Samsung A310F GALAXY A3 (2016) (gold)

I like this phone a lot - it's attractive, has a wonderful screen, the camera is good, and has enough features for my needs. Importantly, it's SIM free also! In case you're not familiar with what that actually means, 'SIM free' refers to a phone that has not been locked to a particular network, and that leaves you free to buy your airtime from whoever you like. I always buy my phone this way, purchasing my own SIM free handset the shopping for the cheapest airtime. It's far cheaper than getting a combined contract, which in reality is just purchasing a new phone on credit.I bought this phone to replace my older Samsung Core Prime, which was running out of memory. 8Gb was never enough to begin with, and the 16Gb of this A3 is more than adequate, especially if you add a micro SD card to the second slot and set the phone up to store your data and images on that, not the internal memory.Reception and network pickup is very good I find, with clear audio. The speaker is surprisingly good too, and I find myself listening to the radio on it quite often. As I said above, the front facing camera is excellent, and captures surprisingly good images with great saturation and clarity. You get built in filters and a panorama feature which is fun. I'm impressed by how close the camera can take you, especially using the Magnify app. Macro shots become a doddle!My favourite bit of the A3 is the screen. AMOLED is always superb, and this one is excellent, with deep blacks and punchy, vibrant colours. It's a joy to look at and it really brings my photos and videos alive. It works well in bright sunlight too, if you turn the brightness up.Altogether an excellent phone, and one that I recommend. My only disappointment is that the battery is sealed inside instead of being user changeable, but hey, you can't have everything I suppose.

Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016) SM-A310F 16GB 4G Black - smartphones (Android, Single SIM, NanoSIM, GSM, HSPA, LTE)I spent weeks looking at phone reviews before I bought the galaxy A3 2016 phone. Its quite a bit better than the A3 from the specs, noticeably the screen is bigger at 4.7 inches compared to 4.3 inches and the camera is 13MP instead of 8MP and the lens is bigger at f1.9 instead of the smaller f2.2. The phone it replaced was a Nokia 720 windows phone.I'm quite pleased with the phone so here is my review in return for all those I've read over the last few weeks.The phone is the SM-A310F, that is the EU version, it is unlocked meaning that it is not locked to a network and you can use a sim from any network. The sim is a nano sim, they are smaller than the micro sim, tiny. I have a pay monthly contract using a micro sim which would not fit my new phone. Vodafone sent me a new nano sim and I switched the phone number over to the smaller sim online and that was very easy.In The Box,phone,earphonesUSB cableUSB charger quick start guide.The USB charger is the 2 pin type so you need a 2 pin to 13 amp adapter if you intend using it. I used a USB charger I had from my old phone and don’t consider this a problem, USB chargers are very cheap and nothing to worry about.The ear phones have volume control and on/off although I have not tried them yet.The Phone.Its screen is 4.7 inches, That is a diagonal measure, corner to corner, an ideal size for me. It can be used one handed, slips neatly into a belt clip and I carry it everywhere on my belt. Although it has a bigger screen than the older A3 it has a slightly narrower body ie less black edges and a greater screen to body ratio.At 7.3mm thick I thought it would feel too thin but it has a glass back and feels nicely heavy and chunky for a smallish phone.The display was initially disappointing as the keyboard was actually smaller than the keyboard on my 4.3 inch Nokia, irritating but I just downloaded the Google keyboard app and that works nice, brilliant predictive text. There is the option for a simple screen layout and note that if you choose this you also get a simple camera. I kept the standard layout and have 20 apps per page with about 3 pages (so far!) and it looks good and is easy to manage.Moving contacts over from the Windows phone I did by using Hotmail and Gmail merge from my PC and then synced the Gmail contacts on my new phone, loads of duplicates but there is function to tidy that up.Emails sync easily and all the usual stuff works a treat as does the Microsoft office functions like Word and Excel. Evernote works brilliantly.I don't do games so no idea about them.The CameraThe main reason I have struggled to change my phone was because my old Nokia had a great camera for a smart phone with a Carl Zeiss lens. It took great photos often good enough for me to send off to the local TV station to have them shown on the telly! Its early days but I think that the A3 (6) has a better camera. The lens is one of the biggest at f1.9, the smaller the number the bigger the lens. The larger lens means that more light reaches the sensor and so you can take better pictures in low light with no flash AND in good light you get sparling results with a faster shutter. You can program the phone to start from locked with a double tap on the Home Button and take photos with the zoom keys. The only down side to not having a dedicated shutter button is that the zoom key locks the exposure and focus as you press down on the key and the photo is taken as you lift your finger. This jerks a little and is the only reason I did not give this phone a 5 star rating. Camera on phones are so important and should have a camera button so you can gently lock thee focus and move the camera and then gently squeeze the shot. Note that megapixels are not the measure of a good camera, beyond about 5Mpixels you will not see any pixels on a computer screen or on a 10'' by 8'' print, big mega pixels is a gimmick to make phones with small lenses, small sensors and poor cameras sound good.That’s it, after 2 weeks, I'm happy I made the right choice, I’ll update in a while after I see how it goes

Great phone not a huge brick like the modern style Easy to hold and operate one-handed decent camera android 6 operating system. Takes micro SD cards to expand memory good overall experience with this phone not quite a galaxy 6edge but still does the job well

do not buy thus phone you will be wasting your money so to start with it charges very quickly but the battery dies in about 2 hours ,it's very slow and you have to push each button about 3 times for it to type and still then it doesn't always work the screen goes a blue colour and to get it back to normal you have to reset the phone when taking pictures it goes all blurt and you can't see a thing again you have to set the phone each time you want to take a picture otherwise it stays bluy to the point you can't see what your taking this is the worst phone I've ever had and if If I wasn't unwell this phone would have been posted back but due to illness I can't get out so now I'm stuck with a phone that doesn't work at all and I was given the shortest time to send this phone back when contacting the seller they did not seem to care that they had sold me a dodgy phone kept telling me to restart it and it should all work now I have to restart this phone every 5 minutes for it to even send a simple text this seller should not be able to sell these phones they do not work and you are waisting your money and as soon as you turn it on you will realised you was scammed so this seller can make a bit of money of the vulnerable who needs a quick phone but cannot afford an expensive one