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Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Reviews: Is It Worth Buying?

In a world of $1000+ phones, the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is pitched as the antidote to your woes, a phone that does everything you need and more without breaking the bank. But is the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G any good in practice? Let’s find out…



Samsung Galaxy A53
4.5

The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is a superbly appointed phone that delivers massively in all the most important areas. It looks great, it will get four years’ worth of security updates and three major Android versions, the camera is very good, the battery life excellent, and it’ll do 5G, and it has a 120Hz AMOLED display.

Pros:
  • Beautiful Design
  • Impressive Camera / Performance
  • Plenty of Storage
  • 120Hz AMOLED Screen
  • Excellent Battery Life (5000mAh)

Samsung Galaxy A53

Samsung is the biggest phone maker on the planet. Cumulatively, it ships more phones than any other company, including Apple.

But the secret to Samsung’s dominance in the mobile space is NOT its expensive Galaxy S23 Ultra or its foldable phones; no, it is its cheaper, mid-range phones like the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G which are driving its revenue lines.

With a world economy still reeling from the COVID pandemic, with inflation crushing peoples’ spending power, the idea of dropping more than 50% of most peoples’ take-home pay on something as superfluous as a phone is starting to look, well… a bit silly.

Thank god, then, for phones like the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G which take the “idea” of a flagship phone and package it up inside an infinitely cheaper package.

How much does the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G cost? You can pick one up for £399/$449 – or, the best part of $1000/£1000 cheaper than Samsung’s highest-end Galaxy S22 Ultra model.

This is a big deal, especially when you consider what this phone does, its specs, and what it looks like – it does not, for a second, come across as a “cheap phone”.

In fact, for many, this could well be the perfect phone to ride out the next few turbulent, inflation-ridden years with.

But before we get to the meat and potatoes of this review, let’s first take a look at the specs and hardware used on the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G.

Once we’ve done this, we can then take a look at some reviews of the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G from around the web, and then, finally, analyze whether or not this phone is worth your time and money.

Spoiler alert: it most definitely is worth your time and money.

Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Specs

  • Dimensions: 159.6 x 74.8 x 8.1 mm
  • Screen Size: 6.5in
  • Screen Type: Super AMOLED, 120Hz
  • CPU: Exynos 1280 
  • RAM: 4GB, 6GB or 8GB
  • Battery: 5000mAh
  • Camera: 64MP (Wide) + 12MP (Ultra Wide) + 5MP (Depth) + 5MP (Macro)
  • Headphone Jack: No
  • 5G: Yes
  • Storage: 128GB or 256GB
  • SD Card Support: Yes
  • Colors: Black, White, Blue, Peach

For the asking price, the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G packs in some pretty amazing specs. The phone runs a Super AMOLED 120Hz screen that not only looks stunning but is also perfectly sized for media viewing and gaming.

And at 6.5in, it is slightly smaller than some other phones in this class – the Moto G Stylus 5G 2022 – and this makes for a more compact overall feel, without sacrificing too much display real estate.

Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Reviews: Is It Worth Buying?Pin

Design

In fact, from a design perspective, the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is perhaps one of the best-looking mid-range Android phones on the market.

The AMOLED screen with its “flagship-grade” refresh rate is a big part of this, but so too is Samsung’s industrial design – it just looks and feels like a flagship phone which is a nice way of saying the phone punches WELL outside its weight class when it comes to looks and design.

With camera performance, again, the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is impressive for its price. It’s not quite up there with the best in its class – that’d be Google’s Pixel 5a – but it is a damn good camera that is more than enough for most people’s needs.

Low light could be better and there’s no telephoto lens, but you cannot expect to have everything at this price point – there are always going to be caveats in play when you’re using non-flagship phones.

One thing that is definitely worth noting is that Samsung DOES NOT include a charging brick in with the phone. All you get is a cable, so if you don’t have a USB Type C charging plug, you will need to buy one.

Most people do, but if this is your first phone, it is definitely something to keep in mind. No one likes opening up a brand new phone and then discovering that they have no means of charging it.

My advice? Get a cheap one from Amazon, rather than buying directly from Samsung.

Cameras

  • 64MP main, 12MP ultrawide, 5MP macro, 5MP depth sensor
  • Lots of classic Samsung camera modes
  • 32MP selfie camera

For the asking price and the fact that this phone is a midrange option, the camera module you get aboard the Galaxy A53 is very impressive.

The main camera is a 64MP f/1.8 with a wide-angle lens, and it’s backed up by a 12MP camera with an f/2.2 123-degree ultrawide lens, a 5MP f/2.4 macro and a 5MP f/2.4 depth sensor.

That’s a lot of lens. And, unlike on most budget Android phones, nearly all of them are pretty good – even the macro!

Performance is decent across the board, although the star of the show is, of course, the main shooter, the 64MP f/1.8 with a wide-angle lens. In decent lighting, it takes very competitive shots that are comparable to many phones in a price bracket above it.

Low light performance is good too, although it’s not quite up there with the Galaxy S23 Ultra and iPhone 14 Pro Max. But at this price point, that’s to be expected. For the asking price, the A53 punches well outside its weight class with respect to low-light performance.

