Galaxy A52 5G review: Flagship features for a budget price By CNET

This is the Samsung Galaxy a52 5g, it costs 500 and kind of has a galaxy s.21 ultra look thing going on. In the same way, I kind of have a kit Harrington haircut thing, going on the difference between a good, low-cost, 5g phone and a perfect one is all about smart compromises. Very few find an appealing balance as well as Samsung has found with the galaxy a52 5g. In fact, the only other sub 500 phones that do this are the iPhone SE which doesn't have 5g and the Google Pixel 4 a5g, which is almost a year old. The build of the a525g is good, it's not premium and that's fine, but it feels good in the hand when you tap on the back, though you can definitely tell it's plastic, so yeah those don't tap on the back compared to the galaxy s21 and s21 ultra. This phone has a bunch of features that does more expensive phones, don't like a headphone, jack, expandable storage, and it even comes with a wall charger in the box.

The a525g is rated ip67 for water and dust resistance. That means it can be submerged under three feet of water, for up to 30. Minutes on the front is a 6.5 inch, full HD display with a hole punch cut out for the selfie camera. This display has a high refresh rate. You can set it to either 60 hertz or 120 hertz animations, look smooth gaming feels more immersive and even mundane.

Things like scrolling through a feed look crisp, topping it all off is a slab of gorilla glass 5. Now let me level some expectations here is the display as good as the one on the s21? Absolutely not, but it's perfect for 500, the biggest downside to the display and design is the end screen optical fingerprint sensor. First, the position of it feels very low for one-handed use. The fingerprint reader is slow, and I rarely unlock the phone with one attempt find it easier just to swipe up and enter a pen. There are five cameras on the a525g one on the front and four on the back.

Now. One of the rear cameras is a depth sensor which works with the main camera. To give you some absolutely fun and ridiculous AR effects more on that in a moment, and some decent portrait mode photos there's a macro camera, and it's not that most people probably won't use a macro camera on a phone. It's just that compared to the main camera. The macro camera isn't great.

It allows you to focus closer, but you need to be really steady, you're, just a handshake or a breath away from being out of focus. I wish there was focus peaking on the macro camera to help you see when your subject is in focus and when it's not pro mode offers, focus peaking, but only for the main camera. So the result is a handful of slightly out of focus, close-up photos of a flower with just one of them in focus. The a525g has a decent ultra-wide camera and a good for its price main camera. The main camera has optical image.

Stabilization, a 64 megapixel sensor, which combines pixels for a 16 megapixel photo with good detail and brightness. Your personal taste will vary on how much you like the color saturation to me. It's just a touch over saturated, but it still looks good in low light situations. We start to see the camera's weakness, but there is night mode and photos look decent, but you're not going to get the same results as night mode on the galaxy s21. The a525g can record 4k video, which in good light, is good, but as things get darker image, noise and artifacts become more apparent.

Also, you can't use optical image stabilization when recording 4k video. But if you drop in resolution to full HD video, you can use super steady stabilization which yes works rather well. The selfie camera has a 32 megapixel sensor and Samsung's full arsenal of face smoothing jaw, line, defining and eye enlarging tools and then there's fun mode. Go on. You say: well, fun mode allows you to use Snapchat AR filters without using Snapchat, so I can finally be the brunette with cat eyeglasses that I've always wanted to be.

To put this all into perspective, both the iPhone SE and Google Pixel 4 a5g have better overall camera systems for photos and videos that speaks less about the a52, 5g's camera prowess and more about what apple and Google are able to pack into their phones. The a525g has a Qualcomm snapdragon, 750 g chip and six gigabytes of ram. It has android 11 and at the time I'm recording this. It's running the July 2021 software update performance is good, it's not blazing fast, but the only times. I notice that is the small delay when I'm opening up the camera from the lock screen or when I'm rotating the phone between landscape or portrait, or vice versa.

But here is perhaps the best part you get three generations of android OS updates and at least four years of security updates, and as the name indicates, this is a 5g phone that works on sub 65g in the US I tested it here in Greenville, South Carolina on T-Mobile and speeds were just okay and a little all over the place, and sometimes, despite having the 5g indicator on the screen, the phone would actually be connected to 4g LTE. Now this actually has everything to do with T-Mobile, because I've seen the same exact thing happen with other phones. I've tested here, as I say in all my reviews- don't get a phone just for 5g, see what your carrier's 5g coverage and speeds are before you consider buying a 5g phone. The phone has a 4 500 William hour battery Samsung claims two days on a full charge. Now I reliably got one day, and that was with the display set at 120 hertz on days with lighter use or with the display set to 60 hertz.

It lasted a day and a half easily in my CNET battery test with continuous video, playback and airplane mode. It lasted a respectable 17 hours in 40 minutes, and that was with the display at 120 hertz. When you step back and consider everything the galaxy a52 5g has, it is a well-rounded phone, despite some minor and annoying flaws. I used the a525z on and off for the past two months and I have to say it's a solid buy for five hundred dollars. Now, as I record this video, you can actually get one unlocked on Samsung's website for 425, which makes it very hard to pass up now.

If you want to learn more about the galaxy a52 5g or buy it check out the link in the description below. But now I want to hear from you guys. What do you think about the galaxy a52 5g did Samsung find a good balance in terms of features and compromises and price, and do you have a galaxy a525g? If so, what has your experience been, like so far, throw your thoughts in the comments.

Source : CNET