Samsung Galaxy F22 review: lovely screen and long battery

Samsung’s online-only Galaxy F series debuted last year and along with the M series of smartphones, comprises the budget and mid-range offerings from the brand. The latest launch by the company is the Galaxy F22 priced starting at Rs 12,499. On paper, the new phone does look quit capable. It boasts a massive 6,000mAh battery and a 90Hz Super AMOLED panel, something rarely seen in the category. What really needs to be asked is how well the phone fares as a daily driver? In this full review of the Galaxy F22, let’s try and answer these questions.

Verdict

While the Galaxy F22 is a fine smartphone in many regards, especially the display and  battery life, it leaves a bit to be desired in the performance aspect. 

The lowdown

The Galaxy F22 isn’t too different from many other affordable devices in terms of the build quality and materials used. Sporting a plastic unibody design with  curved edges at the back and a rather thick chassis, the phone does seem sturdy. The carbon fibre-like finish lends a decent in-hand feel. Other elements of the device mimick its peers, such as the power button on the side doubling up as the fingerprint sensor along with a 3.5mm headphone jack, USB C port, and speaker grille at the bottom. The massive battery does make the F22 slightly heavy but it was never a burden to use one-handed.

On the front, the F22 harbours an HD+ (720 x 1,600) Super AMOLED display that brings in the kind of colour accuracy you would expect from Samsung panels. The 90Hz refresh rate makes the experience quite smooth and it works quite well too. The customisability options are also aplenty with toggles for colour saturation, vividness, dark mode, refresh rate, eye care mode, edge detection, and more. However, at 600nits of peak brightness, I think the outdoor viewing experience of the device could definitely be improved. Even so, with WideVine L1 certification, you can watch OTT content in HD quality. The bezels around the screen are definitely quite slim, except for the chin, though I’m not a fan of the outdated waterdrop notch (Infinity U) housing the selfie shooter.

As far as the optics go, you are provided with a quad-camera setup wherein the primary shooter is a 48MP sensor supported by an 8MP ultra-wide, 2MP depth, and 2MP macro sensors. Here is a brief summary of the phone’s image-taking abilities.

• In daylight conditions and even overcast weather, the sensor is capable of clicking detailed photos with realistic colours. The dynamic range of the photos are slightly on the weaker side but exposure is calibrated well. The image post-processing generally avoids too much oversharpening while the auto scene detector can sometimes take a while to detect the scene. Shutter and focus speeds are very much up to the mark.

• Low-light shooting on the phone is not up to the expected standards. The shots are sometimes grainy with poor detailing and look underexposed. The dedicated Night mode oversharpens the entire frame to remove noise and smoothens out a lot of the textures, giving a soft look to the shot. 
• The macro shots come out decently well but the low resolution of the image makes it hard to view on a display bigger than your phone’s. The 13MP selfie camera matches a lot of the facial details well and can take good front-facing portrait shots. It doesn’t, however, work in low lighting conditions. Lastly, the depth sensor works as well as advertised with edge detection mostly on point and a blur behind the subject that is easy on the eye.

The performance side of the phone is handled by the MediaTek G80 chipset, which I think is a bit underpowered when compared to the competition. Benchmarks usually provide an indicative metric to gauge the processing capabilities of a device. On Antutu the Galaxy F22 brings in an overall score of 201,273 while Geekbench’s multi-core and single-core results are 1,324 and 368 respectively. The similarly-priced Realme 8 manages 297,216 on Antutu along with 1,690 and 536 on Geekbench’s tests in comparison. On its own, the F22 can push through daily smartphone tasks with relative ease. I did find the phone stuttering while switching between Chrome and Instagram. Also, the device gets hot within 10 minutes while running Battlegrounds Mobile India at basic medium settings. All things considered, plenty of other devices will serve as better alternatives if you are a power user or want to play heavy-duty games. You do get only 4GB RAM and 64GB of storage on the starting variant which does seem lower than what you usually would get with other OEMs. Apart from that the fingerprint sensor and face unlock work as fast as expected. The speaker volume is slightly lower than I would’ve liked, and also crackles at a max volume. Call quality and microphone were good enough on Jio’s Noida network.

Software-wise, the Galaxy F22 runs OneUI 3.1 based on Android 11 which is a good improvement over the last iteration. You can read about it in my colleague’s Galaxy M32 review. In summary, a lot of the bloat can be uninstalled, there are a slew of customisability options and overall an easy-to-use experience is on offer. A key feature of the device is the inclusion of the 6,000mAh battery that is bundled with a rather slow 15W charger. The battery life itself is quite exemplary, lasting quite easily for the better part of two days on average usage. Juicing it up, however, requires close to 3 hours, of which the first 50 percent fills up in an hour. 

Final verdict

Samsung has been making the right kind of noises with its Galaxy F series and there is some merit to the F22. There are some niggles of course. The Helio G80 processor might not be appreciated by power users while the night photography on the device has scope for improvement. However, the phone’s lovely AMOLED display makes the viewing experience quite pleasurable. In daylight, the F22 can take photos that can easily rival some of the best devices from its counterparts in the budget category. The phone comes with a rather large battery too. And these reasons could make the Galaxy F22 a reasonable choice for a smartphone.

Editor’s rating: 3.5 / 5

Pros:

• Gorgeous Super AMOLED panel
• Long-lasting battery
• Decent daylight photography

Cons:

• Performance could be better
• Low light photography needs to be improved
• Takes a lot of time to charge