[General Topics] Zirila:
I bought a new Galaxy A41 for 180€ and I'm just setting it up.

I want to share my thoughts so far about:

the hardware, the software, things like rooting.

The Installation and Software:

The phone starts and already wants to trick you into signing data collection agreements (Terms of Service (not optional), marketing, analytics, 3rd party shares (3 optional)).

If you select by common sense and only check ToS you'll get fooled when you check the last radio button which says "I've read all of the above and agree (..)" which enabled all optional radio buttons again right before you click next. What a dirty play.

Also it is not possible to skip the WiFi selection screen ("skip" is greyed out) making it impossible to setup the phone without internet access. This has nothing to do with FRP, this is before anything google related is setup. Samsung clearly states it requires internet to setup the phone and install necessary provider software. Once it gets internet it gets activated and the "skip" option becomes clickable after the next factory reset. This practice makes me really angry. It's obviously the price you pay when you buy a low- to mid-range class phone - you'll pay the rest with your personal data.

I setup the phone without creating google and samsung accounts (I never got one of these anyways) and got to the home screen. If you havent enabled WiFi yet, there aren't many apps at all pre-installed, just a few useful and a few bloatware apps (like Facebook, MS Office, etc).

If you give it WiFi however, it kinda explodes with leeching, loading and updating Apps you never asked for. Only some of these can be "disabled" and only some of them can be "uninstalled" the normal way. Some of the unwanted you can't uninstall nor disable. (This is where you wish you had root access)

The phone had Security Patch Level installed from August 2020. Making OTA firmware updates 3x (about 1-3gb) will get you to Sec.Patch Level November 2020 which is the latest available OTA (we have February 2021 now). That's not a good sign IMO.. so it's already a few month behind the patch cycle..

So, software wise there aren't many useful apps for me installed, really just the utter basics and much more 3rd party bloatware and Samsung nonsense apps. It's not as much as with the Poco X3, but still much...

The Hardware:

The super amoled display is the biggest feature of the phone. and it's really great, the colors, the viewing angle, the brightness.. all top notch.

Battery is with only 3500mA/h not that big, but it's astonishing strong and it holds up the uptime it promises so far. I can only hope it stays like that even after a few years.

The size of the phone is what actually made me buy this phone. its the only phone under 6.5" under 200€ and not older than a year. all newer phones are bigger. The size is great, it's slim, but long. (6,1" ~15cm long)

I didn't expect it to be that heavy, though. well, the weight is not really heavy, but compared to older phones it is a good bit heavier.

The Camera is just Mediocre, I already knew this from reviews before but playing around with it and seeing the results underscores it. The final pics alltogether look always a bit washen out if you zoom in. There aren't enough professional advanced settings in the camera settings compared to open camera or mx camera. you have to stick with what you get. The Sensor of the camera is despite 48mpixels only mediocre. the widescreen lens is a nice feature but quality wise not that good either. Selfie cam is subjectively good enough though.

HDR setting and results are a joke compared to mx camera.

Rooting:

I actually planned to root the phone with magisk and installing TWRP. However, I ended up not rooting or installing TWRP at all. The reasons are various.

First, It's possible to unlock the bootloader in developer settings (after the phone called home..). You'll get a nagscreen every time you boot the phone up after it's unlocked. From this point on you might be able to root the phone with Magisk (following the advices a few posts above), but it'll probably trigger and brick KNOX status.

I decided to NOT do that and relocked the bootloader, because there seems to be no lively community for this phone, there are no Custom ROMs available nor any custom bootloaders. And I might want to sell the phone again if it doesn't fit my likings and that'll be more difficult with broken KNOX status. Also that way I can get OTA stock updates as long as the phone is supported.

There is also no supported version of TWRP for the A41. And TWRP on phones like this is tricky as you can read at the A40 TWRP page: TWRP A40 read chapter "This device uses system-as-root in an A-only partition configuration." Also the device is using File Based Encryption and not Full Disc Encryption. I don't know if TWRP works with that environment at all yet.

So currently the only benefits of getting root would be to be able to completely uninstall some bloatware. The rest (firewall, adblocker, backups, etc) is pretty much possible without root access.

I really hope this phone is able to get custom ROMs and community in the future, though.

I exactly know what you mean as I watch the pics I just made with the same phone. I don't know if you could change anything in this regard after rooting but it actually looks to me like it's rather the built in camera sensor that makes the quality not that good and not so much the jpeg compression. It doesn't really look like jpeg artifacts, it's more like a washen out painting. I doubt you'll get anything better by rooting the phone, but thats just guessing. Also: did you check out the Image format options? "4:3" vs "4:3 48mpixels"?