Samsung has also bundled in a load of camera modes as well, so you can quickly take excellent quality photos without having to mess around too much with its settings.

Samsung Galaxy A53 Camera Modes

Samsung Galaxy A53 5G ReviewsPin

With camera modes on the Galaxy A53, you have the following:

  • Single Take: Capture multiple photos and videos with a single press of the shutter button.
  • Photo: Capture a picture using your camera.
  • Video: Capture a video using your camera.
  • Pro: Manually adjust the ISO sensitivity, exposure value, white balance, and color tone.
  • Panorama: Tap the Camera button then pan slowly in one direction.
  • Food: Optimizes images taken of food.
  • Night: Minimizes noise from dark environments to enhance photo’s details.
  • Super slow-mo: Captures video in super slow motion.
  • Slow motion: Captures video in slow motion.
  • Hyperlapse: Create time-lapse videos.

Not too shabby, right? And that’s just on the main, rear-mounted camera module. We’ve yet to talk about the front-facing camera, and this is another area where the Galaxy A53 really outshines the competition.

The front facing camera is a 32MP f/2.2 lens which, by any standards on the market today, including high-end phones like the iPhone 14 Pro Max, is bloody impressive.

The selfie camera is brilliant for taking high-quality, detailed self portraits. If you take a lot of selfies, this phone is one you definitely want to be looking at. Off the top of my head, I cannot think of another phone that has such a powerful front-facing camera.

The Galaxy A53 also comes packed with something called “Fun Mode” which essentially uses Snapchat filters as an overlay when you’re using the front-facing camera. You can add in effects, items, and turn your face into a cloud or an animal.

It works great and is a nice addition to an already very solid camera setup.

And if that wasn’t enough, the Samsung Galaxy A53 will also shoot 4K, both on the front and back cameras, at at 30fps or 1080p at 60fps. Again, the ability to shoot 4K video on a front-facing camera is super rare and it really does add in plenty of value here.

All told, the Galaxy A53’s camera is a brilliantly accomplished setup that punches well outside its weight class. If you want excellent camera performance but don’t want to pay over a $500 for phone, this is about as good as you can get right now.

Battery Life

Battery life on the Samsung Galaxy A53 is fairly solid, as you’d expect from a phone that is packing a 5000mAh battery. You’re looking at a full day’s worth of usage between charges – and with light use maybe a smidge more.

One area where Samsung has dropped the ball ever so slightly, however, relates to its charging speed. The Galaxy A53 only does 25W fast charging which, compared to some phones that’ll do 120W or 80W, feels criminally slow in 2023.

How long does it take to fully charge the Samsung Galaxy A53? You’re looking at just shy of 2 hours from full dead to 100% which is pretty slow but to put that figure into context, you’ll get much the same speeds from Apple’s iPhone 14 range – and they cost WAY more.

Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Reviews

The Verge

Samsung offers a lot of A-series budget phones, and they’re generally among the best options in their respective price brackets. The A53 5G is the Samsung A-series at its very best. It keeps up with day-to-day tasks now and should last well into the next four or five years if you take care of it. The A52 was a good buy for $50 more, and the A53 will give you an even better return on your investment — even if you have to bring your own charger now

Expect good quality photos in bright light, with punchy, saturated colors. The main camera holds its own in dim and even very low light, with a night mode that brings out a good amount of detail provided your subject isn’t moving much. Portrait mode photos are serviceable, too, especially when there’s plenty of light, but not as impressive as we saw on the Galaxy S22. There’s also no telephoto lens here, so your only option for portraits is the wider view of the standard camera.

The A53 will open an app faster than the A52. In practical use, I’d call it a toss-up between the two. I notice slight hesitations here and there throughout my daily use, but all within the normal range for a midrange phone and nothing I couldn’t live with. It will even run Genshin Impact, albeit with some frequent stutters when there’s a lot happening on screen. I’d expect overall performance to hold up reasonably well, even after three or four years of software updates, too.


Tech Radar

The Samsung Galaxy A53 may lap same-price rivals in the camera and display departments, but it falls far behind when it comes to performance. The chip here is the Exynos 1280, which is a home-brewed piece of mid-range kit from Samsung – and it leaves a lot to be desired.

In practice, we found that the phone lasted roughly a day between charges. We could get slightly more battery life if we used the thing sparingly – or less, if we spent lots of time taking photos or using the device for navigation; but a full day of use is a good ballpark figure.

The snappers take photos that are bright and colorful, which makes shots of wildlife, food, landscapes or people pop. There’s high dynamic range for a phone at this price and pictures are sharp too, as long as you take them on the main camera.

Night photography is pretty good too. We took a few low-light shots that retained quite a bit of detail; it wasn’t quite iPhone-quality, but it was better than we’ve come to expect at this price tier.


GSM Arena

To sum up, the new Galaxy A53 5G seems to be a slightly “tweaked” variant of what Samsung already knows works and sells well. The slightly bigger battery is always nice to see, but what is going to either make or break the A53 5G is definitely the new Exynos 1280 chipset. To be perfectly frank, it just needs to be as good and not even better than the Snapdragon 778G 5G it is replacing. That would mean another wave of happy customers since every other feature of the A53 5G has been carried over from the previous model, and it’s still a fantastic package.

