Flagship phones are outrageously expensive it's clear that people are
done shelling out a thousand plus dollars year after year after year but I
mean you do still need a phone ideally one with a decent screen and camera and
at least 128 gigs of storage for apps and pictures well I don't play a ton of
mobile games no one likes their toilet time interrupted by stuttery gameplay so
the answer is obviously to pick up a mid-range phone there are an
overwhelming number of options what the heck is everyone else buying okay this
is weird Samsung's a53 only has 3 000
reviews but it is at the top of Amazon's best sellers with an impressive four and
a half star rating I mean I knew the a series was wildly popular but Samsung's
marketing and their review program especially in North America is so
focused on note and fold and S series that I have to confess I have never
actually been hands on until now I guess
it's time to find out just why the advertisement friendly words all of you
are buying this phone and what is this
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to describe the size of the a53 I'd use
the words right sized it's easily handleable but you're not going to be
squinting at it it's a really good middle ground it came out in mid-march
of 2022 and it's got almost all the major features you could want decent
storage capacity with MicroSD expansion a 64 megapixel camera with Optical image
stabilization to keep your shot steady a 120 hertz Super AMOLED display with up
to 800 nits of brightness for good outdoor viewing and HDR content and even
5G Network capability we've got the base model with us today just like the rest
of you I mean the thing that stands out to me first and foremost is just how
good the build quality feels it wasn't that long ago that budget phones even
mid-range phones had gigantic bezels around them or really cheap feeling
materials but this feels great if you
told me this cost 300 more or I still
wouldn't bat an eye it doesn't have a three and a half millimeter headphone
jack which is a real bummer but it does
have an amplified earpiece speaker meaning that you will get stereo sound
out of it there's no stupid Bixby button I consider that a feature and I guess I
never mentioned it before but the screen is six and a half inches let's talk
cameras now since for most people their phone is their primary way of saving
precious memories from top to bottom on the back we've got a 12 megapixel Ultra
wide a 64 megapixel main camera and a 5 megapixel depth camera the little guy on
the top is a 5 megapixel F 2.4 macro camera bringing us up to a total of four
sensors on the back of this thing and on the bottom is our light or Flash
the front-facing selfie camera is 32 megapixels and oh I guess I was turned
to the side that time but other than the a little bit overdone smoothing then
again I'm old I kind of need it now I'd say the quality is pretty darn good and
thankfully it doesn't take up a ton of space on the screen as for the back it
might not be technically the best camera but
man I have a hard time finding anything to complain about it is absolutely all
that you need to capture the moment which for me is really where the bar is
as for the display I advocated for years that at these sizes anything over 1080p
class is just wasted cost and wasted
power I mean it's over 400 pixels per inch for crying out loud and it looks
great the blacks are OLED deep and the 120 hertz refresh rate makes the phone
feel and look smoother than pretty much any of the competition at this price
point more on that later by the way however that comes with a caveat just
like on a PC there's not much Point having a high refresh rate display
unless the hardware can keep up with those frame rates and while the menus
and navigation and simple games look great there's no Snapdragon 8 gen
whatever processor in here so don't expect top tier performance and gentian
impact or other more demanding mobile games of course none of that affects
consumption of movies and TV shows which look amazing though of course there is
more to life than looks let's just do a quick audition of the speakers here crab
rave crab Rave let's do it oh my God ads this
is my version of Adblock I will look somewhere else hey the Creator still
gets paid I will sleep perfectly tonight
didn't like these good Sound Stage though
I haven't gotten to the drop yet
I think you judged it too harshly you're right there's not a lot of bass but good
Sound Stage good Clarity good volume and
while I'm not putting much stock in the support for Dolby Atmos if scruffy Dan
broke a stray on his guitar around the campfire you wouldn't be a monster for
pulling this out another area that impressed us was the
battery life thanks to both its mid-tier processor and whopping 5 000 milliamp
hour battery the a53 boasts up to two days on a single charge and that is not
in crap tier monochromatic display mode
disabling all the processor cores or whatever that's with regular usage auto
brightness and Wi-Fi on around the clock and we know this is true because ploof
the writer for this video is one of you he actually bought this phone and Day
lead it for a couple of months only selling it because a colleague offered
him a free side grade and he likes his S10 but has actually not been happy
about certain aspects of it particularly going back to Nightly charging when you
do need to charge on the a53 it supports 25 watt fast charging getting it back to
full in a flash now obviously that battery life is going to degrade as the
years go by but if you start from a really good point well even degraded it
should be a good experience you know what else is like that our new Henley
shirt from LTT Store com it starts great and well obviously it's going to wear a
little its clothing but it'll last a really long time trust me bro now for
the fun part what's the catch here given its lower price point of 350 dollars
