It’s safe to say that – more than any other period in smartphone history – the past 2-3 years has seen smaller, more incremental updates. The gaps between new phone generations and the previous models are shrinking. And it’s not just the flagships, the same is true in the mid-range market too.
Visually, there’s quite a big difference between the A54 and its predecessor, so that’s something. It also has brighter, better display, but does it move the needle enough, or is this just a makeover for a pretty average mid-ranger?
Samsung Galaxy A54 5G
The Galaxy A54 has a big, bright screen and a big battery, making it a great every-day device, although one which – on balance – seems more expensive than it should be.
- Big, vivid and bright display with 120Hz refresh
- Strong battery life – almost two days of use
- IP67 rated water/dust resistance
- Strong main camera
- Can stutter and lag at times
- Ultrawide and macro cameras aren’t the greatest
- Lots of software bloat
Design
- 158.2 x 76.7 x 8.2mm – 202g
- Plastic frame, glass front and back – IP67 water/dust resistant
- Lime, graphite, violet and white colours
The design has been completely revamped for the new A54. The narrow, plastic-backed A53 has been replaced with a slightly wider, glass-backed A54. Where the model from 2022 has a rectangular square-ish look, the A54 is a lot more round, featuring more obviously rounded corners with a bezel around the display designed to match and generous rounding on the plastic edges.
It’s very much a Galaxy S23 -lite in terms of styling. It features that same triple camera system on the back arranged in a neat line of individual protrusions, rather than have a collection of lenses on a raised island. It’s a bit less refined than the flagship model, but the overall approach is there.
It’s a marked improvement on the 2022 model, and actually looks good. It’s pretty plain in white, but there are other colours too like the much nicer looking lavender purple and lime green options. They’re great-looking phones.
It’s a pretty sturdy-feeling device too, despite the plastic framing. And – just like its predecessor – it features a high water and dust resistance rating. Specifically, that’s IP67, and means it can comfortably get through your daily accidents – whether that be getting caught in the rain, dropped in a sink full of water or being left on the bathroom shelf while you’re showering.
Galaxy S23 (L) and Galaxy A54 (R)
It’s quite a big device too. It’s wide and tall, and is just on the wrong side of the 200g point, so it’s not super lightweight. The glossy glass on the back also has a bit of a habit of slipping from soft furniture.
Display and software
- 6.4-inch AMOLED display – 1080 x 2340 resolution – Up to 120Hz refresh
- 1000 nits brightness – HDR10+ support
- One UI 5.1 based on Android 13
It’s safe to say the A54 has some lofty ambitions, and that – of all the individual elements of the phone – it’s the display that stands out. Samsung has increased the brightness from the last model, and delivered a big, vibrant and colour-rich panel that takes up a lot of space on the front of the phone. It’s saturated and shines in pretty much any condition.
In fact, it’s bright enough and has enough dynamic range that it’s been certified for HDR10+ content. It’s more than sharp enough too, with a pixel density over 400ppi on its full HD+ 1080 x 2340 panel. It means details are sharp and clean at arm’s length. Peer closely and you may see the tiniest roughness compared to a Quad HD+ resolution screen, but it’s really not all that noticeable.
These qualities – and its sheer scale at 6.4-inches – mean it’s an ideal panel for gaming and media consumption. It’s bright enough that you can – for the most part – see it clearly outside in daylight, and it’s vivid enough that movies and TV shows really ‘pop’ on the screen.
Our only real complaint – which is admittedly quite nitpicky – is that the colours can sometimes push slightly too far into over-saturated. Even with it set to its more muted ‘natural’ mode, oranges and reds can end up blowing out a bit and losing detail.
It’s also equipped with high refresh capabilities up to 120Hz. Although – being a mid-range device – you don’t get the super responsive adaptive capabilities which would allow it to adjust this based on the type of content on display. Instead, it mostly jumps between 60Hz and 120Hz – but we’ll speak more on performance in a second though.
Software is near enough identical to what you’ll find on any other Samsung smartphone this year, and we’ve covered that more than enough in our Galaxy S23 Ultra review. It’s a fully featured software experience with plenty of additional nuggets that make it one of the best versions of Android you’ll find.
It is – however – not without its issues. It’s loaded with bloat, and still doesn’t seem to be all that well optimised to deliver a consistently fast and smooth experience on the lesser-powered smartphones like the A-series devices.
Performance and battery
- Exynos 1380 (5nm) processor – 8GB/128GB or 8GB/256GB
- 5000mAh battery – 25W wired charging maximum
It may not have a flagship level Snapdragon chipset inside, but the mid-tier Exynos processor in here is more than capable of handling most people’s demands. It’ll run games smoothly, and – while resolution drops a little on some of the more intense games to preserve smoothness – for the most part, we have no complaints at all. We turned in a good amount of time on Mario Kart Tour Mobile, and it ran pretty much flawlessly.
