Budget phones have been getting really good over the last few years with the Nothing Phone A series,
the CMF phone line, even the Pixel A series has really gotten quite good at very accessible prices.
So Samsung can't rest on their laurels anymore. We're taking a look at the A17 5G.
That's right, we're still putting 5G at the end of phone names to make it seem
more sophisticated. In the box here we have our sim popper,
manual and a USB-C to C cable.
That's about three and a half feet long. Wow, this is a cable all right.
And other than that, we got nothing. No plastic case included or anything like that.
Just a cable, a small booklet and the phone itself.
And right away, I gotta say, I like that they're not using plastic. They're using this like papery material.
Honestly, I really like it. This feels nice. I'm just gonna take it out of the bag.
And here we have it. It is a 6.7 inch screen.
This thing is massive. I don't know what the deal with budget phones being so big
is, it feels like that's a trend. Are big screens cheaper? Like I genuinely don't know.
But this thing is massive and it is fingerprinty.
My God, I just took this out. I do have gamer fingers, but I don't think they're that bad.
Okay, well they are that bad, but it is just so fingerprinty. I'd say go for a white model,
but it only comes in this black as well as a light blue. Maybe the light blue will fare a little bit better.
Or I guess maybe you're just not as like nervous as I am because I don't know, maybe I'm a little shy.
You don't have to worry about it. On the back here we have our triple camera system. We have a five megapixel ultra wide,
a 50 megapixel main camera, and a two megapixel macro camera.
I doubt that these two cameras are going to look very good, but we'll take a look.
Maybe it'll be surprised. In the back of the day, five megapixels was plenty.
And in the big two six, we're going retro with it.
Also on the back, we have our flash and just the little Samsung logo.
On the right side of the phone, we have our power button slash fingerprint scanner and volume rocker.
On the top, we have our microphone. On the left side, we have our SIM tray.
Let's open it up. You know, budget phones sometimes have SD card slots
and maybe this one does as well. Oh, it does.
Look at that. So we have an SD card slot as well as a nano SIM.
And we can also see the rubber here for water resistance because it is IP 54.
And on the bottom, we have a microphone, USB two, as well as a speaker port.
You know, for phone design, it's a phone. I think the back looks quite nice actually.
They don't mind the feel of the plastic on the sides. The front looks a little dated with the bigger chin.
We'll turn on the screen and see if it's that noticeable. But I find this kind of gap in the front
to be a little dated. I don't know, it just doesn't look super nice.
But for, you know, the couple hundred dollars you're spending, it's not too bad.
Well, the last thing for us to do is to turn it on, but not before I turn you on to our sponsor.
You know, typically right after turning on the phone, I want to talk about the screen, but first thing I notice is performance is pretty slow.
And I know the phone's just waking up but it took a second to boot up.
Then it took a while for the clock to show up and then just swiping around, it feels a little slow.
Samsung flexes the 2.4 gigahertz octa-core processor
on the website. But when you actually look into it, the Exynos 1330 that's powering the device,
released in early 2023, which for a phone releasing in current year is a little dated
and it feels like it. We had Labs take a look at the performance of the device
and surprise, surprise, it didn't perform great. The Exynos 1330 paired with the four gigs of RAM.
That's right, four gigs of RAM in this phone
performed pretty poorly when compared to the CMF Pro 2,
as well as the Pixel 9a. We're talking 40-ish percent of the CMF phone
to pros performance, as well as only 18%
of the Pixel 9a's performance in our stress test. In our regular benchmarks, it did better,
getting nearly the same performance as the CMF phone in single-core and 70% of the CMF phone's multi-core
performance, but again, gets absolutely demolished by the Pixel 9a.
Sure, those phones are a little bit more expensive, but when you're hopefully getting a device
that's gonna last a while, you want it to work well in that time.
Anyways, back to the screen. This is a 1080 by 2340 screen, so full HD plus,
and yeah, it looks fine. It's a fine amount of brightness,
it's a fine amount of detail. Even though it's a big screen, so you're not gonna get the highest amount of detail
when you get up close to it, I think it looks perfectly adequate.
Wow, look at that full HD plus adequate-ness.
It is an AMOLED though, so that's nice. Again, feels pretty standard for a phone these days.
It'd be odd if it wasn't, especially from Samsung, but yeah, it looks good.
It also has Gorilla Glass Victus on it, so if you drop it face-first, it should be okay.
Please tell me it's okay, please tell me it's okay.
One thing to note is that it's not an HDR screen, so if you're trying to watch Oppenheimer
the way Christopher Nolan intended on a phone, you're not gonna find the best experience here,
but it does get up to 1,150 nits, which is pretty darn bright.
It also runs up to 90 hertz, so if you're trying to game at a high refresh rate
on this old processor, you could dream of 90 hertz,
though I'm not even getting it when scrolling around in anything, so again, your mileage may vary.
But how does it sound? We see the speaker port on the bottom. Maybe it's gonna really blow us away
and you can bring this to your next party. I hate to say it, for those who are excited,
it is only out of this bottom speaker and it doesn't sound good,
so my right ear was pretty disappointed with what it was hearing.
