A fine phone all around, but nothing to get excited about
Samsung seems determined offer a phone with appropriate power at every possible price. With that in mind, the Galaxy A53 5G ($449.99) is no surprise because it fills the midrange gap in the company’s lineup. However, this handset doesn’t quite strike a compelling balance of price and performance. We like the phone’s vivid screen and large battery, but it isn’t as snappy as similarly priced competitors and its camera software could use a bit more work. The A53 5G almost certainly slots in between the forthcoming A33 5G and the Galaxy S21 FE ($549.99), but that’s not must-buy territory. Instead, we recommend either the S21 FE or the Google Pixel 6 ($599.99), both of which are worth the extra money. A High-End Design and Display The Galaxy A53’s design takes a lot of inspiration from the S21 lineup. My primary phone is a Galaxy S21 Ultra, and even I found it difficult to tell it apart from the A53 once I flipped both over. The A53’s camera bump is a little less sculpted and its matte black back attracts grease a bit more easily, but the design is sleek enough that people might mistake your $450 phone for a $700 one. The Galaxy A53 (right) looks very similar to the Galaxy S21 Ultra (left) The phone measures 6.3 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches and weighs around 6.7 ounces. Again, it offers the same premium feel as a lot of other Samsung phones, especially from the S21 generation—you won’t mistake it for the smaller Galaxy S22 (5.8 by 2.8 by 0.3 inches,5.9 ounces), which has a striking flat back, but you could absolutely confuse it with the S21 FE (6.1 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches,6.2 ounces). It has a single USB-C port on the bottom, but you lose the headphone jack from the Galaxy A52. That’s a pity, because many people still prefer to use wired headphones. The A53’s 6.5-inch,120Hz Super AMOLED display has a resolution of 2,400 by 1,080 pixels, and is probably the handset’s strongest asset. The screen looks excellent, with bright, glowing colors, and it’s easy to see in all types of lighting. Other manufacturers such as OnePlus seem to have to choose between the rich blacks and popping colors of AMOLED and the smooth scrolling of 120Hz; Samsung apparently doesn’t. An unremarkable optical fingerprint scanner sits under the display and it works most of the time. The phone has an IP67 water-resistance rating and Gorilla Glass 5 protects the screen. Sufficient Power, Sluggish Software The A53 uses the Exynos 1280 chipset, a relatively rare bird in the US market. This chip has two 2.4GHz Cortex-A78 cores and six 2GHz Cortex-A55 cores; SamMobile compares it with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G. The phone has 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, along with a microSD card slot. Web pages scroll smoothly on the 120Hz screen, but some apps don’t launch instantly Our benchmarks tell the story of a phone with somewhat better performance than one with the 778G chipset, but that can’t compete with the Pixel 6 or the iPhone SE, especially when it comes to games and webpage rendering. The A53 5G performs a bit better than the Galaxy A52 5G, which we called «sluggish» in our review. But the new model doesn’t exactly zip along. Some of that experience is likely because of Samsung’s software. The company’s Android overlay (One UI 4.
