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- So here's the thing: I used to be able to say,
"Cheap phones are getting good,
and good phones are getting cheap,"
because it was true for a while there,
but then, we starting getting
these more and more expensive flagship phones.
They broke through this $1,000 price barrier.
We've got super-expensive phones now,
so I can no longer stand by the second half
of that statement, but the first half,
still pretty compelling.
And so this is the Samsung Galaxy A54,
which just came out pretty recently
and represents roughly the middle-ish of Samsung's lineup,
where they've got phones at every price
from, like, 160 bucks all the way up to nearly $2,000.
And this one actually has a great case to be the best value
in the entire lineup.
I didn't expect to say that, but I'm saying it now
because I've been using this phone for the past two weeks,
and it actually delivers very well
on a lot of the premium smartphone experience,
but at literally a third of the price of the flagship
from the same company, literally.
This phone MSRPs, like, 400, 450 bucks right now.
If you sign the right contract in the US,
you can basically get it for free.
(air whooshing) And the flagship
that I've been daily driving for, like, the first half
of this year so far is the S23 Ultra,
which retails for $1,200 still.
So what I wanted to find out and show you in this video
is how close does this A54 get
to this S23 Ultra or any of these mega-flagships
that are like it?
Because it's definitely not a third of the functionality.
So I'm breaking this down into five categories
because these are my five pillars of a great smartphone:
build quality, display, performance, camera, and battery.
So I've said before, if a smartphone can nail
all five of these things, then it's a good phone, period.
And as a product goes down in price,
then you naturally expect it to start to make
some sacrifices in some of these areas.
So right from the top, with build quality,
it gets interesting because Samsung
kind of adopted this thing
where they use essentially the same design language
across their entire lineup
to keep it consistent and recognizable,
but that also basically means that this $1,200 phone
does not look dramatically different
from this 400 to $450 phone.
Samsung is one of these companies
that only does the satin/matte finish
on the backs of their most premium phones,
and so the squared-off rails on the S23 Ultra
are a polish aluminum for contrast.
The A54, on the other hand, is the other way around.
It's glossy glass on the back,
and it's a more satin finish on the aluminum rails,
and I kinda like that too.
At the end of the day, though,
they're literally both glass and aluminum,
and so really, it comes down
to two main differences between the two.
One is the size.
They only come in these sizes,
and so this A54 is definitively smaller and lighter
than the Ultra, and two, it's flat, and that's totally fine,
where the Ultra does have this little bit of a curve
on the sides of the display,
but to be honest, yeah, build quality is very close here.
It is IP67 versus IP68, which, by definition,
is almost the same thing,
and the A54 puts the SIM card slot
plus expandable storage (phone clattering)
at the top, where the flagship just has a SIM card tray
at the bottom, with no expandable storage.
If I can safely assume that both Gorilla Glass 5
and Gorilla Glass Victus 2 both scratch at a level six
with deeper grooves at a level seven,
I feel pretty comfortable saying that the A54
is 90% of the build quality of the flagship,
which is a really good start.
So then, there's the displays.
Now, this is Samsung we're talking about here,
so they definitely go the extra mile
with the flagship display, no question about that.
It is ridiculously good, incredibly bright,
super-sharp, responsive, adaptive, and efficient.
I mean, every number on paper is pretty close to maxed out,
from the 1440p resolution to the 1,750 nits of brightness
from an AMOLED panel, 120 hertz max refresh rate,
but variable down to one hertz with LTPO.
I mean, it's pretty awesome.
So the A54 display is a step down on paper, sure,
and when you actually use it,
you realize that they've cut out, like,
the extra bells and whistles, the over-the-top stuff
that are maybe a little more for the fringe situations
but still keep the screen to a pretty premium level
for 99% of use cases.
So like I said, this only comes in one size,
so it's a little smaller than the flagship,
but that's also probably a good thing for some people
'cause phones are huge.
So this is a 6.4-inch 1080p flat AMOLED.
This is still over 400 pixels per inch,
so even though it can't do Quad-HD,
it's still gonna be pretty great for most people
that aren't pixel-peeping like I am,
and it's still plenty bright.
I mean, I'm looking at this thing.
It gets up to 1,000 nits and regularly goes outdoors
and looks totally fine, like in the dashboard of my car
and out in the sun, no problems.
So in that way, it's pretty close,
but you can also see the bezels all the way around
are a little bit thicker.
