- Flagship phones are outrageously expensive.
It's clear that people are done
shelling out a thousand plus dollars
year after year after year.
But I mean, you do still need a phone,
ideally one with a decent screen and camera
and at least 128 gigs of storage for apps and pictures.
While I don't play a ton of mobile games,
no one likes their toilet time
interrupted by stuttery gameplay.
So the answer is obviously to pick up a mid-range phone.
There are an overwhelming number of options.
What the heck is everyone else buying?
Okay, this is weird.
Samsung's A53 only has 3,000 reviews,
but it is at the top of Amazon's best sellers
with an impressive four and a half star rating.
I mean, I knew the A series was wildly popular,
but Samsung's marketing and the review program,
especially in North America,
is so focused on note and fold an S series
that I have to confess,
I have never actually been hands-on until now.
I guess it's time to find out just why the
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- To describe the size of the A53,
I'd use the words right sized.
It's easily handleable,
but you're not gonna be squinting at it.
It's a really good middle ground.
It came out in mid-March of 2022
and it's got almost all the major features you could want.
Decent storage capacity with microSD expansion,
a 64 megapixel camera with optical image stabilization
to keep your shot steady,
a 120 hertz super AMOLED display
with up to 800 minutes of brightness
for good outdoor viewing
and HDR content and even 5G network capability.
We've got the base model with us today,
just like the rest of you.
I mean the thing that stands out to me first
and foremost is just how good the build quality feels.
It wasn't that long ago that budget phones,
even mid-range phones, had gigantic bezels around them
or really cheap feeling materials, but this feels great.
If you told me this cost $300 more,
I still wouldn't bat an eye.
It doesn't have a three and a half millimeter
headphone jack, which is a real bummer.
But it does have an amplified earpiece speaker,
meaning that you will get stereo sound out of it.
There's no stupid Bixby button.
I consider that a feature.
And I guess I never mentioned it before,
but the screen is six and a half inches.
Let's talk cameras now since, for most people,
their phone is their primary way
of saving precious memories.
From top to bottom on the back,
we've got a 12 megapixel ultra wide,
a 64 megapixel main camera,
and a five megapixel depth camera.
The little guy on the top is
a five megapixel F2.4 macro camera,
bringing us up to a total
of four sensors on the back of this thing.
And on the bottom is our light or flash.
- [Plouffe] Take a selfie. Wow.
- The front facing selfie camera is 32 megapixels
and oh, I guess I was turned to the side that time.
But other than the little bit overdone smoothing,
then again, I'm old, I kind of need it now,
I'd say the quality is pretty darn good
and thankfully it doesn't take up
a ton of space on the screen.
As for the back, it might not be
technically the best camera.
But man, I have a hard time
finding anything to complain about.
It is absolutely all that you need to capture the moment.
Which for me is really where the bar is.
As for the display, I advocated for years
that at these sizes, anything over 1080P class
is just wasted cost and wasted power.
I mean it's over 400 pixels per inch,
for crying out loud and it looks great.
The blacks are OLED deep
and the 120 hertz refresh rate makes the phone feel
and look smoother than pretty much any
of the competition at this price point.
More on that later, by the way.
However, that comes with a caveat.
Just like on a PC, there's not much point
having a high refresh rate display
unless the hardware can keep up with those frame rates.
And while the menus and navigation
and simple games look great,
there's no Snap Dragon eight gen whatever processor in here.
So don't expect top tier performance in Genshin Impact
or other more demanding mobile games.
Of course, none of that affects consumption
of movies and TV shows, which look amazing.
Though of course, there is more to life than looks.
Let's just do a quick audition of the speakers here.
Crab Rave?
- [Plouffe] Yeah, Crab Rave.
- Let's do it. - [Plouffe] The classic.
- Oh my god, ads.
This is my version of ad block.
I will look somewhere else.
Hey, the creator still gets paid.
I will sleep perfectly tonight.
You didn't like these?
- [Plouffe] I thought they were okay.
- Good sound stage, though.
- [Plouffe] It's not bad.
There's not much bass,
but that's with any small device.
- I haven't gotten to the drop yet.
(Crab Rave playing)
I think you judged it too harshly.
You're right, there's not a lot of bass.
But good sound stage, good clarity, good volume.
And while I'm not putting much stock
in the support for Dolby Atmos,
if Scruffy Dan broke a string
on his guitar around the campfire,
you wouldn't be a monster for pulling this out.
Another area that impressed us was the battery life.
Thanks to both its mid-tier processor
and whopping 5,000 milliamp power battery,
the A53 boasts up to two days on a single charge
and that is not in crap tier monochromatic display mode,
disabling all the processor cords, or whatever.
That's with regular usage, auto brightness,
and WiFi on around the clock.
And we know this is true because Plouffe,
the writer for this video, is one of you.
He actually bought this phone
and dailyed it for a couple of months,
only selling it because a colleague offered him
a free side grade and he likes his S10,
but has actually not been happy
about certain aspects of it,
particularly going back to nightly charging.
When you do need to charge on the A53,
it supports 25 watt fast charging,
getting it back to full in a flash.
Now obviously that battery life
is going to degrade as the years go by,
but if you start from a really good point,
well, even degraded it should be a good experience.
You know what else is like that?
Our new henley shirt from lttstore.com.
It starts great and well,
obviously it's gonna wear a little, it's clothing.
But it'll last you a really long time.
Trust me, bro.
