Samsung Galaxy A52 5G In-Depth Review (vs S21 Ultra) | Do You NEED To Buy A Flagship? By InsideTech

Samsung's galaxy s, series typically gets all the hype you've likely heard of the s21 ultra, which is probably the best smartphone money you can buy right now, but their budget in mid-range a series is actually where they make most of their money, and I think it's a quietly undervalued series, that's more worthwhile checking out than you might realize. So this video will be a review of the new galaxy a52 5g, not to be confused with the lower spec a52, which isn't available in the US and UK, and I want to see how this stacks up against Samsung's s-series phones and in particular, if it's really that different from the expensive s21 ultra, so we'll be pitting the best of the series against the best of the s series, but I'll draw comparisons to the full s series lineup of this year in case you're, considering getting the cheaper, s21 or plus. Now, for those of you wondering why the a72 isn't being featured well, that's because it isn't actually the best a series phone, despite having the higher number in the name. The 72 is having a limited release and won't be available in places like the US. It has a slower, processor and display, and it doesn't have 5g. So the a52 5g is the real winner.

This video might seem a little strange on the surface, comparing a 499 mid-ranger against a 1200 flagship, and obviously we expect the ultra to win in most of these comparisons. It's the flagship it's supposed to. But if we look at this in the context of how much more you're spending to get those better things well, then we can start to ask the interesting questions like do. We really need to spend over a thousand dollars to get a phone that does everything we want it to do. We actually need to buy a flagship.

The galaxy a52 5g is less than half the price and might just offer everything you want from a smartphone. Let's take a look, so the very first difference to note is with the a52 5g which, for the sake of ease, I may simply call the a52 well. This phone still comes with the wall charger in the box, unlike the flagship s21 ultra. This is a difference. I personally don't consider an upgrade.

I think it's better to not have these in the box, especially since it's just a 15 watt charger and not a 25w, fast charger that this phone could use. And then, when you get to the phone itself, it has a very promising start with what I think is a really beautiful design. This is the awesome black model, but it does come in white violet and a light blue color as well. Although it seems like the US, possibly only has the black option, it's more of a metallic gray black than the phantom black s21 ultra, which I've previously said was the best looking phone, but I have to say that I actually prefer the a52 design. I think the main reason for this is the significantly smaller camera bump, which is obnoxiously large on the ultra.

So in terms of appearance, this phone is pretty awesome. You've also got build quality to consider, though, a cheaper phone has to cut corners somewhere and does so here with the durability. Both phones have an aluminum frame, but this is a gorilla glass 5 display, as opposed to the superior Victor's glass on the ultra, and the main difference is that this has a plastic back as opposed to glass. Now you'll, remember that the s21 also has a plastic back, but as nice as this match, texture feels in the hand the material here doesn't quite feel as premium. So you notice the step-down in build quality.

I wouldn't say this feels cheap at all, though, and if you're putting the phone in the case, then it doesn't matter at all, and if you use a screen protector, then even the glass doesn't matter much either. There's similar dust and water resistance. Here too, with ip67 in the a52 and ip68 with the ultra, which just allows you to submerge the phone half a meter deeper. We have the same button layout with a power and volume rocker at the side and a set of stereo speakers at the front and bottom, but you'll notice that the a52 still holds onto the three and a half millimeter headphone jack. So already, we've got an advantage to the cheaper model.

The same applies to the dual sim card trays at the top, because with the a52 we still have the option for expandable storage, which is a very popular feature that the s21s don't have now. The ultra has a few more options for the base storage, whereas you're stuck with 128 gigs for the a52, but obviously there's actually much more storage here. If you expand this with a micros card, the one caveat is that you have much faster storage on the ultra, which you can see pretty clearly from the read write tests, but in terms of overall capacity, the a52 has the edge. Now I said the a52 was the better looking phone, but you'll obviously spend the most time looking at the displays where the s21 ultra flexes its flagship prowess, because this is frankly the best display you can get right now. They both have the infinity o design with a single hole, punch camera at the center.

But you can see that the thicker bezels make the 52 look like a cheaper device and the ultra slight curve helps to achieve those super thin side. Bezels. The a52 screen is completely flat, though, which many people find more functional, as it gives fewer accidental touches. You're looking at two similar sized phones, each with very large displays, but the a52 with its thinner and narrower body is the easier to use. It's also the more comfortable to use, mainly as a result of its super light body which isn't that much heavier than the smaller s21, and I think the ultra's, relatively heavy weight, does factor in overtime.

