Even up till a few years back, when buying a phone online wasn’t as widespread and regular a practise as it is now, Samsung phones filled the budget segment, thanks to the company’s reliability, and their easy availability and service at brick and mortar retailers.

Things have changed now, though. Brands such as Xiaomi, Motorola, Oppo, Lenovo have made huge inroads into the budget segment and thanks to online sales (Xiaomi’s phones selling out within a few minutes of the sale beginning), customers now have a lot of options for the money shelled out.

This isn’t to say that Samsung did not have a consistent presence in the sub-20K segment. It always did but seemed to lose out on specs to the Xiaomis and Motos. The recent offering from the company, the Galaxy On Max, seems a bid to reclaim space in the mid-range category.

The company has made a lot of noise about the cameras on the Galaxy On Max, boasting superior performance for a phone in this range. Here’s how the phone behaved, when put to use.

Sleek looks

The review unit received was ‘Max Black’, although the back seemed closer to midnight blue in colour. The phone looks plain, but sleek and expensive. It has minimal bezels on the sides though the top and bottom still have them. The bottom houses the home button-cum-fingerprint sensor along with the navigation keys. The navigation keys aren’t backlit and this is a handicap when using the phone in the dark.

The speaker is on the right side, placed next to the power button and I found this placing awkward, mostly because many other phones place it on the front or the bottom of the phone. Moreover, there’s a chance your fingers might obscure it partly. The volume rockers are on the right and the back is smooth, save for the Samsung branding and the camera and flash.

Display on the Galaxy On Max is a plus. The 5.7-inch screen comes with a 1080 x 1920 resolution and watching videos and gaming was fun. Daylight visibility is good, although I found that the brightness sometimes becomes inexplicably dull even under decently lit indoor conditions.

Colour reproduction is good; although the home screen colours look slightly washed out. However, the screen and the back pick up fingerprints and smudges very easily and getting a cover is recommended.

The loudspeaker, despite its somewhat awkward placement is good enough for individual use. The earphones provided in the box were average, but the plastic on them can be a tad hard on your ears. Though this is easily fixed by getting any new 3.5 mm earphones, thanks to the headphone jack at the bottom of the phone, next to the micro USB port.

Hassle-free performance

With 4 GB of RAM, Samsung is matching other mid-rangers on some specs, and that’s a good thing. The phone comes with 32 GB of memory, which can be expanded with a dedicated micro SD slot apart from the SIM slot on the left side of the phone. The Mediatek Helio P25 octa-core processor coupled with the 4 GB of RAM ensures a mostly lag-free performance even with multi-tasking, but heavy gaming and you can see it is under strain. To its credit, however, the phone doesn’t have heating up issues. But at this price, I wonder why Samsung didn’t power this one with the very capable Snapdragon 625 from Qualcomm, especially given how many phones competing with the On Max run on it.

The 3,300 mAh battery is an average performer and I was able to eke out just about a day’s worth of use with the usual bouquet of apps running. But if you plan to use it extensively for camera or gaming, it may run out before the day ends so carrying the charger is a good idea. While Samsung hasn’t really advertised ‘fast charging’ on this one, it takes a little less than two hours to juice up fully and that isn’t bad at all.

Lovely camera

The rear 13 MP with f/1.7 aperture is a very capable performer. Daylight images with the HDR mode were very good to behold and captured colours and detail well. But where Samsung has done a really good job is low light photography. Images captured at night have very less noise compared to other cameras in this segment and this is clearly the stand-out camera in the lot. The front camera is also 13 MP and gave out sharp, clear selfies and aided video calling with very good image quality. A double press of the home button lets you launch the camera even when the phone is asleep. The social camera feature on the front camera lets you share selfies across networks instantly and also adds Snapchat-like location filters and illustrations.

The phone runs on Android Nougat out of the box with Samsung’s UI and while there is no bloatware as such, you do get a bouquet of Samsung’s apps such as Samsung Pay Mini, which are quite handy, and a Microsoft App bouquet too, which is helpful for some light work on the go. Samsung is clearly looking to capture some mid-range market share with the On Max, and succeeds on many fronts. But the biggest plus is getting decent specs along with the much-valued reliability that Samsung provides.

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