Last week, Samsung stealthily released both the Galaxy A54 and Galaxy A34. By stealthily, I mean literally no pre-amp or any hype. We just get an email saying that these two phones are now officially announced. It’s a jarring change since the A-series from a year ago has the same hype as the Galaxy S series.
Anyway, let’s focus on the phone itself. Supposedly, the A54 is Samsung’s latest and best phone within the A-series as the alleged A74 is missing. Let’s get started with our review to know if this is a good phone or not.
Disclaimer: The unit we are featuring here is not a retail unit. There are some software quirks (like GPU Watch crashing). I presume that the software is near completion compared to the final retail version. By the time you get your hands on the A54, things might change.
Design
We’ll start off with the design. It now has a new design very similar to the Galaxy S series now – each camera is a protruding circle, and I personally do like this new design since it’s very minimalist and clean. However, I do think that Samsung is kinda overusing the same design language since both the Galaxy S and A series do look very similar now.
The A54 is available in 4 different colors too – lime, violet, graphite, and white. We have the lime color here – and yes, it does look very striking. What I don’t like is the glossy plastic finish at the back. I have no idea why Samsung decided to suddenly change it back to a glossy finish whereby the Galaxy A34 still has a matte finish.
From what I can feel, the frame seems to be thicker than the front and back of the phone – and I can confirm this by rubbing the phone like this.
Cameras
Since we are talking about the Galaxy A series, the camera is also a big focus. There are two big changes here. First, main camera got changed to a 50MP sensor. Second, the useless depth sensor from the last generation got removed – thank you for doing that.
By the way, the camera protrusion of the A54 is really high. Maybe that’s because of the focal length of the lenses – we’ll talk more about this in a while.
To have a look at all of the pictures and videos taken with the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G, watch the video at the top of this review.
Display
How about the screen then? Well, here’s the thing – they changed quite a lot too. We now have a 6.4-inch screen which is 0.1-inch smaller, but the bezels are now a lot thicker than before. We do have the A53 with us to compare too.
The screen resolution got changed to 2380×1080 pixels and it still retains the 120Hz refresh rate.
What’s improved is actually the brightness. When I got this phone, I immediately started using it under the bright sun and I can still see the screen. When I shined our studio lights directly on the phone, we recorded about 1000 nits brightness. That’s impressive.
The color accuracy is also fantastic. Our colorimeter reports that this screen covers 100% sRGB and 99.96% of DCI-P3 but the max ΔE number is a bit high at 3.3. Nonetheless, the screen is gorgeous. It’s just that the bezels are thicker now.
I also just quickly want to point out that the under-display fingerprint scanner is placed way too low, making it difficult to reach.
Performance
If you want to play games on the Galaxy A54, then this part is important for you. This phone is powered by the Exynos 1380 chipset and that is where things start to get weird. Every time a new chipset comes into the market, we’ll have to wait for it to get optimized and for game developers to enable the proper graphical settings for that particular chipset and phone.
That is exactly what’s happening on the A54. In our gaming test, we mentioned that many games do not have higher refresh rate options even though the phone can clearly handle it.
That is why we always use Genshin Impact as our primary game to test because they don’t have any artificial locks. At the lowest graphical settings, this phone can achieve about 40fps on average and I think that will provide a very decent gaming experience overall.
The temperature is higher than what I expected, but still comfortable to hold the phone – so there is nothing to worry about.
And of course, we performed the ritual to summon the battery bypass feature – and yes, we have that on the A54 too. So, if you want to perform the ritual yourself, watch the video at the top right corner to know how.
Battery life
Speaking of that, let’s talk about battery life. The phone comes with a 5,000mAh battery and with our usual PC Mark battery life test locked at 100 nits brightness, we can get around 13 hours which means we can use it for one day with no problems.
Charging
The charging speed is also unchanged from last year. 25W is the maximum wattage the phone can accept and it takes nearly an hour and a half to charge from 15% to completion.
I do believe Samsung can make it faster if they want to since there is some thermal headroom. Look at the temperature graph – it’s always below 37.5°C.
All other phones I reviewed keeps the temperature at around 40°C so hopefully, we can see 40W charging on the Galaxy A series next year.
Software
And then comes the software. The Galaxy A54 5G is using the same One UI 5.1 as the Galaxy S23 series, but without the fancy features like lifting certain objects off of an image.
We do have the feature to generate this kind of short videos – which I have no idea what they’re called but they do look good.
The usual apps that I use are also present on this phone – we have Modes and Routines, Samsung Pay, and also Edge Panel.
Everything else is the same as the Galaxy S series – so nothing much to talk about here.
Few more things to mention
And a few more things to mention before ending this review. The Galaxy A54 still has IP67 rating and that’s fantastic.
It does have a dedicated SIM card slot and another combo slot so you can stuff in a microSD card if you want to.
Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy A54 5G?
And that’s all we have to share with you about this phone. At the time of filming this, we do not have the price yet. I’m literally rushing the review for you guys so you can be informed about the product before purchasing.
Once I have the price, I’ll come back here and update the review – so remember to check back.
However, I do recommend you check out our review of the Galaxy A34 5G before making your purchase of the A54. That A34 is an interesting one.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
Like our Facebook Page here at NasiLemakTech.com for more news and in-depth reviews!
Also, join our Facebook Group for insightful information and memes!
Subscribe to our YouTube channel too!