One thing that stands out, though, is the ultra superior haptic feedback, and the a52's vibrations feel considerably weaker and less satisfying, for example, when typing, but in terms of the display specs, the ultra is a considerable upgrade offering a sharper and much brighter display than the a52. The dynamic AMOLED versus the 52 super AMOLED brings a much higher contrast ratio, improved colors and a better low blue light filter too. So it's a better looking and more accurate display. That's also literally easier on the eyes. You've got s pen support for the ultra here too, which you do need to buy separately, and whilst this won't affect the vast majority of people, I'm sure there are some of you out there.

Who'll know if this is a dealbreaker. The difference with 1440p compared to 1080, especially on large screens like these, is noticeable for the eagle eyed among you, but I still found the a52 to be vibrant and colorful. It's just not quite as good as the ultra to use in harsh sunlight. The ultra's super bright, 1500 nits display offers a beautiful contrast, ratio and true high dynamic range, which you can't get on the a52. So when it comes to HDR movie content or even simply YouTube videos, the ultra offers a much better viewing experience, some of the most technologically advanced earbuds you can buy, but the competition has been catching up.

Sony lost their noise, cancelling crown to Bose's, quiet comfort, earbuds and the bowers and Wilkins pi7 that we saw last week are now the best sounding earbuds you can buy. Both phones use an under display fingerprint sensor, but the technologies used here, and the resulting performance are quite different. The s21 series used the newer ultrasonic tech, which delivers much faster unlock speeds, whereas the a52 is using the older optical tech, and I'd often need to keep my finger held down for longer before unlocking so since you'll be unlocking the phone multiple times throughout the day. This is a nice quality of life perk for the ultra. Interestingly, the a52 does still offer a 120hz refresh rate, which is generally considered to be a flagship feature and is a compelling reason to get the 52 over other mid-range or budget phones, including the other models in the a-series.

This provides super smooth scrolling, essentially on par with the ultra, and it opens up the option for high refresh rate gaming too. Now this isn't the adaptive refresh rate you'll find on the s21 series. It's a fixed, 120 or 60 hertz that you can choose between. So it's not able to adaptive lower to save on battery life like the s21s can. But in spite of this, I actually found the a52 outperforms, the ultra when it comes to battery life.

It just beats out the ultra in a head to head for screen on time, but if you use your phone for anything intensive or battery demanding, then the ultra chews through the battery at a much faster rate. If you look at the battery scores after some identical, repeated performance testing, you can see how the 52 leaves the ultra in his wake, a phone that has a bigger battery. So it just goes to show that numbers and specs on paper aren't everything under more normal use, though this is a two-day used phone or more realistically one and a half days. So unless you're constantly pushing the battery life to the limit, it should last you a really long time- and this was with the high refresh rate turned on. So you can extend battery life even further by dropping to 60 hertz.

As for charging, it has the same 25 watt fast charging ability as the s21 series and gave an almost identical fast charging result as well, but the biggest emission, not just with charging but perhaps from the entire phone- is wireless charging. This has been such a convenient feature, and it's one of those quality of life perks. You can start to take for granted, but really notice when it's gone. The a52, like many other mid-range phones, doesn't have this, and I personally really miss it. It's not just the extra convenience the s21s give you either it's also more functionality like being able to reverse wirelessly charge up your earbuds when they run out of juice or perhaps top up your friend's phone in an emergency.

I know many people won't care about this, but the lack of wireless charging is one of the biggest drawbacks in my opinion, so that's the battery performance, but how fast and capable is this device? Well, the 52 is rocking six gigs of ram and a snapdragon 750g processor globally. So there's no more argument of snapdragon vs Enos, like we have every year with the s series. It's a healthy upgrade over the previous model and if you look at the benchmarks, you'll see that it compares favorably to most mid-ranges edging out competitors like the Pixel 4a, but obviously falling behind the performance king iPhone SE, but against the flagship, s21 series, you can really see the step-up in terms of raw power. Clearly, this mid-range chip performs nowhere near the standard of the flagship, snapdragon 8 in the ultra, which offers a huge step up in performance for intensive gaming, video, editing and multitasking. So, if you're heavily dependent on those types of tasks, then you'll already know that a mid-range phone is likely no good for you.

