When you think of a Samsung phone, a battery champion is probably not what comes to mind. That may be about to change though, with the new Gala
xy M51, which has an insane 7000 mAh battery! Just how good is the battery life here and what else does this mid-ranger have to offer?
Let’s find out in our full review. The Galaxy M51 is a midrange phone that isn’t lacking feature wise. Its specs and price are very similar to the popular Galaxy A71- that is besides this device's huge battery. Because of this power pack, the M51 is thicker, and heavier than many of this year’s phones, but at the same time it does weigh less than the larger flagships. This is partly due to its lighter plastic build, which while not the most premium, still feels solid. On the front you get 6.7 inch Super amoled display, with a 1080p resolution, and a standard 60Hz refresh rate. Overall this display is nice especially for a mid-ranger. You get a sharp picture, punchy colors, which can be tuned to be reasonably accurate in settings, and those deep blacks typical for an OLED. Brightness is good too, with a maximum of 370 nits and a boost up to 670 nits in auto mode when in bright conditions. All we're missing here is a high refresh rate. Many competitors panels will look smoother when you're swiping or scrolling.
For audio the Galaxy M51 has a single bottom firing speaker. Loudness isn’t great, with just an average score in our loudness test. And as far as quality goes, the mids leave more to be desired here. But you do get a traditional 3.5mm jack, and with headphones plugged in, there is support for FM radio. Now let’s dive into the Galaxy M51’s most unique feature, its battery life.
Its 7000mAh power pack is the biggest we’ve seen in a mainstream phone! As you’d expect, it blows away the competition as far as endurance goes. The M51 was able to score an outstanding rating of 156 hours in our proprietary tests! The Galaxy M51 comes with a 25 watt charger in the box, and with it we were able to charge this huge battery from 0 to 35% in half an hour- which is pretty respectable.
The Galaxy M51 is no slouch when it comes to chipset performance either. It runs on an upper mid-range Snapdragon 730G chipset, and in benchmarks, performance is on par with devices such as the Galaxy A71 and the Poco X3. It's not the best mid-range chipset you can find out there and you don't get support for 5G connectivity, but the Galaxy M51 has plenty of power for running your everyday tasks. The phone’s interface is Samsung’s latest version of OneUI, running over Android 10. It's quite smooth and gives you a similar experience to other recent Samsung phones. Most functions are provided by Google's apps, though you do get a proprietary gallery app, file manager and a Samsung web browser. One thing missing here that you'd find on most other Galaxy phones is an edge panel for shortcuts, though this isn't the end of the world. You get 128GB of storage on board the device and this is expandable through microSD if you need more. Waking up and unlocking the Galaxy M51 can be done with a side mounted fingerprint scanner. You don't get an under display one, like the Galaxy A71's, but it is fast and reliable.
Now on to the Galaxy M51's quad camera setup. There’s a 64MP, quad bayer main camera, a 12MP ultra wide angle cam, a 5MP macro camera, and a depth sensor. The main camera takes 16 megapixel photos by default and in good light these are quite nice. You get lively colors, excellent detail and wide dynamic range for a mid-range phone. There is some visible noise though. Portrait shots look pretty good, with competent edge detection, and pleasant looking backgrounds. The algorithm does have trouble with complex backgrounds or messy hair styles though. Since there's no telephoto camera, zoomed photos are achieved through a crop and upscale from the main cam. This process introduces some softness, which the phone tries to mask with over sharpening. The 12 megapixel ultrawide cam takes especially wide photos with respectable dynamic range, and a pleasant amount of detail. The barrel distortion correction does a great job, too. There is some noise present and colors are warmer here than on the main cam. 5mp close-up photos from the macro camera actually look pretty nice, capturing a good amount of fine detail. These are much better than what you'd get with the 2mp macro cams that are common these days. In low light photos from the main camera are decent with above-average quality for a mid-ranger. There is well preserved detail and good dynamic range and colors aren't bad. There is plenty of noise though. Turning on night mode introduces a slight crop so you end up with 12mp images. You get a lot of restored detail and highlights here, but there isn't such a dramatic improvement in shadows. Low light photos from the ultra wide are rather soft but if the scene has enough light you can get a usable image with decent detail and wide dynamic range.
There is night mode support on this camera and these shots come out sharper like on the main cam. This provides a nice improvement in the highlights but here you also get a noticeable lift in the shadows, too. The Galaxy M51 has a 32MP, quad bayer front facing cam, and selfies come out at 12mp. These have good detail and wide dynamic range, and faces come out well exposed. Skin tones can be hit or miss though, depending on how well lit the scene is. Videos can be recorded with the main camera at up to 4K resolution at 30fps. This footage is very good with excellent detail, low noise, reasonably wide dynamic range, spot on colors, and natural looking processing. The ultra wide cam can also shoot 4K videos and these have warmer colors than the main cam's. There's good detail for an ultra wide but there is some visible noise. Electronic stabilization is available on both cameras and it smooths out handheld video reasonably well. We did notice a bit of a jello effect from time to time on the main camera though. So, that’s the Samsung Galaxy M51.
You get amazing battery life, but that’s not all- the rest of the package is quite solid, too. There's a competitive chipset, a nice looking AMOLED display and the cameras do a great job for the money. There's actually not much to say as far as downsides go- we weren't too impressed by the speaker quality and Samsung doesn't support a trendy high refresh rate on this display. However these things are easy to look past, especially at this price, and if you want a mid-range phone with some of the best battery life in the business, the Galaxy M51 is definitely worth recommending. Thanks for watching guys, stay safe, and see you on the next one
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