Now for the fun part, what's the catch here?
Given its lower price point of $350,
that's down from 450 at launch,
it's kind of hard to complain.
I just really like this thing.
But it's my job so I'm gonna do it.
Let's start with the clearest drawback.
The processing power.
As I alluded to before,
the GPU in this thing is a Mali-G68.
Now for the average person,
that doesn't make the experience awful or even bad.
It's a lot faster than its predecessor
but it certainly could be better.
What will affect pretty much everyone in everyday use,
at least eventually, is the CPU.
Like a flagship chip, the Exynos 1280 has an eight core CPU,
but those cores are running significantly slower.
And while Plouffe didn't encounter
any slowdowns over time with his phone,
he doesn't load up his phone with random apps
and games and he only used it for a few months,
so he didn't have to deal with that slowdown
that tends to come from
multiple generations of software updates.
If customer reviews are anything to go by though,
it might even be a problem today.
In fact, looking through the one
to three star ratings for this device,
complaints about processing power are a clear pattern.
For one star, some people simply got lemons.
One hated on Samsung support.
Several people were upset about
the lack of an included charging brick.
That's fair enough, even if it looks
like this might be the new normal.
Honestly though, I'm actually more annoyed
by the inclusion of a type C to type C cable.
I mean if you're not gonna give me a brick, okay, fine.
But this is a mid-tier device.
What are the odds that the brick
that I already have with my old mid-tier device
is a type C brick?
Read the room, Samsung.
- [Voiceover] Do you guys not have USBC bricks?
- Another common thread was
the allegedly terrible call quality
when using this phone via Bluetooth in your car.
Allegedly?
I take calls in my car all the time
and that doesn't make any sense.
I'm gonna have to try that.
- [Plouffe] Hey.
- Hey. - [Plouffe] How is it?
- You sound fine, but are people
- [Plouffe] It's fine? I'm walking away.
- Are people complaining about
what comes through from my side or the other way?
- [Plouffe] Um, I think it was
coming through from on my side.
I don't know. You sound fine to me.
- Yeah.
- [Plouffe] Do I sound fine to you?
- You sound
- [Plouffe] Either way, it sounds like we're
- I kind of wonder if they just had a bug at some point.
- [Plouffe] Um, maybe.
I mean there were quite a few reviews.
But yeah, it's possible that new software updates
could have fixed it.
It's been out for almost a year.
- I don't know what to tell you.
It's fine, at least with this car.
I'm not saying you imagined it.
Once we move up to the two and three star reviews,
people start complaining more about
the text to speech feeling a little sluggish.
So processing again.
A lack of memory resulting in
app's freezing momentarily.
Lack of dual SIM support,
though there is an international version with dual SIM.
So it seems like they might have bought the wrong model.
Poor facial recognition.
We found a couple complaints about this
in the four and five star range, as well.
But they don't seem to really be bothered by it,
I guess, 'cause it's still a five star review.
And then another big one is
the unresponsive fingerprint scanner.
The good news is that a lot of these features
might not matter to you that much,
particularly dual SIM support.
And a good hack for Samsung's poor fingerprint recognition
is to register the same finger multiple times.
They are just a little bit slower than the competition.
Funnily enough, most of the four star reviews
complained about bloatware.
But from my point of view, it's really not that bad,
especially if you don't sign into
a Samsung account during setup.
We did a regular installation with just a Google account
and honestly, like, what? This? That's it.
I don't even know if I would actually
get rid of anything that was preloaded on this device,
but this is an unlocked device
and it's possible that some of these folks
are leaving reviews with their carrier bloated versions.
And then, ah, the rest of the complaints at this tier
were pretty focused on the lack of wireless charging,
which is kind of valid at this price point.
What is interesting though is that,
in spite of all these complaints and shortcomings,
y'all seem to pretty much love this thing.
Five star reviews made up 64% of all reviews
with another 20% being four star.
I mean, I can't think of
just about anything in this polarized world
that 84% of people agree is damn good.
So what do you guys love then?
Expandable storage, decent camera.
Really decent camera.
Great battery life, nice display, 5G.
But we've talked about all of that.
The biggest one is the value.
Plenty of you guys are paying between three
and $400 with many remarking that they either came
from the thousand plus dollars flagship scene
and just didn't want to do that anymore
or they never had one and wanted to avoid
shelling out big bucks in the first place.
Interestingly, we didn't see too many comments
from people who appreciated it being affordable
without locking into a carrier contract,
but that was a major factor in Plouffe's buying decision.
So I think it's worth mentioning.
Also worth mentioning is
the main competitor for this model, the Google Pixel 6A.
While they're both the same price,
both now and at launch,
the 6A only has 650 ratings total,
so it's clearly less popular.
But that doesn't surprise me that much,
given that Samsung is a bit more
of a household name than Google is,
at least when it comes to phones.
As for how they differ.
Well the camera on this one may be
technically better, actually, in some ways.
Google's software is so darn good that
the Pixel 6A ended up taking first place
in MKBHD's blind camera test.
So if that's all you care about,
then maybe you go for the Pixel.
But if you care about just about anything else,
like a smooth display, the A53 walks away
in just about every other category,
meaning the herd mentality approach might not be a bad one
if you're shopping for a value phone.
Oh, and if you're into the herd mentality,
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- If you guys enjoyed this video,
make sure to check out
some of the others from this series,
like the mouse we looked at recently.
Why is everybody buying that one?