that's down from 450 at launch it's kind
of hard to complain I just really like this thing but it's my job so I'm gonna
do it let's start with the clearest drawback the processing power as I
alluded to before the GPU in this thing is a Mali g68 now for the average person
that doesn't make the experience awful or even bad it's a lot faster than its
predecessor but it certainly could be better what will affect pretty much
everyone in everyday use at least eventually is the CPU like a flagship
chip chip the exynos 1280 has an 8 core CPU but those cores are running
significantly slower and while ploof didn't encounter any slowdowns over time
with his phone he doesn't load up his phone with random apps and games and he
only used it for a few months so he didn't have to deal with that slow down
that tends to come from multiple generations of software updates if
customer reviews are anything to go by though it might even be a problem today
in fact looking through the one to three star ratings for this device complaints
about processing power are a clear pattern for one star some people simply
got lemons one hated on Samsung support several people were upset about the lack
of an included charging brick that's fair enough even if it looks like this
might be the new normal Honestly though I'm actually more annoyed by the
inclusion of a type c to type c cable I mean if you're not going to give me a
brick okay fine but this is a mid-tier device what are the odds that the brick
that I already have with my old mid-tier device is a type c brick read the room
Samsung you guys not not happy USBC bricks
another Common Thread was the allegedly terrible call Quality when using this
phone via Bluetooth in your car allegedly I take calls in my car all the
time and that's doesn't make any sense I'm gonna have to try that
hey you sound fine but are people coming I'm walking away are
people complaining about what comes through from my side or the other way
um I think it was coming through from on
my side I don't know you sound fine to me yeah you sound cool I kind of wonder
if they just had a bug at some point uh maybe I mean there were quite a few
reviews but yeah it's possible that new software updates was kind of fixed that
it's been up for almost a year I don't know what to tell you
it's fine at least with this car I'm not saying
you imagined it once we move up to the two and three
star reviews people start complaining more about the text-to-speech feeling a
little sluggish so processing again a lack of memory resulting in apps
freezing momentarily lack of dual SIM support though there is an international
version with dual SIM so it seems like they might have bought the wrong model
poor facial recognition we found a couple complaints about this in the four
and five star range as well but they don't seem to really be bothered by it I
guess because it's still a five-star review and then another big one is the
unresponsive fingerprint scanner the good news is that a lot of these
features might not matter to you that much particularly dual SIM support and a
good hack for Samsung's poor fingerprint recognition is to register the same
finger multiple times they are just a little bit slower than the competition
funnily enough most of the four star reviews complained about bloatware but
from my point of view it's really not that bad especially if you don't sign
into a Samsung account during setup we did a regular installation with just
Google account and honestly like what
this that's it I don't even know if I would actually get rid of anything that
was pre-loaded on this device but this is an unlocked device and it's possible
that some of these folks are leaving reviews with their carrier bloated
versions and then ah the rest of the complaints at this tier were pretty
focused on the lack of wireless charging which is kind of valid at this price
point what is interesting though is that in spite of all these complaints and
shortcomings y'all seem to pretty much love this thing five star reviews made
up 64 of all reviews with another 20
being 4 star I mean I can't think of just about anything in this polarized
world that 84 percent of people agree is damn good so what do you guys love then
expandable storage decent camera really
decent camera great battery life nice display 5G but we've talked about all
that the biggest one is the value plenty
of you guys are paying between 3 and four hundred dollars with many remarking
that they either came from the thousand plus dollar Flagship scene and just
didn't want to do that anymore or they never had one and wanted to avoid
shelling out big bucks in the first place interestingly we didn't see too
many comments from people who appreciated it being affordable without locking into a carrier contract but that
was a major factor in blue spying decision so I think it's worth
mentioning also worth mentioning is the main competitor for this model the
Google pixel 6A while they're both the same price both now and at launch the 6A
only has 650 ratings total so it's clearly less popular but that doesn't
surprise me that much given that Samsung is a bit more of a household name than
Google is at least when it comes to phones as for how they differ well the
camera on this one may be technically better actually in some ways Google
software is so darn good that the pixel 6A ended up taking first place in
mkbhd's blind camera test so if that's all you care about then maybe go for the
pixel but if you care about just about anything else like a smooth display La
the a53 walks away in just about every
other category meaning the herd mentality approach might not be a bad
one if you're shopping for a value phone oh and if you're into the herd mentality
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this video make sure to check out some of the others from this series like the
mouse we looked at recently why is everybody buying that one