Samsung Galaxy A52 5G: Is "good" good enough? By Engadget

One of the best parts of my job is getting to play with really expensive premium smartphones oftentimes days before they go on sale. But if you ask me whether I love the idea of paying for all of this stuff well, the answers are pretty obvious. No, I don't often like spending more than I need to Samsung gets that, which is why they've created new devices like the galaxy a52 5g, which packs a pretty great screen solid performance, a plethora of cameras around back all for about 500, which is not a ton. You could wind up paying a lot more for a smartphone if you're, not careful. The question is: is a 500 phone these days really worth investing in well before we get to that? I want to make clear this is not a full review, I'm not at home. I don't have access to my full suite of comparison devices so consider this more of an open-ended conversation about the a525g and what it means to buy into a less expensive smartphone.

Let's take a closer look now. You would naturally expect a 500 smartphone to be rife with compromises, and that is certainly true to an extent the back of this phone, for example, it's made out of a flat sheet of plastic, unfortunately we're not getting any of the fun colors that Samsung showed off, and it's ostentatious and kind of cringy launch event we're just getting black here, which is fine if you're into the more subtle look, but I find it does tend to pick up fingerprints pretty quickly. That said, this body is rated ip67 for water and dust resistance, so it should handle a decent amount of beating, but that's not true of the entire phone, the display wow great, and we'll get to that in a second. The cover glass is actually quite malleable to the extent where I've already put a couple tiny nicks in it bear in mind. I've been treating this phone with kid gloves.

Basically, since I got it, it is brand new so for little scratches to appear so quickly. It doesn't really bode well for long term use. Oh, there's! No wireless charging here that still largely remains the feature. Samsung only wants to put in its more expensive smartphones and charging can take a while Samsung says the a52 5g supports 25 watt fast charging, but they only gave you a 15 watt charging brick in the box. Now it's nice that you're getting one anyway, since we are painfully aware that Samsung is removing these things from some of its flagship devices, but long story short just be ready for a bit of a wait next time.

You take this thing to a wall outlet. If there is one stand out here, it is the screen. Samsung shows a six and a half inch infinity, o AMOLED display that, to my eyes, honestly looks pretty great for a phone of this price. It's also really smooth. If you want it to be, you can wrap up the refresh rate on the display up to 120 hertz, though that is completely optional.

If you'd rather have the battery savings, you can keep things at a relative eye, friendly 60hz, not nearly as pretty but should keep your a525g just going a little longer other than that. There's not a lot to complain about 1080p on a screen. This size might not be perfect for everybody. I know some pixel peepers would probably be just a little upset by the choice but bear in mind again. This is a 500 phone, certainly not bad, and it is worth pointing out that even under the harsh Oakland sun, the max brightness on this display makes it perfectly usable outdoors now that it's finally getting nice out and people are getting vaccinated.

That's going to be more of a concern than it. Maybe was this time last year, so certainly something to keep in mind. We're also looking at a pretty flexible rear camera setup. We've got four sensors back there. Now.

I will be completely frank: it's been pretty nice in California. So far, so the photos I've taken under broad daylight do look great and that's generally true of every other smartphone camera and really, if your lighting is good, you have nothing to worry about when it finally gets dark and night mode kicks in automatically. You do get generally nice results as well. Now, like I said before, I don't have my full complement of review comparison devices and I would have loved to test this thing against Google's Pixel 4a, which, in my mind, is probably the best cheap, android smartphone. You could probably buy right now and that's thanks in large part to this really incredible.

Computational, photography, chops, those photos, look good, and you barely have to do anything. Samsung's image processing has gotten perfect, particularly when it comes to my shots. I have taken a few that I'm really, really proud of, but I'm still not convinced that they've really managed to pull ahead of google and, if you're more of an iPhone person, I should point out that the iPhone 11 generally does a better job. Overall, though, I think it really kind of boils down to your personal preference. The iPhones these days tend to shoot pretty moody photos they're a little more contrast, whereas Samsung, obviously, as always, still skews towards really bright images, with a lot of color a lot of verve and a lot of vividness we're.

