Samsung Galaxy A54 5G review: Almost the ace budget phone

Note: This review was first published on 5 July 2023.

Samsung steps forward

Singapore sees no shortage of midrange phone options, with some notable ones including the Google Pixel 7a, Poco F5 Pro and Redmi Note 12 Pro+ 5G. Joining the parade is the Samsung Galaxy A54, which is Samsung’s newest offering in the Galaxy A series. 

With a 6.4-inch FHD+ Super AMOLED display that supports 120Hz refresh rate, a 50MP primary camera, IP67-rated protection and a large 5,000mAh battery, this phone has several flagship-worthy features included with a starting price of just S$588.

More than that, the phone offers features like Samsung’s Nightography (its once flagship-exclusive night mode), firmware support for OS and security updates longer than most midrange phones, 5G compatibility and even expandable storage up to 1TB.

TL;DR: We think Samsung feared having the Galaxy A54 5G annihilate its competition, so it used an entry-level Exynos chipset to even the playing field.

However, does the Galaxy A54 do enough to stand out against the myriad of other options in the midrange category? Are there phone-breaking flaws to a S$588 version of Samsung’s best handsets? Let’s take a look.

Finally looking like a Samsung flagship

With Samsung standardising the appearance of their phones across the different Galaxy series, there are only mild differences between how the Galaxy A54 looks when compared to the Galaxy S23 or S23+, such as choice of glass on the rear and the frame material.

The most notable difference would be that the back of the Galaxy A54’s glossy Gorilla Glass 5, while the S23 series use frosted Gorilla Glass Victus 2. That gives the flagship series a more premium look and feel in the hand. This is also an upgrade from its predecessor, the Galaxy A53, which had a plastic back. 

Additionally, the Galaxy A54 uses a plastic frame while the Galaxy S23 and S23+ use aluminium. It also comes in a couple of fun colours like Awesome Lime (which we have here) and Awesome Violet, in addition to the standard black and white options.

The phone is slightly heavier than both the Galaxy A53 and the Galaxy S23+ at 202g (compared to 189g and 196g respectively). Personally, I think it’s a good idea to keep midrange smartphones at around 200g or so to prevent the phones from feeling too light and insubstantial in the hand. A study has shown that heavier, denser objects tend to feel more important or premium, which can be an issue when most of the phones in this category come with a lightweight plastic or polycarbonate frame. By keeping the A54 slightly heavier, Samsung has managed to avoid this perception problem.

The SIM card tray on top is another excellent selling point of the Galaxy A54. Not only do you get dual SIM capabilities, the second SIM slot actually doubles up as a microSD card slot and supports expandable storage of up to 1TB. These days, expandable storage on phones are uncommon, even with midrange ones. 

With an IP67 rating for dust and water protection, the Galaxy A54 is one of the few midrange phones around to offer such a high protection rating, alongside the Google Pixel 7a. 

Bright, punchy display that’s great for media consumption

Even though the display size has shrunk slightly from 6.5-inch on the A53, the 6.4-inch Full HD+ (2,340 x 1,080 pixels resolution) display on the A54 supports HDR10+ and can get up to 1,000 nits of brightness. 

The standard Vivid colour profile offers punchy, contrasty colours that tend to skew on the slightly cooler side for the colour temperature. Fortunately, there’s a slider that allows for colour temperature adjustment. 

On the Natural colour profile, colour accuracy is improved and images appear more, well, natural.

There’s also an adaptive refresh rate default setting which allows for the phone to automatically switch between 60Hz and 120Hz depending on the type of content being shown, and there’s also the option to lock the refresh rate to 60Hz if you need longer battery life.

HDR videos are crisp with beautiful colours, and watching shows and movies on the Galaxy A54 is a pleasurable experience. I would rather have higher doses of display brightness while out and about under bright sunlight, but it’s still usable with legible content and it feels plenty for indoor use.

Playing games like Honkai: Star Rail and Call of Duty: Mobile are great as well, even if the phone heats up slightly under load. 

Almost the same user experience as the S23 series

We’ve gone through the Samsung One UI 5.1 features in our Samsung S23 Ultra review, and we’ve also taken a look at the newly released Galaxy Enhance X app in our Samsung S23/S23+ review. There isn’t much left to speak about on the software side of things, but the A54 is running on the same One UI 5.1 skin of Android 13. 

There are still the same pre-loaded apps that we recommend you uninstall after set-up. Since the phone only comes in two configurations (128GB and 256GB of storage), freeing up space for more apps and media is necessary.

A point to note is that Samsung did promise to bring the Galaxy Enhance X app to the A series phones. The company has just officially announced support for the Galaxy S22, S21, S20 and Note 20 series, alongside the Z Fold and Z Flip devices after almost 2 months since the app’s release for the S23 series, so we’re expecting the app to come to the A series phones next. 