One thing I found interesting, though, is that the ultra got much warmer under heavy load like with gaming, so, although even the thermally throttled performance will likely still win against the a52, I thought it was interesting to note. Despite the lower spec gaming on the a52, 5g still proved to be quite successful. Even for the more graphically intensive games under heavy load, you may notice the odd dropped frame, though something you wouldn't get with a s21 or a gaming phone. But it's more than good enough for casual gaming, and the performance here exceeds budget options and most mid-ranges, I think, what's more appropriate to compare, though, is the performance in day-to-day use, and here you may notice that apps take a bit longer to open. Web pages, are slower to load, and you won't be able to switch apps or multitask as quickly switching back to even recently used apps or sometimes need to refresh.

So the ram limitation seems to restrict the number of apps that can be held active in the background. It's far from a dealbreaker, but these are the smaller quality of life, perks that affect everyday usage, so you do feel the benefit with a flagship, a lot more with things like this compared to something like a minor display or camera spec difference, I think, as long as you're not coming from a flagship phone to the a52, though then this won't feel slow at all, especially with that high refresh rate and to handle social media internet browsing and playing YouTube videos. All with relative ease. A perk of the 750g soc is that it comes with 5g which yes, still isn't readily available in most parts of the world, but I know it's still an important factor for many people when buying a phone, especially with long-term use in mind. It's worth noting that the superfast millimeter wave speeds are not available here, like they are on certain regions, s21 models.

So even if you connect to a 5g network, you may only be able to get speeds just above the best 4g, but at least there is some 5g support here going forwards. Wi-Fi speeds won't blow you away either as the phone doesn't support, Wi-Fi 6, nor does it have ultra-wideband support, which enables new and upcoming features like precise location, tracking and digital car keys. It also comes with the older standards of Bluetooth, 5 and USB 2. , and, whilst the Bluetooth difference is negligible, you may notice the slower data transfer speeds via USB, for example, when offloading data to your computer.52 also misses out on the fantastic Samsung DEX feature, and this allows you to access and display your phone on. Another screen with some handy features like instant, drag and drop for file sharing so aside from certain features that are dictated by the hardware you're getting the same software here as you'll find on the s21 series.

So this is one UI 3.1 on android 11 straight out of the box, and this will be upgradable to android 12 once it becomes available. We've seen before that, one UI is a colorful and feature packed version of android, but not necessarily the cleanest, and I found the pre-installed bloatware to be even worse here than on the s21 series, including forcing TikTok onto my home screen even after selecting. No, thank you. If longevity is a concern, though, then you'll be pleased to see the phone has the same four years of updates guaranteed just like the s21s, so you don't lose out on software support when purchasing this mid-range option. The cameras are another area where budget and mid-range phones tend to cut back to reduce the cost, and although the a525g has a quad camera setup, you only really need to care about the main and ultra weird lenses, the 64 megapixel main lens bends.

Down to 12 megapixels, just like the ultra does, and it actually really impressed me, we've seen before that the high-res modes don't add much to image quality, but the regular 12, megapixel shots showed good, colors detail and even dynamic range with good lighting conditions. It takes some pretty nice ultra-wide shots too, where the only real drawbacks compared to its flagship brother and that images aren't as sharp and there's a little more distortion in the corners. But images from these two lenses were generally pretty good and for a phone costing less than half the price. It really held its own against the s21 ultra I'd say here that the colors are even more true to life than with the flagship, and you can pick out more detail in the leaves too. The 52 photos were typically not as saturated or high contrast, as with the s21s, so photos aren't as striking or pleasing to the eye straight out of the camera, but the ultra has crushed the black levels so much that essentially lost some of the detail that the a52 has retained.

So you could argue that the a52 photos are a better foundation that you could simply add a bit of saturation to in post for a better image. This is more down to an artistic choice, though, and personal preference, but the point is that the ultra's camera isn't just better in every single way. One thing I noticed with the processing is that the a52 really struggles when using the scene optimizer because turning it on usually results in way over saturated images. As you can see, it's turned lily completely orange here. Just to give you an idea of context, these are the normal and then scene, optimized versions taken on the s21 ultra, and this is them taken on the a52 5g, so image processing just isn't on the same level as the s21 series, the 52 has a dedicated macro lens, which is fine, but nothing really.

Special images are often very soft. You need good lighting to use it, and even then the quality of the sensor isn't great, and you can typically just crop in on the main lens to achieve a similar or better effect. So it's not a very useful lens. Some phones, like the s21 ultra, even have macro modes built into other lenses now where the quality is either just as good or often quite a lot better. Perhaps a better choice would have been to include a telephoto lens, because the zoom capabilities are very limited, with the a52 and quality very quickly drops off up to the maximum zoom of 10x.

