Samsung Galaxy M10 review

The not-so-basic Millenial smartphone

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UI/UX- yay or nay?

Samsung has faced criticism of its UI in the past, but it's clearly improved over the years, and it shows in the M10. The Samsung Experience (version 9.5 UX) comes across as smoother and more seamless than many others in its class; it remains very customisable, allowing users to adapt the phone to suit their needs. 

The phone runs Android 8.1 Oreo- which... meh. It's 2019. Android Oreo isn't just 'so yesterday', it's 'so last year'. For a phone that released this year to come with Android Pie is just... a big let down. 

One new feature to the UI, though, is the Lock Screen Stories. The Lock Screen shows a number of articles, based upon your (again, customisable) preferences. Samsung has partnered with Glance to source stories from a variety of platforms. If you don't want to load up your lock screen, you can disable the feature in settings.

There are a number of apps pre-loaded on the phone- Dailyhunt, Samsung Members, Game Launcher, Samsung Mall, Microsoft Office suite. While a few can be uninstalled, others can only be disabled. Unless you're prone to working on the go, having an Office suite on your phone that you can't uninstall can get pretty annoying.

The Galaxy M10 also has a Dual Messenger feature, accessible from the 'Advanced' section of the settings- it allows you to use multiple accounts on the same messenger/social media apps via cloning. So you can use two Facebook accounts (if for some strange reason you have two) on the same phone without having to log in and out every time. 

So overall, it's a yay for the UI/UX from us. 

Specs and Performance

Under the hood of the M10 is the Exynos 7870 octa-core processor, along with 2GB/3GB RAM. So far, the performance has been impressive. Despite playing multimedia-heavy games for hours on end, there was no noticeable lag or stutter. Of course, if you run every single app at once, there's bound to be a bit of protest from the phone, but the M10 also detects dormant power-consuming apps and closes them down regularly. 

As far as performance goes, the Galaxy M10 is one of the the best sub-10K phones in the market right now. 

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