Samsung Galaxy M51 Review: Is it really the Meanest Monster?

It’s not that often when you can praise Samsung for launching a competitive mid-ranger who can stand neck to neck with the Chinese competition. But this time it’s a bit different. I have been using Samsung Galaxy M51 for more than 10 days now as my primary device. Today, I will be giving a full review of the Samsung Galaxy M51 and discussing how it stands with the current competition in the market. 

Samsung Galaxy M51 Specification 

Samsung Galaxy M51 Full Review 

Built & Design – Hefty but not so heavy 

Just like any other ‘M’ series device, Samsung Galaxy M51 also has a plastic built with a plastic frame and a shiny plastic back. The back was prone to smudges, but I had my cover on the device throughout my usage, which I bought separately as Samsung didn’t provide one on the box. 

Talking about button placement and ports, the volume rocker keys on the right side were quite tactile, and the power button below also doubles as a fingerprint scanner. While at the bottom, we get a Headphone jack, Type-C port, primary mic, and a bottom-firing speaker. Despite having a large battery, Samsung has managed the weight of the device well. The device was lighter than the Poco X3 NFC, which has a 5100mAh battery and weighs around 215gm. 

Display – 60Hz but Super AMOLED Plus 

Samsung devices come with the best quality display in the price segment. If you look at the quality, the display on the M51 has some of the best-looking display among the mid-rangers currently available in the market. At the front, It has a 6.7-inch FHD+ Super AMOLED Plus display with HDR10+ certification. Samsung says that the AMOLED Plus display use is thinner and lighter than the regular AMOLEDs. 

It was a joy to watch content on this panel with those inky black and reasonably faithful color reproduction. It has a small Punch hole at the center on the top, which doesn’t bother. You can’t compare this AMOLED panel’s quality with any other IPS Display out in the market. 

It is a traditional 60Hz panel, which means no, you won’t get any fancy 90 or 120Hz smoothness that competition is providing. If you have used a high refresh rate display before, you know how snappy and responsive it looks, but Samsung has gone with a regular 60Hz. It would have been a killer if we had a 90Hz panel here. Never the less, it’s a great quality display with joy to view content and consume media. 

• Also Read: Samsung Galaxy M51 Vs OnePlus Nord N10 5G

Cameras – Comes with 64MP a Sony sensor. 

Samsung has done many things right with the Galaxy M51, and the camera is also one of them. Here we get a quad-camera setup at the back with a 64MP F/1.8 primary camera with a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide, 5MP f/2.4 macro, and a 5MP depth sensor. Whereas at the front, we get a 32MP f/2.0 selfie shooter. Keeping the specs aside, let’s see how the camera performs in real life.     

The primary camera on the Samsung Galaxy M51 shoots images with punchy and bright colors. The pixel binning technology produces 16MP shots from the main shooter. The post-processing done after the image is taken makes the picture come out with a balanced dynamic range and correctly exposed exposure under the daylight. The large f/1.8 aperture is also good enough for night shots, and with the night mode, you get bright images with less noise. Also, the night mode shots are cropped and captured at 12MP. 

The ultra-wide camera also produced pleasing images under good lighting conditions, and also the field of view is wider than the other mid-rangers in the market. But, under low light condition images tends to lack sharpness and brings a lot of noise in the picture. Talking about 5MP macro, it’s better than other 2MP sensors, but I rarely used it in my review time period. While the depth sensor does a great job of differentiating between foreground and background and produces a nice boke effect at the back. 

Samsung Galaxy M51 can record up to 4K at 30fps from both the front and the back. The videos have EIS support and can easily stabilize the handheld walking shots. Samsung has also packed tons of features in its camera app like, Single take, full-fledged Pro mode, and many more features, which were firstly exclusive to the ‘A’ & ‘S’ line of devices.   

Performance – Samsung agreed to use Snapdragon on a mid-ranger

Samsung is finally leaving Exynos 9611 behind for its ‘M’ series of devices and coming up with something much more powerful. The Samsung Galaxy M51 is powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G. It is an octa-core CPU with 2×2.2 GHz Kryo 470 Gold & 6×1.8 GHz Kryo 470 Silver cores. While Adreno 618 GPU handles the GPU duties. With the M51, we get two different RAM configurations, either 6GB or 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM with 128 storage.

Samsung Galaxy M51 can easily handle day-to-day tasks like surfing the web, scrolling through large web pages, or binge-watching your favorite series. The variant I used had 6GB RAM and easily helped me through my multi-tasking. Even the gaming experience on the M51 is way better than any other Samsung mid-ranger. It can easily run PUBG-Mobile under smooth graphics with ultra frame rates. You can even crank up the graphics to HD, but it might so some hiccups. We already did a PUBG gaming review of the Samsung Galaxy M51 on our youtube channel so, go check it out for a better understanding of the gaming performance. 

Samsung Galaxy M51 provides a commanding performance at the price. Still, if the price to performance ratio is what you care about the most and want a better gaming device, you can look out for POCO X3 NFC has a newer SoC and high refresh-rate display. 

Battery – Monstrous Endurance 

Samsung marketed the M51 battery as a Meanest Monster as it has one of the largest batteries in any commercial device available in the market. Samsung M51 packs a 7000mAh battery, which easily lasted for 2 full days of usage during my time with the device. It is, without any doubt, the best battery life device on the market.  The 8nm SoC and Super AMOLED display makes a great combo for a 7000mAh battery to last longer. 

Talking about filling that battery, M51 supports 25W fast charging, and the charger is provided in the box. The device takes somewhere around 2 hours to charge fully, and once done, it can easily give you a screen on time above 9hr and, depending on your usage, can go up for 2 days without any hiccup. 

Software & UI – Clean and Improving 

Samsung Galaxy M51 runs on ONe UI Core 2.5 on top of Android 10. The user experience here was quite appreciable. There were not much of Ads throughout the UI though you do get annoying notifications from the Galaxy Store. The One UI on the Samsung device is improving a lot since it’s touch wiz days. You do get some bloatware out of the box, and you can uninstall a bunch of them. Also, the gesture mode on One UI is improved a lot from the previous version. 

Conclusion

Samsung Galaxy M51 is an overall all-rounder from Samsung, excelling in Camera, Software, and battery life. The device might be a great choice for someone looking for a device with long-lasting battery life. It would have been interesting if we got a high-refresh-rate display with this one. However, 60Hz AMOLED is also a good choice for media consumption and everything else. 

Samsung Galaxy M51 Review – Pros & Cons 

 Pros 

• Super AMOLED Plus Display 
• Best in class battery life 
• Snapdragon 730G SoC 
• Camera performance (both front and rear) 

Cons 

• No high refresh rate display 
• Gorilla Glass 3