Blackview A95 Reviews and Unboxing

The smart electronic device giant brand, Blackview has put a new product, Blackview A95 on shelves today, following the considerable sales volume of the latest Blackview phone Blackview BV8800, a flagship rugged phone with night vision, in the course of its world premiere offer on AliExpress. The follow-up is a mid-range smartphone yet with an iPhone 13 Pro-like design and ultra-worthy-for-money configuration. The real interesting thing is Blackview A95 starts at an unbelievably low price — only $139.99. Let’s check what it has got.

We sorted out the average specifications of general $139.99 smartphones and found an incredible fact about Blackview A95 — it outguns its peers in terms of key specs that matter for smooth and efficient operations of smartphones. It is one of the best Blackview phones you shouldn’t miss.

Battle against common $139.99 smartphones

Clearly, A95 offers unexpectedly impressive specs compared with common $139.99 phones including the processor, storage, camera and OS that are usually the top factors to consider in the market for a smartphone.

Blackview A95 Unboxing

Inside the package box of the Blackview A95 is well organized with 1 protective case, 1 user manual, 1 charging cable, 1 charger, and 1 SIM eject pin.

Review: Design

Let’s get started by talking about the design of the A95. Blackview boasts that it’s the most beautiful A-series smartphone ever, and it’s worthy of the name. This stylish handset takes in three gorgeous colors, vividly and poetically named Summer Ocean Blue, Fantasy Galaxy Rainbow, and Aurora Night Black, from which we can easily tell its source of inspiration for the stunning color palette — the summer ocean under rays of warm midday sunshine, the dazzling nebula in the infinite galaxy, and the white northern light on the night sky.

In terms of the overall layout of the back cover, the A95, especially for its blue shade, is easily reminiscent of the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro design — such as the square-shaped camera module on the top left corner and polished flattened middle frame. This model claims to apply new processing technologies that achieve glittering and translucent effects and bring the texture of better fingerprint resistance. In the sunlight, the back cover shines.

It’s not only great to look at but to hold in your hand. Officially measured in just 8.55 mm slim and 195g light (thanks to the plastic but metal-like cover), the A95 is taking the grip friendliness to a whole new level. Right on the frame is a power button integrating the fingerprint recognition function. Click with your finger pulp and unlock the screen in a wink, more effortless than in-display or rear-mounted fingerprint sensors.

Review: Display & Audio

Moving on to the display, we have a 6.528-inch 720*1600 HD+ panel with support for a standard 60Hz refresh rate and 120Hz touch sampling rate. The screen-to-body ratio reaches 87.3%, rating in the middle of mainstream flagship smartphones. Topping out at 400 nits for brightness level, it’s not the most popularly bright panel we’ve seen on the phone in the recent past. However, it proves to be visible enough in most lighting conditions and reproduces vibrant and punchy colors. In real-world performance, it has no reason to complain about when watching the latest TV dramas or gaming with the A95.

Besides the display, an immersive experience cannot live without the sound performance. The A95 equips an AAC-1217 speaker (not the stereo type) at the bottom side. Judging by the loudness level and the sound quality in video streaming, the bass and mids are delivered excellently but with the highs a bit distorted at higher volumes. As for its call quality, thanks to the high 50MW receiver, it’s easy to make you heard even in noisy public places. It comes with a Type-C port to connect to earphone cables for better listening.

Review: Battery life test

As for the battery, Blackview A95 is fueled by a 4380mAh capacity, which is average. But it’s a bonus given its slim body. In case there’s someone that is not sure about the endurance, the Blackview official released a test. The video records a day with the A95 — it runs every common operation that we would usually do with our smartphone like watching videos, swiping TikTok, browsing webpage, playing games. And turns out that it can last a day based on normal use.

Review: Cameras

Turning to the camera power, as far as the megapixel size, compared with other specifications of the A95, it’s not surprising enough with a 20MP sensor, especially when there are 48MP, 50MP, or even 100MP on the mobile market. However, one thing is to mention — the previous flagship A-series smartphone Blackview A100 only features a 12MP sensor, and the A95 is the first-ever Blackview A-series smartphone that supports a 20MP camera. More specifically, the A95 takes in a 20MP Sony® IMX376 camera sensor that was first available on the front camera of Vivo X9 in 2016 and later found in OPPO and Redmi smartphones.

As for the working principle, in low-light environments, the 4-in-1 pixel binning technology helps four neighboring 1μm pixels combine into a large 2μm super pixel that enables 4x higher the light sensitivity for 5MP bright images. When in well-lit conditions, the re-mosaic algorithm comes in handy to reorganize the binning pixels into original ones to shoot 20MP clear photos. In the actual shooting, photos have higher contrast and boosted saturation. It can manage the exposures well in bright daylight and do the same at night, although there’s a loss of sharpness. Blackview’s AI-powered software does a great deal of background work for better imaging.