One of the tell-tale signs that this is a mid-range device is that loading apps and games doesn’t feel instant, but it never left us waiting to the point of frustration. In fact, if you’ve never used a top-level Android phone you likely won’t even notice.
That’s not to say the entire phone experience was zippy and fast always.
As we’ve seen in a number of recent A-series (and some S-series) phones over the past couple of years, there are times when stutter and lag can creep in. Usually, it’s when swiping out of an app to go back to the home screen, or scrolling up and down within a third-party app. It just leaves a feeling of not being quite speedy, fluid and responsive enough. And that’s not just comparing to much more expensive flagship phones.
When you compare that side of things with competition from the likes of Poco with its competitive F-series models, or the OnePlus Nord models which pride themselves on having that responsive, smooth user interface, there’s a noticeable difference here. It’s certainly an area where Samsung could improve.
Battery life – however – is very strong. Samsung’s marketing talks up a “two day battery” and – in our experience – it likely won’t be a full 48 hours between charges, but it’s not miles off. Our own typical usage, which usually consisted of around 3 hours of mixed usage during the day – usually split between gaming, social media, web browsing and listening to music – would leave us with around 40-50 per cent over at the end of a day. This was with taking the phone off charge around 8am and going to bed and placing it on charge at around 11pm/midnight.
Cameras
- Main: 50MP, f/1.8, OIS
- Ultrawide: 12MP, f/2.2
- Macro: 5MP, f/2.4
- Front: 32MP, f/2.2
Just like its more expensive S-branded siblings, the A53 features a neat trio of cameras on the back. Only two of those are really useful cameras, however, with the third being a 5-megapixel macro.
It does let you enable a macro mode in the camera app, and then get really close to small objects, focus and take a picture from a few centimetres away but the results leave a lot to be desired. Photos from the macro camera are just rough looking, because of the lower resolution sensor there’s a lack of detail, especially when compared to the other two cameras.
Photos taken with the dedicated macro camera.
So really, you have two cameras to play with – or at least – two that you’ll spend the most time using.
On the whole, the photos delivered from the A54 are strong for the market they’re in. In that classic Samsung style, in bright daylight you’ll get photos that are very colourful and contrast-rich. Even with Samsung’s aggressive ‘Scene Optimiser’ disabled you’ll get really saturated colours.
2x digital zoom, 1x primary camera and ultrawide comparison
There’s no doubt in our minds – having tested the camera – that the primary lens is the strongest of the three. It copes a lot better with contrasting highlights and shadows than the ultrawide lens does. It’s a good camera, that focuses and processes images quickly. Pictures from it are sharp and colour rich.
Primary camera
If we have any criticism it’s that Samsung’s processing on the A54 seems to introduce a bit too much contrast. Even subtle shadows become dark, while darker parts of backgrounds become so crushed at times they lose texture. This seemed to mostly happen when there was a particularly bright spot in the image, almost as if – in its attempt to reduce the highlights to retain detail – it’s dropped the brightness and exposure levels too much everywhere else. It doesn’t seem to want to elevate the shadows and reduce highlights at the same time.
Ultrawide, primary and primary digital zoom shots.
The ultrawide lens – by comparison – seems to struggle a little, and often over-exposes the images so that brighter parts of the images blow out and lose their detail. Indoors, away from bright lighting, the additional contrast we found in most images made shadows and darker areas quite grainy and noisy.
Selfie camera – regular (L) and wide (R)
On the video side, there’s plenty here to offer a good experience too. Mainly, being able to shoot in 4K, but also having a stabilising feature built into the software that you can just toggle on. With it switched on video becomes much smoother (although a little grainier).
Verdict
We’ve come away from our time with the Galaxy A54 in a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, we have a device with a great, big, vibrant display and good battery life. It has strong cameras too – to an extent. But at its price range, it has a lot of competition.
Look at the Pixel range from Google, and you can either spend similar money (or a little more if there’s no sale) and get the Pixel 7 which has excellent cameras and offers a clean, fluid, bloat-free software experience. Or you can spend less and get the Pixel 6a.
We’d argue the Galaxy A54 has a stronger display and battery than either Pixel, but Google’s phones are more competitively priced given the rest of their strengths (particularly camera and software experience).
Likewise, there are the likes of the OnePlus Nord 2T and Poco F4 which offer faster, more responsive, smoother experiences for less money than the Galaxy A54.
Samsung’s latest A50-series is still the phone to get if you want a long-lasting phone, that you mostly use for consuming media. That bright, large display really sells it. With a more restrained approach to software and more consistently smooth user interface experience, it could be an incredible mid-range device.
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