Really just awful showing out, honestly.
Does not sound good at all. It's not even particularly loud. Hey, maybe the camera is excellent though.
You know, five megapixels used to be really impressive and maybe it will be here too.
We do have a 50 though. Wow, they couldn't even hold the app open.
I just went to the camera for two seconds and the YouTube app closed.
Four gigs of RAM is crazy. I know we're in a crisis.
It feels weird to use the word crisis when it's about the ability to buy something
for your computer, but four gigs of RAM in 2026 is insane.
If I can't keep the YouTube app open and open the camera for two seconds
and go back to the YouTube app, something is wrong with your phone.
Why would you sell this? That's crazy. Anyways, anyways, anyways.
The camera, 50 megapixels sounds like a lot, so maybe it's good.
Let's take a picture. They have built-in Snapchat filter. That's your screen record.
Does this phone not have the ability to screen record? That'd be crazy, right?
I tried to screen record, but there's no option and I'm wondering if it's because there's not enough RAM
to screen record and do other things since it can't open the camera while YouTube is open.
That's crazy, but look at this angle. We have Snapchat filters built into the phone, finally.
I've not wanted to use Snapchat since 2016, but I guess I can without an account now, which is nice.
This is awful. This is truly awful. Taking a photo without the filter, though.
Honestly, that's a decent front camera. It feels like the appropriate amount of sharpness.
My beard looks a little crispy, but like otherwise, not bad at all.
And it has the ability to get just the teeniest bit wider
if you just need a little teeny bit more room.
All right, let's try the main cameras. Here's our 1x, our Ultra Wide,
and you can zoom up to 10x. Digital zoom, though.
It's not optical. What is nice though, I'll give it some credit. The main camera has optical image stabilization,
which is great for low light or recording videos. But let's take a look at the photos.
You know what? It doesn't look bad in the top-down. But when you actually look at the photo,
he looks a little bit like a painting, but actually there's no bud. That's not great.
If it's 50 megapixels, it should look, in theory, better than that.
Let's take a look at our other photos. You know what? If you don't zoom in, this ultra photo is not bad.
You do get fisheye, some distortion
on the edges of the photo, but it doesn't look bad quality-wise.
When you zoom in, yeah, again, it's not the sharpest, and there's a little bit of chromatic abrasion
around the lights, but this is a cool-looking photo. And for our main photo, again, perfectly adequate.
It's not good. It's not bad. It's totally fine. If you don't zoom in,
I'd be totally fine with this photo and the level of detail it has. Let's put this into 50 megapixel mode.
Maybe that'll make the huge difference. I do have to say, though, I don't know if you'll be able to see on camera
because I can't screen record. The preview does not look good.
I'm surprised that the photos are turning out as well as they do considering the preview
does not look fantastic. Like, I don't know, maybe I'm just painting.
Okay, throwing into 50 megapixel mode, it does look a bit better. You can see the wrinkles in Reese's face.
Again, this is actually not a bad camera. I went in with pretty low expectations, but this is totally fine.
For recording, we get just a couple options. You can do full HD or HD,
and you can only shoot at 30 FPS in either mode.
So this probably isn't gonna look amazing, but let's take a video and see.
This is a video I'm talking. I'm moving the camera a bit. I'm Jocelyn.
Not the name, I'm just Jocelyn. And there's Reese. Hey, I'm gonna try zooming in.
How's the mic sound? How does it sound? The video again, zooming in, it doesn't look that bad.
It takes a second to like stop fizzling, but not bad.
Oh, and there's a switch to 0.5.
Not bad. Jelly, but not too bad.
Again, I'm actually pretty impressed by the video. The optical image stabilization works quite well,
and even going to the 0.5, it did stutter a bit going back and forth.
In fact, it skipped something I was saying just very briefly, but that's pretty good.
That's pretty good. Other than that, the specs are not anything
to write home about. It's got Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.3. It charges at 25 watts in that USB 2 port,
and there's no wireless charging. So I'm kind of just left wondering, who is this for?
Because at $200, there's a lot of competition.
I'm a believer in just buying an old flagship.
Like you can probably get an S23 FE for around this price.
The CMF phone is only 70 bucks more, the Pixel A's,
you know, 100 and some odd bucks more, which is a bit of a jump.
This does come with six years of security updates and six years of major OS updates, which is nice.
So maybe this would be great for a parent or grandparent,
you know, throw it into easy mode. I mean, look at this.
My grandma wouldn't be afraid of this. This is so approachable and friendly.
But again, it just seems like Samsung has kind of fallen asleep at the wheel
as there's so many phones coming out. There are so many great phones that have come out
that are still great. At $200, four gigs of RAM is just kind of embarrassing.
No HDR kind of puts off people who really want to watch media on this.
The gaming performance, don't play games on this unless it's cribbage or backgammon.
Pfft. I've been a big fan of budget Samsung's in the past,
but this one seems a bit like a miss. But what do you think?
Does this design entice you enough to look past its RAM woes?
Let us know down below, get subscribed in, go have a big old glass of water on me.