Though featuring a 3-camera design, you should know that there’s only one real camera at the back camera module. The camera experience will never be the same if the A95 supports more, such as the ultra-wide camera. As for the front camera, the A95 embeds an 8MP sensor of an unknown brand which unsurprisingly doesn’t fare better, but, again, the results are decent enough to capture memories. Backed by the upgraded AI Beauty algorithm,  you get a not-bad selfie shot.

There are more camera modes to make the photo works plain remarkable. For example, the Night Mode, witnessing a shift from 1.0 to 2.0 version, together with the 20MP camera, turns low-light shooting into marvelous. It improves the overall brightness and reserves more details largely.

The PortraitColor Mode keeps the focused subject to be colored. You’re always the protagonist of the photo.

The Portrait Mode blurs the background and tweaks the contrast to focus on your subject, a bit similar to the PortraitColor Mode.

Review: Processor & Storage

If you’re a heavy mobile user and frequent gamer, then you will find the A95 has an edge and shows no signs of stress in multitasking and gaming performance by shipping the octa-core MediaTek Helio P70 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. With the LPDDR4X and UFS 2.1 combination popular in mid-to-high-end mobiles, accessing data faster and quicker with less power consumption will make no problem. Moreover, you get the TF card support of up to 1TB capacity, which means it’s a breeze to store everything in the handset.

Tested with AnTuTu Benchmark, the A95 gets a score of 226979, a bit lower than the official data of 229873. Though not as good as the results of some Snapdragon SoC phones, it doesn’t mean that the A95 won’t deliver good enough performance in gaming and day-to-day tasks. We did notice some level of instability while playing games on the device, which causes a bummer. However, referring to the overall responsiveness, smoothness, or graphic rendering, it’s far from dissatisfaction, much less to run more apps in the background simultaneously and switch without stutter or lag.

Review: Operating System

Blackview has put much effort into developing its operating system called Doke OS to make most of the Android OS potential. Although the A95 is not available with its latest Doke OS 3.0, the Doke OS 2.1 based on Android 11 has a lot to appreciate. From an aesthetic perspective, every UI element for the wallpaper, icon, and option interface design works harmoniously, enhancing aesthetics and consistency. The customization level of the A95 isn’t high as expected, which might be a pity, but still, you can change the themes and reorganize the apps.

The Doke OS 2.1 offers an app drawer containing all apps. Slide up for the app you need. You can disable the app drawer entirely if that’s not your thing. With the improvements in the smoothness of animations and gesture navigation, we rarely experienced stuttering when navigating the menus, and apart from a few demanding games, apps opened promptly.

A few features impress us. First is the 3-finger Screenshot & Long Screenshot. Activate this function in the setting interface, and you can slide down with three fingers on the screen. Now more smartphones facilitate screenshot function on the Control Panel, but 3-finger operation is neck to neck on the convenience.

Then is the Split-screen function. Go to the Recent Tasks interface, click the bullets at the top right, and choose the Split Screen. You can watch movies on one screen while chatting with friends on social apps on the other and not interfere with each other.

Last is the Game Mode. Before gaming, you can clear up the RAM and block disturbance by calls or notifications. It supports a Diving Mode to prevent all incoming messages with one click for the best immersive gameplay.

Overall, to its credit, Doke OS 2.1 is multifunctional and practical with a fair share of beneficial features to successfully cope with a wide range of needs

Conclusion

The real outstanding point is Blackview A95’s 8GB + 128GB large storage, usually seen on flagships, which makes it look like a steal for the pricing of $139.99. Let alone it supports 1TB expandable storage, providing enormous room for all your movies, music, photos, files, and games.

And there’s a feature that you may neglect solely from this sheet but make a big deal in photography is its excellence in low-light shooting. The 20MP Sony® IMX376 rear camera, enhanced by the 2µm 4-in-1 Super Pixel technology, captures up to 4x more light and up to 3x higher light sensitivity, which can produce strikingly clear photos in poorly-lit environments.

What’s more, three refreshingly dazzling colors are really impressive, which enables it apart from a number of homely budget 4G phones. For an iPhone 13 Pro lover, look no further, this good Chinese smartphone Blackview A95 has the same, iconic camera on the back. The back panel presents a dazzling and translucent finish with an all-new ICM process and 8 layers of vacuum nano-optical coating. Weighing at only 195g, slim as 8.5mm with sleek rounded corners, the A95 delivers a luxury enjoyment on each grip.

On the whole, Blackview A95 really pushes the envelope to give you a stunning design and the best performance while staying super economical on pricing. If you’re interested, lose no time to snap up one before it runs out. It’s worth noting that $139.99 is a limited-time offer. After all, it looks like a losing deal for the seller. Here’s the thing — the original price for the A95 is actually $214.27. $149.99 is a cut-price only effective from Feb. 21 to Feb. 23 PT, and it comes with 1000 coupons worth $10, so you can get an A95 at a staggering $139.99. Don’t miss it!

• A95 World premiere at Blackview global store on AliExpress.

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