Imaging Performance

With a triple camera array, the Galaxy A54 looks quite similar to the S23 and S23+ from the rear. Even the cameras used are somewhat similar. 

The main 50MP camera has a 23mm focal length and f/1.8 aperture, while there’s a 12MP ultra-wide camera (f/2.2 aperture, 1.12µm, 123˚ FOV) and a 5MP macro camera (f/2.4 aperture, 1.12µm). 

The images out of the main camera are pixel-binned (the process of combining data from multiple pixels, four in this case, into one) to 12.5MP, and they look very good if lighting conditions are ideal. Of course, you get the punchy, contrasty images that Samsung is known for, but it doesn’t get too overly processed.

There is a 2x digital crop zoom that takes the centre group of pixels from a regular unzoomed photo. Detail does get lost, so if you need to regularly use the 2x zoom option, it might be worth considering turning off pixel binning and cropping in from a 50MP photo instead for better detail retention.

The ultra-wide camera does a good job of minimising fisheye distortion, although details and textures do tend to get a little smudged. If you’re not zooming into your photos, this won’t be a big deal. 

As for the macro camera, colour me surprised. I was honestly not expecting much here, as I’ve been let down quite a number of times by macro cameras on phones. There was a good amount of detail retained, with the phone managing to capture the lines on the movement of my watch. Aside from that, the colours were accurate and the photos were actually usable, although you do get noise.

Nightography also makes its way to this midrange phone, and it works just as well as ever. The same caveat as always applies though, this mode works best for shots without moving subjects and there’s still a bit of noise introduced into the image. While the Nightography results won’t have the same clean and bright results as that from the flagship S23 Ultra, it’s an excellent offering at this phone’s price point. 

Benchmark Performance

As a midrange phone, the Galaxy A54 comes equipped with Samsung’s own Exynos 1380 processor which also provides 5G compatibility and 8GB of RAM. 

First unveiled around March 2023, the Exynos 1380 is a new midrange 8-core chipset that comes with four high-performance Cortex-A78 CPUs running at 2.4GHz to handle performance-intensive tasks and four power-efficient Cortex-A55 CPUs at 2.0GHz. Samsung claims that the Exynos 1380 is able to deliver up to approximately 40% faster execution speed, 20% faster game loading, and 30% powerful multi-core performance (when compared to its predecessor).

The GPU included here is a Mali-G68 GPU that features five cores running at 950MHz. Another point to note is that the Exynos 1380 actually offers support for 200MP image sensors, which could be a good thing if Samsung ever decides to trickle down a 200MP camera to the midrange series. It hasn’t happened yet but one can hope.

With more and more midrange phones coming equipped with powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, it’s unlikely the Exynos 1380 will beat out many of the phones we’ve tested in recent months. 

JetStream 2.0

JetStream 2 is a combination of a variety of JavaScript and Web Assembly benchmarks, including benchmarks that came before like SunSpider and Octane. It primarily tests for a system’s and browser’s ability in delivering a good web experience. It runs a total of 64 subtests, each weighted equally, with multiple iterations, and takes the geometric mean to compute the overall score. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench CPU is a cross-platform processor benchmark that tests both single-core and multi-core performance with workloads that simulate real-world usage. Geekbench 5 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 1000, which is the score of an Intel Core i3-8100. The higher the score, the better.

Geekbench 6

Our Geekbench 5 benchmarking will soon be replaced with Geekbench 6, the updated version that tests single-core and multi-core CPU performance. Geekbench 6 scores are calibrated against a baseline score of 2500, which is the score of an Intel Core i7-12700. We’ll continue to populate this new benchmark with more scores from our review units before fully transitioning over. 

3DMark Wild Life (Unlimited)

3DMark Wild Life is a cross-platform benchmark for Windows, Android and Apple iOS for measuring GPU performance. Its graphics test consists of multiple scenes with variations in the amount of geometry, lights and post-processing effects, mirroring mobile games that are based on short bursts of intense activity. Wild Life uses the Vulkan graphics API on Windows PCs and Android devices. On iOS devices, it uses Metal.

In Unlimited mode, the benchmark runs offscreen using a fixed time step between frames. Unlimited mode renders exactly the same frames in every run on every device, regardless of resolution scaling. The higher the score, the better.

PCMark for Android - Work 3.0 and Storage 2.0

PCMark for Android is a benchmark for testing the performance of Android phones and tablets. The Work 3.0 test checks how the device handles common productivity tasks such as browsing the web, editing videos, working with documents and data, and editing photos. Storage 2.0 checks write-in and read-out performance for internal storage, external storage (if applicable), and SQLite database management. Together, the benchmarks can clue us in on how capable a phone is at handling everyday use. Work 3.0 scores are above, while Storage 2.0 scores are immediately below for each device - the higher the score, the better.