This is one of those things that tends to get, like,
pointed out in YouTube comments
more than by people actually buying the phone,
but yeah, it's true, it does have slightly bigger bezels
and a bigger chin.
It's not completely corner to corner.
And then, while the S23 Ultra has the LTPO
that can adapt all the way from 120 hertz
down to one hertz when it's not moving,
this A54 display can adapt from 120 hertz down to 60 hertz
and basically switch back and forth.
So not quite as adaptive and efficient,
but better than nothing,
and it goes pretty blue off-axis, more than some
of the more premium Samsung panels already do,
and also, that hole-punch cutout, as I pointed out before,
is not quite the little perfect black circle,
but it does have this little shiny metal ring
that can be slightly distracting
when the sun hits it at just the right angle.
It's a small thing, but I gotta mention it.
But yeah, they still give you every single setting in here
as the more expensive phone to dial in the display's colors
and match what you're looking for.
So overall, I'm willing to say the A54
has 80% of the display of the flagship.
It's obviously not gonna match it on paper,
and in the most bleeding-edge extreme situations
like direct outdoor sunlight and things like that,
then you can see the difference,
but honestly, most of the time,
when you're just using the phone, especially indoors,
they look very similar, which is pretty amazing,
just with slightly thicker bezels.
So then, there's performance.
Now, this is where you start to get
a little bit of a wider gap here.
So you've already heard about the flagship.
Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, eight gigs of RAM,
one terabyte of storage, all that good stuff.
This is working with a lesser chipset here,
so it's just not gonna be as good.
So the A54 is powered by an Exynos 1380 chip,
which benchmarks about 50 to 80% lower
than the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in CPU.
It's a very comfortably mid-range chip.
I'll put it that way.
For context, it's putting up similar Geekbench scores
to the A12 Bionic, which was in the iPhone 10s in 2018.
So pair this with six gigs of RAM,
and you've got a phone that, you know,
can handle everyday tasks, but it isn't blowing anything
out the water in terms of performance.
And the specs are only part of performance.
Like, when I say performance as a pillar,
obviously, you want it to be able
to open apps very quickly and be smooth and reliable.
So for normal daily things like checking email
or social media scrolling or just subscribing
to this YouTube channel, like,
it feels just like the flagships because it's fine,
and it's also 120 hertz, and it's smooth.
That stuff doesn't require a super-high-end chip.
Now, sure, there are a few dropped frames here and there,
and it does fee a little bit different,
and if you gave me these two phones
and didn't tell me which was which,
sooner or later, I could tell you
which one was a lower-end chip.
But it would require me starting to push,
you know, some higher-end stuff: starting to multi-task,
starting to flip between a couple heavier apps at once,
opening and closing a few things.
When you get to, like, navigating while streaming music
over Bluetooth, you know, while reading something
in a web browser on a big website, stuff like that,
then, the difference is actually really quite noticeable.
And then, the S23 line all has these, like,
lightning-fast, ultrasonic fingerprint sensors,
while the A54 does have an optical sensor,
which is just a bit slower and has to shine a light
for a second instead of the ultrasonic ones,
which are more versatile.
You could also argue that built-in storage
is gonna be faster than expandable,
although some people just don't care.
Like, they just want expandable storage,
in which case, that's actually a benefit for the A54.
But yeah, it's pretty clear that the performance difference
between flagship chipset and mid-ranger is pretty big.
It's noticeable. It's a feel thing.
It's a smoothness thing.
If you haven't used a more expensive phone,
you might not even notice, but that's what it comes down to,
and especially with the higher-end tasks,
(plastic tapping) these phones are running
the same software, One UI 5.1,
but just one executes the same stuff
a little more reliably and smoother.
So I'm gonna give A54 60% of the performance
of the flagship, not bad.
So now, cameras. Cameras, cameras, cameras.
We got all kinds of cameras.
Typically, cameras are what separate
the good phones from the great phones, (smacks)
and that's still true. (laughs)
So you look at the back of the A54,
and it looks just like all of the rest of the S23 series,
obviously, not as many cameras as the Ultra,
but when you actually hear
that this is the 50-megapixel main camera,
and this is the 12-megapixel ultra-wide,
and this is a five-megapixel macro,
now, you're starting to see where they save money.
Like, in what world do you want a macro camera
over a zoom camera?
This is the obvious version of, like,
making it look like the more expensive phone
but saving some money, not putting a zoom,
but still having something there.
So now, the actual photo and video-taking experience
is the same as the more expensive phones, literally.
It's the same app, the same UI,
the same features and buttons, so that's fine.
