Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G Review: A good premium phone, but is it worth the extra dollars?

The Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G is a good overall phone, and there are no two ways about it. However, it is also proof of the idea that not everything that is good is necessarily recommended. It’s this that makes the Galaxy A52s (hereafter so called) a bit of a curveball when you need to explain exactly what’s wrong with it, to a potential buyer. You see, if you discourage buyers, you would be doing a really good smartphone a disservice. However, if you recommend it, there’s really only one reason why you should consider it.

Before we explain ourselves further, the gist: the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G 5G SoC. It has 6 GB or 8 GB of RAM (our variant is the latter), but only 128 GB of storage. There’s a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED FHD+ display with a 120Hz refresh rate, with a bore hole to accommodate a 32MP front-facing camera. On the back, the design is very similar to Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S21 series, and there’s a quad-camera setup with 64MP primary, 12MP ultra-wide and two 5MP units for macro shooting and depth assistance. All this is powered by a 4,500 mAh battery with 25 W fast charging.

Design & Build: Reaches for flagship, misses a few clues

Samsung has very clearly adapted the design of its flagship phone to the premium segment, and the Galaxy A52s has clear design elements from the S21 series. While I especially love the matte back and the block colors, some may find it too plain jane. However, the steel-finished edge feels a bit cheap. The screen is not quite flush with the side edge and there is a slightly beveled edge that protrudes towards your grip of the phone.

I’m not exactly fond of what the rear camera setup looks like – it feels like the designers stopped using the S21 design here because the marketing team needed the two setups to look different. In terms of build quality, the Galaxy A52s is better. The power and volume buttons are well placed, the matte back makes the phone easy to grip and there’s also a 3.5mm audio port on the bottom for wired IEMs. It’s also slim to hold, and I especially like the feel in the hand and the lightweight construction. Despite its lightness, it still feels like a phone that can take a beating and not get damaged.

Display and software: a typical (and good) Samsung experience

The 6.5-inch, full HD+ super AMOLED screen is typical Samsung, and thanks to the refresh rate of 120 Hz, the screen is also comparable to the Galaxy S21 series. If the design of the Galaxy A52s and Galaxy S21+ is masked, there would be little to distinguish in terms of display quality.

This essentially means an inherently smooth screen, producing higher saturation levels than most other phones on the market. Still, you get vibrant and punchy colors, a high contrast ratio to produce deep black levels, enough brightness to display crisp whites, and an adequate touch response. Everything comes together to make the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G a smartphone with a beautiful display.

Keep in mind, though, that most phones these days, especially in the premium price range, offer screens that are either very good or excellent in most cases. The differentiator here, OneUI 3.1, is Samsung’s modified version of Android 11 and offers decent ergonomics. Switching from an Android phone from another OEM to a Samsung phone will take some getting used to. Apart from this, there is nothing that you really miss.

Performance: Smooth, fresh and uncluttered

Beyond benchmarks and performance tests, what I really like about the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G is how clean the whole experience is with it. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 778G SoC is proving to be an increasingly popular option in the mid-premium smartphone range, and in the Galaxy A52s it more than does its job with plenty of smoothness and an air of uncluttered simplicity.

As a result, day-to-day performance is smooth and almost any normal work app loads without a hitch. The chipset inside is also powerful enough for easy multitasking – for example, I could open Gmail, Drive, Sheets, Outlook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and eight tabs in the Brave browser, and there were no hints that the phone was struggling to keep you up. good. Overall performance remained as smooth as I could have hoped, and on spontaneous use, Samsung doesn’t seem to have a habit of violently killing background apps – the 8GB of RAM is clearly enough.

It is for this no-nonsense approach to performance that I started using the Galaxy A52s more and more as my daily work device. Even throwing the rather demanding Pokemon Go into the aforementioned mix of apps didn’t make it sluggish, and the 120Hz screen further enhances the feeling of smoothness and fluidity. Graphics intensive games like Asphalt 9 are rendered with sufficient sharpness in details, and only a critical eye will notice that this is not a flagship despite its pretensions.

Benchmark testing via Geekbench 5 reveals a difference of about 30 percent in single-core performance and 20 percent in multi-core performance between the Galaxy A52s and a more expensive flagship smartphone. What betrays this real-life difference are actions such as searching the app drawer, which takes a second longer and shows a stutter on this phone – something you won’t see on the Galaxy S21 Ultra. If such little things, including a few interrupted browser tabs when you’re not actively using them, bother you, it’s the Galaxy S series you need to look into.

However, for most users, the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G is more than adequate.

Cameras: not a trendsetter, but still good

A big part of what makes a phone “good” is how stable and reliable it is in terms of overall performance. The cameras on the Galaxy A52s are just that – not a world beater, but a reliable bunch when you need to shoot a spontaneous moment. The smooth performance means that the camera app itself doesn’t take forever to open, and thanks to ample memory and a decent ISP (image signal processor), the shutter response and other features of the camera app are smooth enough.

The 64MP main camera is typical Samsung in terms of the color balance it produces by default, with slightly oversaturated and boosted colors. Impressively, though, it appears to have good dynamic range, allowing for better-detailed shadows and a better-balanced sky in contrasting photos. This also helps with a more natural light balance in videos. The only real criticism I have is the slight lack of fine detail in low light, but otherwise there’s nothing wrong here.

Macro photography is good enough with the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G, and the 12MP ultra-wide unit is usable too. The 32MP front camera produces good skin tones in selfies, but we don’t recommend using the filters. Most built-in filter options tend to soften skin textures, giving selfies an artificial look. If you want a certain shade of color in your selfies, we recommend using a photo editing app a la Snapseed.

Battery life: good enough for a day’s work and play

The 4,500 mAh battery of the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G is not monstrous, but large enough for users with average usage to last a whole day. There’s not a lot of headroom for extra use, though – stretch your daily schedule with an extra hour of gaming or a few episodes of your favorite show, and you’ll find yourself reaching for the charger in about 10 to 11 hours.

Fortunately, the 25W USB-C fast charger charges the battery to 50 percent in just over 25 minutes, and the battery is fully charged in less than an hour. It’s far from the fastest charging stand out there, and there are no extra features like reverse or wireless charging. But like the rest of the phone, it gets the job done nicely and stably.

Verdict: It’s all pretty good until you see the price

By now you have probably understood that we like the Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G, and if you have come to this verdict, you are not wrong. You see, if someone just gifts you this smartphone without you having to spend a dime on it, we’d say this is a very nice smartphone to own. It doesn’t try to do flashy things, but delivers just the right amount of firepower to get you through the day. For most users, this would be enough.

That is, until you see the price tag. For our variant with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, the Galaxy A52s costs Rs 37,499 (or Rs 34,499, if you have HDFC Bank credit cards). In comparison, for the same chipset, RAM, storage, smooth playback and faster loading speeds, we have the Realme GT Master Edition which costs Rs 27,990, the recently launched iQoo Z5 which costs Rs 23,999, and the upcoming Xiaomi 11 Lite NE 5G, which is to expected to be priced about the same as the Realme GT ME.

Would you voluntarily spend almost Rs 10,000 more to get essentially the same experience? The short answer is that unless you’re a huge Samsung fan, there’s no reason you should do such a thing. If so, you will probably wait, save up and buy a Galaxy S or Galaxy Z series smartphone. It’s this last point that makes the Galaxy A52s a rather annoying smartphone to justify as a purchase – even if it’s a very good overall device to use.