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| Pros | Cons |
| Supports fast charging | Disappointing battery life |
| Decent dual-lens camera | Plain plastic build |
| Very affordable | Middling power |
The Samsung Galaxy A20e is a great choice for anyone who wants fast charging or multiple camera lenses on a tight budget. The battery life could be better, but in most other ways it's at least competitive.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e is one of the cheapest recent Samsung smartphones you can buy, coming in below the likes of the Samsung Galaxy A71 and Samsung Galaxy A51, and oddly even the Samsung Galaxy A10.
It is, in fact, one of the very cheapest smartphones you can buy from any company, which is all the more surprising when you consider that this isn’t just any company – it’s Samsung, a big-name brand.
You might therefore not be expecting much from the Samsung Galaxy A20e, and in some ways you’d be right – this isn’t a phone that really excels in many areas, but that it’s competent at all at this price is something, and it’s certainly competent, while in some areas going beyond what’s necessary.
Of course, it’s also in a crowded market, so it arguably needs to be more than simply competent to stand out. Does it manage that? Read on to see.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e has a 5.8-inch 720 x 1560 screen, which is a reasonable size and a reasonable resolution, especially for the price. It amounts to 296 pixels per inch, a figure which isn’t a million miles from even the iPhone 11 with its 326 pixels per inch.
Of course, pixels aren’t everything, and this display can’t come close to Apple’s phone, as you’d expect. It also lacks the colourful OLED tech that pricier Samsung phones have long been known for.
Colours therefore are more muted than on a lot of phones, and this also isn’t a super bright display, though unless you’re in direct sunlight it should hold up well enough.
Its aspect ratio is an increasingly conventional 19.5:9, and it’s fairly light on bezel, with a teardrop notch at the top and a strip at the bottom, but little to the sides, giving it an edge-to-edge look. That leads to a screen-to-body ratio of 80.4%, which isn’t bad for a phone that’s this cheap.
We’ve noted above that the Samsung Galaxy A20e has decent screen-to-body ratio, and this fact ensures it looks reasonably good from the front. No one will confuse this for a flagship – even without turning the screen on, the bezel below is too large for any expensive phone, but for what it costs, it looks good.
From the back it impresses less, as it has a fairly plain plastic body, but that’s exactly in line with other phones at this end of the market. Having said that, some phones do better. The even cheaper Huawei Y6 (2019) for example goes some way to disguising its plastic with interesting finishes.
The Galaxy A20e comes in at 147.4 x 69.7 x 8.4mm and a lightweight 141g, so it’s comfortably pocketable, but there’s unsurprisingly no water resistance here.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e has an octa-core Exynos 7884 chipset, which is a fairly low-end chipset, similar to the one found in the Samsung Galaxy A10. It’s paired here with 3GB of RAM, a combination which is generally fine for basic smartphone tasks and app use, but will struggle once you try multi-tasking or playing more than simple games.
It is however competitive for what you’re paying here – there aren’t any cheap high-performing smartphones, and if your budget is under £200, you won’t find many handsets that are much more powerful than this.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e manages to pack in a dual-lens camera, making it a step up from the single-lens Galaxy A10.
You get both a 13MP f/1.9 main sensor and a 5MP f/2.2 ultra-wide one. For the most part the 13MP one will be the one to go for of course, as it performs reasonably well, especially in decent lighting – as with most cheap phones it can struggle in darker environments though.
The 5MP ultra-wide snapper isn’t quite as capable, but it is nice to have the option of fitting more into a shot – that’s not something that’s guaranteed at this end of the market.
Selfie duties meanwhile are handled by an 8MP f/2.2 camera, which gets the job done but doesn’t particularly excel, even in good light.
The main feature of the Samsung Galaxy A20e beyond the basics is its fingerprint scanner. This sits on the back, which has never been our favourite position (it means you have to pick the phone up to unlock it if it’s sat face up on a surface), but it works well and seems secure.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e runs Android of course, specifically Android 9 out of the box, but it can be updated to Android 10. So the software is fairly modern at the time of writing, though not quite up to the latest available version (11).
The Samsung Galaxy A20e has a 3,000mAh battery, which is on the small side, but can sometimes get the job done in lower spec devices like this. In practice its life isn’t at all special, but will see you through the important one-day period, so you can charge it overnight.
And if you find yourself needing to juice it up partway through a day that’s less of a problem here than with some cheap phones, as the Galaxy A20e supports 15W fast charging. Now, as fast charging goes that’s quite slow (the OnePlus 8 offers double that for example and some phones have even more charging power), but fast charging at all on such a cheap handset is impressive and unusual.
As for memory, there’s just 32GB built in, which won’t go far, but there’s also a microSD card slot with support for cards of up to 512GB, so there’s no need to run short on storage.
Connectivity meanwhile includes the basics – Bluetooth 5.0, 4G, and NFC, but of course there’s no 5G here.
The Samsung Galaxy A20e is a basic phone in a lot of ways but one that goes above and beyond in a few. Its fast charging battery is a really pleasant surprise, while its dual-lens camera and edge-to-edge screen are also appreciated.
It’s very ordinary in a lot of other ways – battery life is just barely average, the build is plain and plastic like most cheap smartphones, and it doesn’t excel for power. But it’s at least competitive in most areas, which is what counts most.
You inevitably make some sacrifices when you’re not spending much and we’d argue that the biggest sacrifice here is the battery life, since some cheap phones - like the Moto G8 Power Lite - actually have big batteries.
But the fast charging cushions the blow somewhat, and if you can live with its average life then the Samsung Galaxy A20e is a phone that – for the price – we can certainly recommend.
