Introduction
While we’re all ambitiously looking to this or that Galaxy S as the ultimate Samsung phone, the truth is that the A-series has always been the Korean company’s workhorse – its backbone, sales-wise. And the A5x model has been every year the best selling Samsung – not the S Ultra model, not even the ‘vanilla’ S flagship or its big sibling.
So in a way it doesn’t get real anymore Samsung than an A5x — meaning it’s the Samsung experience that most people actually get. For a large number of users, an A-series device is their only insight into what a Samsung phone looks like, and this obviously comes with pros and cons. The latest in the best-selling segment of the A-line is the A53, but the most interesting A5x ever is definitely the A52s. And that’s why we decided to review it in the long term.
Before the A52s, the A5x model du jour was always below par, even for a mid-range smartphone, given its launch price. Obviously a lot of people accepted this – either because it was a Samsung, or for the generally better-than-average cameras, or for the convenience of buying one just about anywhere, or for the software support that has come a long way in recent years. improved again and again. But these devices were certainly not fast. Most competitors from China had a similarly priced offering with a better chipset.
And that all changed with the launch of the Galaxy A52s last year. For the first time, an A5x came with a premium mid-range SoC, the Snapdragon 778G, and the Chinese competition didn’t really have an answer, as their best alternatives used the exact same chip. This has been exciting for many, it seems, judging by the levels of interest we’ve seen for this unit since its release.
And then it got cheaper. And cheaper. And at the current pricing, it not only competes very well in its space on specs, but also on price. That’s practically unheard of for a mid-range Samsung, so here’s a very intriguing package that we couldn’t help but use for an extended period of time as our one and only smartphone, to understand if Samsung has found a way to increase its sales in to secure the mid-market against highly aggressive Chinese competitors.
2022 has been a weird year for the mid-market, with most successors to 2021 devices not really surpassing them in many ways. We’d bet the Galaxy A53 is in exactly this camp, so perhaps it’s better to think of the A73 as the true successor to the A52s, although even that doesn’t come with any chipset upgrades.
So it seems that Samsung can play name-confusion games just as well as other companies. We’re not going to celebrate that in any way, but we’re going to try to reveal to you whether the A52s is still a great mid-range purchase right now. It’s had a lot of time to mature, so to speak, so it should be the perfect time for a long-term review of it. Let’s start.