Also looking at a 12 megapixel ultrawide camera, which is honestly it's fine. It's not great, I wouldn't use this often if I could get away with it and honestly, if you're in any sort of dark situation, you're going to see a lot of noise, but it's there for you anyway. As far as flexibility goes, those are really the two cameras that you're going to want to stick with the most often there is a depth sensor, basically just for portraits and using some of Snapchat's filters that are now built into the camera app which they're not bad. I guess, if you're into that kind of thing, you can take photos of people splash and fake makeup, or if you really wanted to there's an out of focus mode that lets you take perfectly casual, not at all contrived images that aren't quite in focus, but you're wearing a nice pair of virtual shades. So it's kind of worth it, maybe not oh, and if you happen to be a fan of shooting, really, really small things.

There is a 5 megapixel macro camera here, which certainly does the job. Well enough, I spent a little time shooting a tiny bug walking around on the sort of textured grip of my Fuji xh1, and I have to say it didn't look too bad. Will I use this in any sort of regular sense? Probably not, but this is Samsung. Their camera setups are generally more focused on the flexibility of the entire package, rather than giving you great cameras all the way through. So I can't say I'm surprised now after living with the a52 5g for a couple of days, I have to say performance out of the snapdragon 750g chipset has been more or less respectable in day-to-day tasks like whipping through websites installing apps playing games.

I actually ran into very little issue the times when things did seem to get pretty honky were not really the ones I expected. The device only has six gigs of ram and for whatever reason, I think this is most apparent when you're jumping between certain applications. The one example that most immediately springs to mind is if you're, watching a video on YouTube, and you jump out of it. The natural inclination for YouTube is to just shrink that video window and sort of have it running on top of the rest of android, but that has caused my phone to sort of block up a few times for reasons that I can't quite figure out. Maybe it's the ram, maybe there's some underlying software.

Optimization, that's not happening correctly, but there are moments where the a525g just doesn't feel as fast as you'd expect out of a 500 phone and then, of course, there is a software which continues to be a very hit or miss proposition. Now, since this is Samsung we're talking about, there is a lot of extra stuff built into one UI and a lot of it. You know if you're an android purist almost certainly not for you, but if you're someone who's just sort of getting into grips with a new smartphone or don't really have a ton of expectations. You just need something reliable. I think on the whole Samsung's balance of good software to just sort of bloated cruft sort of works out in Samsung's favor, which I guess means it works out in our favor too.

Now I wish I'd had a little more time to test this, and I will continue to keep living with the a525g for a while to really get a sense of what it's capable of, but there are just some things that still, for me, at least at this point, remain question marks. Battery life is one of those things. There's a 4 500 William hour battery inside the a52. I've generally been able to get a full day out of it, at least, but I'd like to see where that ends, as the name implies. This is also a 5g device that plays nice with sub 6 5g networks, although it is clearly not everywhere.

I should mention that, as I sit here in this backyard, I'm not getting 5g at all, despite getting 5g actually really quite close. This is T-Mobile 5g, it's their nationwide network and in general it does seem to work pretty well, but I got nothing right now. So we'll see what that's about one more thing that I would really like to live with a little more, the in-display fingerprint sensor, it's there. It works most of the time, but I'm going to try re-enrolling my thumbprint a few more times because as it stands, it is a bit of a struggle to get this phone to unlock and that's just not a fun thing to live with. I have not spent that much time with the a52 5g, but it does seem to have all the makings of a really properly solid mid-range 5g device.

But should you buy one? Well, you might want to wait for more coverage from us before you make your decision, but at least as far as my first impressions go, I would probably skip it and that's not because I'm telling you to go off and buy a Pixel 4a or an iPhone SE. I think Samsung's own biggest competition in this case is Samsung. It doesn't cost that much extra now with the right deals to get a galaxy. S20 fan edition. That gets you a much faster processor.

It gets you again a 120hz refresh rate display. It gets you again, a bevy of cameras plus the same battery. I think in general, the performance gain is probably going to be worth it, but we'll see how things pan out once I live with the a52 for just a little longer, if you have any thoughts about the way we approached this whatever this was or if you want to know anything specific about my experience with the a525g. Please leave it down in the comments below or email me at videngadget. com.

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Source : Engadget