The Samsung Galaxy F22: A Budget Smartphone That Falls Short in Key Areas
Samsung’s latest F-series smartphone, the Galaxy F22, promises a practical design, impressive battery life, and decent hardware at an affordable price point. However, after spending more than a week with the device, it’s not what the Samsung Galaxy F22 offers, but what it doesn’t that makes it an average budget smartphone overall.
While the F22 boasts features that might attract budget-conscious buyers, several shortcomings, especially in performance and camera quality, ultimately hold it back from being a truly compelling option. Let’s delve into the details and see where the Samsung Galaxy F22 falls short.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Price and Variants
The Samsung Galaxy F22 is available in two variants:
- 4GB RAM + 64GB storage: Priced at Rs 12,499 in India.
- 6GB RAM + 128GB storage: Priced at Rs 14,499 in India.
While the price seems enticing, we need to consider the competition and what those phones offer at similar price points.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Design
The Galaxy F22 adopts a no-frills design, available in two finishes: Denim Black and Denim Blue. The phone has a plastic body with the display panel protected by Gorilla Glass 5. The plastic unibody boasts a matte finish with fine grooves on the back, providing a decent grip. Both the display glass and the back panel effectively resist fingerprints.
The Galaxy F22 feels solidly built, with no noticeable creaks. Despite its 9.4mm thickness and 203g weight, the device’s relatively tall body makes it comfortable to hold. Surprisingly, it’s even comfortable for one-handed use, a feat for a smartphone with a 6,000mAh battery.
However, the design isn’t without issues. The 6.4-inch display has a waterdrop-style notch at the top and a noticeable chin at the bottom. This notch design feels dated considering most budget smartphones now feature displays with hole-punch cutouts.
The placement of the ambient light sensor within the notch led to frequent dimming of the display while playing games in landscape mode, as my thumb often blocked it. While the Game Booster app offers a handy toggle to disable automatic brightness adjustment during gaming, this issue reveals a design flaw that shouldn’t exist, particularly in a modern smartphone.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Specifications and Software
The Galaxy F22 is powered by the MediaTek Helio G80 processor, which was announced in early 2020. This SoC consists of two Cortex-A75 cores clocked at up to 2GHz and six Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8GHz. The phone offers either 4GB or 6GB of RAM and 64GB or 128GB of storage, along with a microSD card slot for storage expansion of up to 1TB.
Connectivity options include support for 4G/LTE, Bluetooth 5, and dual-band Wi-Fi ac.
Display
The 6.4-inch display has an HD+ (720×1600) resolution and a 90Hz refresh rate. Given the Super AMOLED panel, Samsung has enabled an Always On Display (AOD) feature that shows notification icons when the phone is locked.
However, the HD+ resolution pales in comparison to the full-HD+ panels found on some competitors at this price point. While the panel delivers punchy colors and deep blacks, the lower resolution is noticeable when streaming movies and playing games. The Widevine L3 support limits Netflix playback to SD quality, meaning some content looks less sharp compared to competing smartphones with Widevine L1 support and HD resolution.
Audio
The Samsung Galaxy F22 features a single speaker located at the bottom and a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top. Interestingly, there’s also an FM Radio app that allows you to listen to local stations after plugging in a pair of wired earphones.
Battery
The Galaxy F22 boasts a massive 6,000mAh battery and supports wired charging at up to 25W. However, Samsung includes only a 15W charger in the box, leading to relatively slow charging times. The Galaxy F22 took 2 hours and 41 minutes to fully charge from a dead battery.
Software
The Galaxy F22 runs Samsung’s One UI 3.1 software, based on Android 11. Samsung has optimized its traditionally bloated One UI to run smoothly on the 4GB RAM variant of the Galaxy F22. Nevertheless, a collection of preinstalled Samsung-branded apps cannot be removed, along with several third-party apps from Microsoft and others, which can be uninstalled. Despite having all these apps, it was surprising to see very few promotional notifications while using the phone.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Performance and Battery Life
The 90Hz refresh rate display significantly enhances the Galaxy F22’s software experience, with smooth swiping between screens and scrolling through social media feeds. However, the HD+ resolution is a compromise, especially when compared to competitors with full HD+ displays.
Benchmark tests reveal lower-than-average performance for this price level. The Galaxy F22 scored 1,61,369 in AnTuTu, significantly lower than the Realme Narzo 30’s 3,56,846 points. The performance gap is evident in Geekbench as well. The Galaxy F22 managed 372 and 1,313 in the single and multi-core tests, respectively, while the Realme Narzo 30 scored 532 and 1,700 points, respectively.