All things considered, we kind of get why Samsung is in no hurry to share details regarding the Exynos 1280 chipset or to parade it in press materials for the new Galaxy A53 5G and A33 5G. While it is a decently-powerful chip, it is also a clear downgrade from the Snapdragon 778G used by last year’s Galaxy A52s 5G and even falls short of the Snapdragon 750G inside the Galaxy A52 5G in some respects.

Even though this is a tried and tested camera setup, there are no upgrades compared to last-gen. After some poking around system files and paths, we unsurprisingly discovered that the A53 5G has the same list of supported sensors as its predecessor. The main camera (f/1.8, 0.8µm and around 1/1.7X” sensor size with PDAF and OIS) can either use a Samsung s5kgw1p sensor, commonly known as the GW1 or a Sony IMX682. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing which one our unit has. The same goes for the 32MP selfie (f.2,2, 0.8µm, 1/2.8″, fixed focus), which can either be the Samsung s5kgd2 or the Sony IMX616.


Pocket-Lint

The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G does a sterling job of following on from the Galaxy A52 – a phone that was a great seller for Samsung, and one we also rated highly. In truth, there’s no significant improvement here, much like we found with the latest Galaxy S range. However, the A53 is a strong mid-range phone regardless.

The display on the front is vibrant and bright with (mostly) smooth animation, and the battery life is very good, as is the overall speed and performance.

At its price point, however, it’s got a lot of competition. You’ll find similar performing phones from the likes of Redmi, Realme and OnePlus that cost less, as well as similarly priced phones that perform better in some areas.


Is The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G Worth It?

When it comes to making extremely attractive mid-range phones that punch well outside their weight class, Samsung really knows what it is doing.

There’s a good reason why it is the biggest phone brand on the planet, and it is NOT because of its flagship phones – it is because of phones like the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G and the Samsung Galaxy M13.

These mid-range Android phones are Samsung’s bread and butter, they’re the phones that are driving nearly all of its profits and revenues and growth in markets as far and as wide as the US, Europe, the UK, India, Brazil, and Africa.

And given what this phone represents and what it can do, it is no wonder that Samsung is killing it in 2023. The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is a superbly appointed phone that delivers massively in all the most important areas.

It looks great, it will get four years’ worth of security updates and three major Android versions, the camera is very good, the battery life excellent, and it’ll do 5G, and it has a 120Hz AMOLED display.

You also have adequate performance via the Exynos 1280, although it is no way near flagship-level, ample storage options, and even support for SD cards.

The only missing thing here is a headphone jack (and a charging brick).

Galaxy A53 reviewPin

The only real issue with this phone seems to relate to its CPU; it’s just not quite as good as Qualcomm’s equivalent.

But this is often the case, when it comes to Snapdragon vs Exynos – we see this in Samsung’s flagship phones too.

The Snapdragon variants ALWAYS run cooler and more efficiently. Is this a deal-breaker? I’d argue, no; not if all you want to do is browse the web, run apps, and IM. If that’s all you need, the Exynos CPU is perfectly capable of handling these things.

If you need anything more advanced or you want to run high-end mobile games, you’re going to need to pay a little extra and go with a phone that runs an appropriate chipset – and you will not get one of those for less than $500, sadly.

For most, the Exynos 1280 will be enough to get you through your day-to-day tasks but you must keep in mind that it is NOT a high-end CPU, so do not expect miracles with respect to performance.

Is the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G worth buying? I would say, yes, the phone is a great option for anyone that is looking to get the maximum bang for their buck in 2023 without making too many concessions.

If you want or need something better, I’d advise you get the Pixel 6a or pay $150 more today and get the Pixel 7 – it has a better camera, a better CPU, and superior software. But it is more expensive.

If all you need is a reliable phone with plenty of power under the hood, as well as excellent support for updates, then the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is well worth a buy in 2022, especially for its very impressive asking price.

Samsung Galaxy A53
4.5

The Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is a superbly appointed phone that delivers massively in all the most important areas. It looks great, it will get four years’ worth of security updates and three major Android versions, the camera is very good, the battery life excellent, and it’ll do 5G, and it has a 120Hz AMOLED display.

Pros:
  • Beautiful Design
  • Impressive Camera / Performance
  • Plenty of Storage
  • 120Hz AMOLED Screen
  • Excellent Battery Life (5000mAh)
Richard Goodwin

Richard Goodwin has been working as a tech journalist for over 10 years. He has written for Den of Geek, Fortean Times, IT PRO, PC Pro, ALPHR, and many other technology sites. He is the editor and owner of KnowYourMobile.

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9 months ago

I found this review of the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G extremely helpful in making my purchasing decision! It provides a comprehensive analysis of the phone’s features, performance, and overall value for money. The detailed insights into the camera quality, display, battery life, and 5G connectivity helped me gauge its suitability for my needs. The article’s balanced perspective and honest assessment make it a reliable source of information. Thank you for helping me determine whether the Samsung Galaxy A53 5G is worth buying!

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