With the Galaxy A52 5G , Samsung found an appealing balance between price, features and making smart compromises. It’s the latest good sub-$500 5G …
With the Galaxy A52 5G, Samsung found an appealing balance between price, features and making smart compromises. It’s the latest good sub-$500 5G phone and joins the nearly half a dozen phones from Motorola, OnePlus and TCL. The Galaxy A52 5G costs $500, £399 and isn’t sold in Australia but converts to AU$680. That’s at the higher end of what’s considered an affordable phone. The A52 5G also straddles the line between being a good affordable 5G phone and a fantastic one. The only other sub-$500 phones that do that are the iPhone SE, which doesn’t have 5G, and the Google Pixel 4A 5G, which is almost a year old. The A52 5G has a high refresh rate display, years of OS and security support, a good main camera and good battery life. It has features that the more expensive Galaxy S21 and S21 Ultra lack like: a headphone jack, expandable storage and the inclusion of a wall charger in the box. As with any phone, even a good one, not everything is roses and sunshine. The in-screen fingerprint reader is so annoying to use that I preferred to enter my PIN to unlock the phone. The mediocre macro camera seems like a frivolous add-on that is only there to boost the total number of cameras on the phone. More is definitely not better. There are many duplicate apps like Samsung’s version of an internet browser and photo gallery app in addition to the ones from Google. But after two months, when I step back and consider everything, the Galaxy A52 5G is an all-around good phone with some great features and a few minor and annoying flaws. It’s a solid buy for $500, but as I write this review, you can get a Galaxy A52 5G unlocked on Samsung’s website for $425 which makes it even harder to pass up. The build is good. It’s not premium and that’s fine because it feels good in the hand. When you tap on the back you can definitely tell it’s plastic. So, don’t tap on the back. The look of the phone is clean. It has curved plastic edges, symmetrical thin bezels around the screen and a matte finish. The camera bump loosely echoes the one on the Galaxy S21 Ultra in the same way my haircut does Kit Harrington’s. Over two months, the phone collected its share of nicks along the sides. The matte finish back definitely doesn’t look fresh or new. Most people will inevitably put the phone in a case, so that shouldn’t be an issue. The A52 5G is rated IP67 for water and dust resistance and can be submerged under three feet of water for up to 30 minutes. On the front is a 6.5-inch full-HD display with a hole-punch cutout for the selfie camera.