Gaming
The gaming experience is decent at best. The smartphone gets quite hot while playing demanding games like Call of Duty: Mobile and Asphalt 9: Legends at default settings. Call of Duty: Mobile exhibited skipped frames at the default Medium graphics and frame rate settings. Similarly, Asphalt 9: Legends experienced stuttering and frame drops during gameplay. The Galaxy F22 is clearly not meant for intense 3D games and is better suited for casual titles.
Battery Life
The 6,000mAh battery provides excellent battery life. It achieved 29 hours and 35 minutes in our HD video battery loop test. This impressive performance is a result of Samsung’s software optimizations.
With normal usage, which included extensive social media app usage, an hour of gaming, two or more hours of video streaming, and photo taking, the phone easily lasted two days before requiring a charge. The display’s refresh rate was set to 90Hz during testing. Switching to 60Hz would likely have extended battery life even further.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Cameras
The Samsung Galaxy F22 features a quad camera setup at the back, consisting of a 48-megapixel primary camera, an 8-megapixel ultra-wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel macro camera, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor used when the Portrait mode is active. Selfies are handled by a 13-megapixel camera located within the display notch.
The camera interface is user-friendly with easy access to relevant controls and a customizable camera mode switcher.
Daylight Photography
Photos taken in daylight with the primary camera are clean, showcasing good detail and dynamic range. Although colors are slightly saturated, they don’t deviate significantly from the actual scene.
Photos captured using the ultra-wide-angle camera are not as detailed as those taken with the primary camera. They are decent at best, exhibiting noticeable purple fringing and blown-out highlights in brighter areas.
Portrait Mode
Daytime selfies taken in Portrait mode are slightly hazy, with brightly lit backgrounds becoming overexposed. The same issues were observed when using Portrait mode with the rear camera. Edge detection is decent, but occasionally the camera would "snip" my hair when it felt like it.
Macro Photography
Macro photos show passable detail, but they are not sharp enough to be considered usable.
Low-Light Photography
As expected, low-light camera performance is not impressive. The primary camera is slow to lock focus, and photos exhibit a lot of noise in darker areas, along with murky textures throughout. The Night mode slightly improves these photos by brightening them, but textures and details are further reduced, leaving some photos looking blotchy.
The ultra-wide-angle camera is unusable in low light, producing blurry photos, and the Night mode provides no help in this case. Using the front-facing camera in low light results in selfies exhibiting noticeable noise, average detail, and dull colors. While the Night mode improves color, it can’t remedy the noise.
Video Recording
Video recording tops out at 1080p 30fps for both the front and rear cameras.
Daylight footage captured using the front-facing camera appears shaky with overexposed backgrounds, but foreground subjects retain a decent level of detail. 1080p 30fps video recorded with the rear camera looks quite good with good stabilization and detail. The phone can also record 1080p video using the ultra-wide-angle camera, and such clips show decent stabilization with passable detail, but brighter parts of the scene are overexposed.
Low-light footage exhibits noticeable noise, but it’s usable provided there’s ambient light. Switching to the ultra-wide-angle camera at night results in very dull videos.
Samsung Galaxy F22: Verdict
After spending a week with the Samsung Galaxy F22, it’s clear that this is a decent budget smartphone for those with basic needs. However, it has several notable shortcomings.
The phone boasts a vibrant 90Hz refresh rate Super AMOLED display that’s great for watching videos and enhances the overall usage experience. The massive 6,000mAh battery is a major advantage for those who demand uncompromised battery life.
However, when compared to the competition, it becomes evident that other companies offer significantly more, not only in terms of specifications but also in convenience. It’s also important to remember that the Super AMOLED display doesn’t translate to crisp video quality, as you’re limited to SD content for OTT apps.
While battery life is well-optimized, the 6,000mAh battery takes over two hours to charge using the bundled 15W charger.
Some users might overlook these compromises, but competitors offer much more compelling options. For example, the Realme Narzo 30 features good battery life, a full HD+ display with HD content streaming support, and faster charging with a 30W charger included in the box. Xiaomi’s Redmi Note 10, for just an additional Rs 500, offers 33W charging, a full HD+ Super AMOLED display, and stereo speakers.
The Samsung Galaxy F22 is a decent budget smartphone, but it doesn’t offer a compelling advantage over its competition. While its strengths include a 90Hz AMOLED display and excellent battery life, its underwhelming performance, mediocre camera quality, and slow charging make it a less-than-ideal choice within its price range.
