affects the brightness of the photo. But in totality, the results are pretty neat for cellphones in its class. Not only that, according to his claim, the battery he carries can accompany your activities all day at home without having to go back and forth to refill.
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