Since this is a newly introduced benchmark in our reviews, we’re building up our database of PCMark scores for Android phones.

Benchmark Performance remarks

As seen by the numbers, the Exynos 1380 processor doesn’t have the best numbers, but when it comes to real-world usage, it’s not all that terrible. There were occasional stutters and lag when unlocking the phone or opening multiple apps, but it never drove me to a point of frustration. 

The phone does heat up slightly (from around 39°C while gaming to 42.7°C while benchmarking) under prolonged use, but it’s nothing less than I expected from an Exynos chip since those tend to run hot. 

A good point to note here is that thanks to the 8GB of RAM included, apps were able to be kept in the background without impacting performance too much.

Battery Life

Our new battery benchmark uses PCMark for Android’s Work 3.0 Battery Life test to determine a modern Android-based smartphone's battery uptime in minutes. This controlled benchmark simulates real-world usage with a combination of both web and social media browsing, video and photo editing, parsing data with various file formats, writing (on documents), and more. 

To enhance consistency in battery results, we start the test at: 

• 100% of the phone’s battery capacity until 20% left
• A fixed display brightness is calibrated at 200cd/m2 (200-lux) with the help of a luminance meter 
• Max resolution
• Refresh rates unlocked
• 0% audio, or completely silenced where possible
• Full bars of Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth, and notifications enabled
• Only one other battery recording app opened in the background
• Scored in uptime minutes; the higher, the better

In real-world usage, the Samsung Galaxy A54’s 5,000mAh battery was more than enough for a full day of moderate usage texting, gaming and watching videos with around 40% left at the end of the day, which is quite surprising and almost in line with Samsung’s marketing claims that the phone can deliver over 2 days of battery. You probably need to be on a 4G network and on power saving more for most of that time, though. The phone drained roughly 9% in an hour of taking photos and videos, and used up around 10% for an hour of 60Hz gaming. 

Wired charging was decently fast at 25W, which is actually the same speed that the S23 and S23+ have. It took us 26 minutes for the phone to charge from 0% to 50%, and a total of 1 hour 18 minutes from nothing to 100% using a third-party 65W wall charger. Samsung does sell a first-party charger separately, but it’s not included with our review set, although we did use the included cable. 

Unfortunately, there’s no wireless charging included here, which is relatively par for the course with midrange phones.

The new benchmark will succeed our outgoing Battery Life benchmarking, which has the following parameters:

• Looping a 720p video with screen brightness and volume at 100%
• Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity turned on
• Constant data streaming through email

Conclusion

With the midrange smartphone category being so competitive lately, it’s getting harder for new phones to stand out. Brands now face the difficult question of how to make midrange phones as attractive and feature-packed as they can without cannibalising sales from the flagship models. However, the Galaxy A54 does have its good points to make it an option for consideration.  

The Galaxy A54 is a good choice for people who want a budget midrange phone that has flagship features like 5G support, a 120Hz refresh rate and IP67-rated dust and water protection, while also featuring a large battery that provides long-lasting battery life. The cherry on top is the length of software support that Samsung offers with its ever-familiar UI, making this a midrange phone more attractive than other phones in the same category with these aspects in mind.

But, if you value performance above all else, you might have the same problem I have. The Exynos 1380 chip and its performance makes it harder to recommend it over other midrange handsets with more powerful processing. If Samsung had gone with, perhaps, the older Snapdragon 7 Gen 1 instead, I think the A54 might be a solid top contender in the midrange market. 

For processing power, there’s alternatives like the Poco F5 Pro, which costs almost the same amount for the 8GB + 256GB model (S$659 versus S$648). If your priority is taking nice photos with good UI, then the Google Pixel 7a (S$749) is a great option that offers a bunch of extra software features. And for users who don’t mind getting older models of phones, flagship phones from a year or two ago can be found at pretty decent discounts these days as well. 

Choosing the Galaxy A54 falls upon choosing its upsides, like using the Samsung’s ecosystem and the aforementioned promise of four years of OS updates and five years of security patches. The expandable storage is another big advantage that a lot of other phones on the market no longer offer, whether they be midrange or flagship devices. 

The Galaxy A54 is fighting against some very strong opponents in a competitive segment, but while it doesn’t quite come out on top, it’s worth consideration if the phone fits your budget, meets your purpose and of course, have a preference of a polished Samsung device and ecosystem.

The Samsung Galaxy A54 retails in the following configurations at these official prices: 

• Samsung Galaxy A54 (8GB RAM +128GB storage): S$588
• Samsung Galaxy A54 (8GB RAM + 256GB storage): S$648

You can find the Samsung Galaxy A54 at the Samsung Official Store, Amazon, Lazada and Shopee. 

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.