Samsung Galaxy M31s - The Premium Budget smartphone from an Non Chinese brand

Samsung's Galaxy M31s

          Samsung launched its Galaxy M31 on Feb 26. After 2 quarters they launched this smartphone on July 30. They call it "Monster".This is not from any Chinese brand and it is Made In India.

Design

          Samsung Galaxy M31s comes with a plastic back and Gorilla Glass 3 on top of display. It looks decent for its price but the competitors have glass back with their phones. 

          It comes in 2 colour options.

• Mirage Black                      
• Mirage Blue
  

Display

          M31s has a large 6.4 inch FHD+ AMOLED display and has a punchole at the centre like Samsung Flagships. They call it as Infinity O Display. Despite having AMOLED display, it doesn't come with an in display fingerprint scanner. For that it has an side mounted fingerprint scanner. It also has always on display.

Camera

          Now we'll look into the cameras. M31S has a rectangular camera array on the left of the back which seems similar to the previous smartphones. It comes with a quad camera setup in which the primary sensor is a sony sensor. First time in M series, Samsung used Sony sensor. It is 64MP Sony's IMX 682, an 12MP ultrawide sensor with 123⁰ field of view and two 5MP cameras for taking Macro and Portrait photos. It also has some software features like "Single Take" which is only present in Flagships before.

         Single Take takes multiple pictures and videos in only one take so that it is named as like that. The rear camera can shoot upto 4K at 30fps, 1080 at 60fps and also Ultra Steady videos as well.

          Now we look into selfies. For selfies, it has an 32MP front facing camera in the punchole. It takes well detailed and crisp selfies. It can also shoot slow motion videos at 480 fps. Therefore it looks like an monster in camera department.

Processor

          Moving onto the processing power, it has the same Exynos 9611 which is made in 10nm and clocked 2.3 GHz. We've seen this Processor on lot's of smartphones in M series and actually it performs well and good. Also it has 6/8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage. 

Battery

As we look into the battery capacity, it seems like a real MONSTER because it has a big big 6000mah battery. Inspite of having a massive battery, Samsung kept thickness at 9.3mm and weight below 200g.

To charge this battery, samsung also upgraded the charger from 15W to 25W. It has a type c to type c cable and can charge from 0-100% in 97 mins. And it also has support for reverse charging as well.

Software

M31S comes with the latest software version of One UI 2.0 on top of Android 10. It has its own customisable options and also some cool features. But the Goodlock isn't available on Samsung's budget smartphones. It seems to be a sad thing. Otherwise the UI is clean, fast and bloatware free.

Miscellaneous

M31s has support for Dolby Atmos audio. It retains headphone jack and has an side mounted fingerprint scanner. Also it sports an dedicated Micro SD card for memory expansion and supports dual VOLTE as well. It comes with the 25W charger out of the box. 

Price 

      6GB & 128GB - ₹19,499

      8GB & 128GB - ₹21,499

*First sale starts on August 6 on Amazon

Competitors

           Redmi Note 9 Pro Max, Realme 6 Pro, Poco X2, Motorola One Fusion+ and also Samsung's M40 are the major competitors. Of these Poco X2 has a 120Hz and Realme 6 Pro has a 90 Hz smoother display when compared to M31S. All these smartphones do have more powerful processors than M31S. But the processor in M31S do perform well day to day tasks and moderate gaming. 

           If you are a intense gamer, you can choose other options. But now India's dispute against China has created a trend among Indians to Boycott Chinese Products. So it will be the decent option from Samsung.