We can all say what we want about Samsung's layouts,
but, you know, they work.
They're pretty straightforward,
and then, the photos you get, in good lighting,
they seem perfectly fine.
Like, if you don't compare it to something super-expensive,
these are all super-passable, (shutter clicking)
sharp-detailed, normal-looking photos,
maybe a little bit blue with the white balance,
a little bit over-exposed. (shutter clicking)
But honestly, short of the Pixel 6a,
this is about as good as you'd expect from a $450 phone.
But of course, like I said, my goal is to compare it
to the super-expensive big brother, so when you do,
that highlights a little more some of the flaws
of the A54's main camera, which really is just
that it tends to over-expose
and take unnecessarily bright shots quite often,
and the white balance is a little inconsistent.
But it's funny; this angle always feels weird
because most people buying this phone have never,
they haven't come from a $1,200 phone.
They don't know what a $1,200 phone's capabilities would be,
so it's like comparing a Toyota Corolla to a Supra.
Sure, they come from the same company,
but, like, people buying the Corolla
weren't cross-shopping with the Supra,
and they were even thinking
about getting the performance of a Supra.
So just me putting 'em side by side
helps highlight the differences,
but yeah, this camera set is fine.
I think sometimes, I boil the camera
all the way down to, like, "Yeah, this one's just fine,"
but I really mean it.
It's fine.
Like, when you zoom in, yeah, you lose sharpness
because you went with a macro over a telephoto,
so it doesn't come close to touching the zoom performance
of the more expensive phone past about 4, 5X.
The A54 also can't do 8K video or even 4K 60,
like the flagship can,
but it can do everything else just fine,
and the ultra-wide is pretty soft,
as expected, especially in lower light,
but it happens to actually be a tiny bit wider
than the flagship's ultra-wide,
so it's got that going for it.
You know, between the missing telephotos
and the lesser compute power, this one can go
in a bunch of different directions,
but I'll say the A54 is 70% of the camera
for most normal photos of the flagship,
which is pretty good.
But then last, but not least: battery.
This one's pretty simple: 5,000 milliamp hours,
5,000 milliamp hours, and so it turns out,
the usable daily battery life of these two phones
is pretty similar, but the thing about the chips, though,
is the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2,
which is in a lotta the higher-end newer phones now,
is it's really good.
It's both more powerful and more efficient than the Exynos.
So basically, this flagship phone is capable of way more.
It's capable of a much higher peak output,
and so you can actually spike the usage a lot
and, like, run down the battery pretty hard
if you wanted to, but then it's also more efficient,
so for, you know, combining it with this LTPO display,
just using it every day, regular scrolling social media,
email, hanging out, you know, this is, it's sipping battery.
It's actually going slower through battery than the A54.
So the A54 is more of a constant drain.
It doesn't spike as high,
but it doesn't have as good standby time,
so the curve of the flagship phone
might look more, like, spiky,
but the A54 looks more like an even descent,
if that makes sense.
Now, you also do not get wireless charging
with the A54, despite the glass back.
That's one of those features that you sometimes see
in phones of this price,
but it's definitely a common omission,
and the max charging rate is 25 watts,
which is straight-up slow in 2023, but it's fine.
It's serviceable.
There are all kinds of phones offering blazing fast,
like, 50, 80, 100-plus-watt charging
even at this lower price point.
So even if the battery isn't amazing,
you could at least top up quickly if you had that,
but that's not here either, so it'll take about an hour
to charge from 0 to 100, totally average,
but overall, it's not a substantial weakness,
especially versus the flagship from the same company,
which only does 45 watts.
So A54 battery experience is, like, 90% of the flagship.
So if you total up all of my assessments
and average them out over 500 points,
you get 78% of the flagship for 1/3 of the price,
which that seems like it's pretty clear
that it's a pretty good deal.
Now, there's also, of course, lots of little things
that didn't quite fit into those pillars,
like the slightly better haptics
of the flagship, for example.
You might be really into that, or the bigger speakers
that come from having a bigger phone, that do sound better.
Also, there's a stylus in the big one.
Also, if you want DeX, you'd have to pay up
because the A54 doesn't have that.
Funny thing is they both have
the exact same unboxing experience,
which is just the phone, no charger,
but yeah, these mid-rangers today masterfully mitigate
the law of diminishing returns,
matching the flagship's finesse for a fraction of the funds.
Thanks for watching.
Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.
♪ One little thing ♪
♪ One gotta demand of you, just be ♪