Samsung Galaxy A54 5G smartphone review – ticks all the boxes at an affordable price

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• VERDICT

The Samsung Galaxy A54 5G is one of the best mid-tier smartphones you can buy. It ticks all the boxes for customers in terms of design, screen, camera and battery life and also delivers excellent value.

Samsung’s Galaxy A54 5G is a mid-tier smartphone with the design, display and features that makes it feel like a flagship product.

No, Samsung isn’t trying to put itself out of business – the A54 5G is no Galaxy S23 but the mid-tier device can still hold its own.

It’s ideal for the customer who wants something better than an entry level smartphone but that doesn’t want to shell out thousands of dollars for the top of the line products.

You can describe Samsung’s A54 5G as the Goldilocks smartphone – not too cheap, not too expensive – it’s just right.

When looking to purchase a smartphone, customers want to tick four main boxes – design, camera, display and battery life.

The Samsung A54 5G delivers in all those areas.

Let’s start with design.

The A54 5G is a simple and clean look with gently rounded edges and a glass finish.

It has a nice size and shape and feels good in the hand.

The volume and power buttons are on the right edge and the SIM card slot is on the top edge.

Speaking of the SIM card slot, the tray has room for one SIM card and a microSD card so you can expand the memory. That’s a feature Samsung’s flagship phones don’t have. There is no eSIM.

The 6.4-inch FHD+ Infinity-O Super AMOLED Display (1080 x 2340 resolution) is stunning and bright and is easy to read anywhere including outside in bright sunlight.

We were checking the Samsung A54 5G on the golf course in the middle of the day waiting for the group ahead to clear.

We were able to check easily read our emails, messages and apps and see the screen clearly to line up our photos.

And with refresh rates up to 120Hz, it is a super smooth experience as well.

The device is powered by a 2.4Gh octa-core processor with 6GB RAM, 128GB of onboard storage and external storage through the MicroSD card slot.

On the camera side you’ve a 50-magepixel main camera, 12-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 5-megapixel macro camera. And for your selfies you’ve got a 32-megapixel front camera.

The quality of the images are obvious whether you’ve got plenty of light or in lowlight situations.

The pictures were bright and with punchy colours.

The onboard sensors can suck in plenty of light, not to the level of the S23 but still quite respectable.

For the price, the A54 5G’s camera definitely punches above its weight.

We shared plenty of images on social media and no one questioned the quality – it looked as good as any of the posts around it.

A feature we loved was the Object Eraser which allows users to circle and remove unwanted objects.

We took a selfie on the golf course but there was a tree in the background that looked like it was coming out of the top of my head. One quick edit on Object Eraser and it was gone in seconds.

If you’re shooting video, you can shoot 4K at up to 30 frames per second.

Bottom line, the Samsung A54 5G camera is not going to let you down.

Another strong feature is the battery life.

The battery has a capacity 5,000mAh capacity and when we we’re using it as our daily driver smartphone, we found it got us through more than day and a half before we had to think about connecting the charging USB-C cable.

What it does NOT have is wireless charging so you’re only option is to charge via cable. But luckily the solid battery life was enough to get us through.

For security, the A54 5G also has an in-screen fingerprint reader.

Also onboard is NFC (near field communication) so you can use the A54 5G to make payments with your credit cards.

The Samsung Galaxy A54 5G is available now and is priced at $649.

VERDICT

The Samsung Galaxy A54 5G is one of the best mid-tier smartphones you can buy. It ticks all the boxes for customers in terms of design, screen, camera and battery life and also delivers excellent value.