Most people don't care too much about this, but if Zoom is important to you, you'll definitely want to consider a phone with a dedicated tell lens, because the quality difference compared to the s21 ultra is massive. But when you get into the extreme ends of lighting conditions, either bright, sunlight or low light, then you start to see the s21s really pull ahead. So, first, you have the higher contrast and saturation with the ultra's photos, whereas the a52's image is a little washed out. Colors are more true to life too, whereas a pink tinge is creeping into. The 52 image which you can see is affecting skin tones the stone path, and especially these black surfaces, but the s21 superior high dynamic range is most evident of all, and you can see how the 52 has blown out the sky, the ground and even this pair of blue jeans.

So in some lighting situations, you'll find the a52 on par with the s21 series. But when you need that high dynamic range, the flagship models really show their advantage and what a better processor can bring to your images. The same color and contrast differences apply to the portrait mode too, but I think the actual portrait effect is pretty similar between these phones, the blurring effect and the edges are almost identical and the only time I saw an advantage with the ultra was occasionally with the trickier areas where the depth perception was a little better. But in general I think that portraits are competing well with the high-end models. One clear advantage for a phone like the s21 ultra is that it has more lens options for portrait mode, not only to crop in on the main sensor, as you see here, but also to use his telephoto lens, whereas the a52 offers only one option for framing the shot.

Another perk is that the snapdragon triple eight is able to process portrait effects in real time. So you can preview portraits with various effects before taking the shot, whereas the 52 will only let you adjust the depth and any other effects have to be applied in post, so getting into low light photos. The a52 does have a night mode and compared to the normal mode. You can see that it brings out more detail and a sharper image, but it's definitely not on the level of the s21 series which produce much cleaner and more color. Accurate photos.

So night mode could help you out in low light situations, but there is a noticeable step up in quality with the flagship s21 series. The selfie camera performance is very similar to the s series and shares almost all the pros and the cons. Both images are very well exposed with good dynamic range and are clearly very detailed too, but Samsung's excessive over sharpening is very evident here and often creates unwanted artifacts, especially with skin textures. So it makes sense as to why Samsung tries to force beauty mode on you by setting skin smoothing to level 2 by default, although these were both taken with no filters or enhancements at all. I think I do prefer the more saturated and accurate ultra photo, which gives a more healthy and realistic skin tone here, but both are struggling with the color.

The a52 is photo giving a pink tinge, whereas the ultra leans the opposite way with a greenish tint. I also noticed that both suffered from this weird coloring effect on the left side, but I think this might be due to the bright sunlight affecting the lenses. The main takeaway message, though, is that I don't think the ultra selfie camera is that much better than the a52s at all with the portrait mode. A lot of this same image. Differences are carried over, but in terms of the portrait effect itself, I would give the win to the ultra.

The edges are just a little softer and more natural, and it did a better job of discerning the depth of individual hairs. So there's a bit more of an obvious difference here with the selfie video, the a52 maxes out at 4k30, which you're seeing on both phones. Here, though, the s21s can do 4k60 as well. The ultra's, better HDR is pretty clear to see as the sky with the a52 is completely blown out, and you can also see this with the sunlight, reflecting off of holly's face notice here again, that's pink tinge with the a52 affecting the sky and skin tones, but also how much more stable the ultra's video is in this walking shot. It's a similar deal with the rear, video too, which is pretty good, but is missing.

The color saturation, and especially the stability of flagship phones like the s21 series.4K30 is again the maximum on the a52, but the s21s can record at 60 frames per second and even 8k30, plus you've got options for tracking autofocus as well as recording in HDR. So there are much more advanced options available. I think overall, there's a clear step up in camera quality with the s series phones, they offer better HDR, autofocus and zoom options, but if you're just using the main lens as most people will be, then the a52 is very competitive in most situations. So I think the camera here will be plenty good enough for the average person, so we've covered the specs and features and seen that there are definitely some useful upgrades when you spend extra on a flagship like a higher build quality and wireless charging. But many of the changes and improvements are largely superfluous.

So as nice as it is to own the best new smartphone, you should ask yourself if it really justifies spending over a thousand dollars, there's still a 300 gap between this a52 5g and the lowest spec s21. So you're almost doubling the price, but I don't think you're doubling the value. There are some obvious downgrades that you'll notice, like the plastic back and the thicker bezels, but features like the 120 hertz refresh rate 5g and that huge battery life help this to feel much more like a flagship than a budget phone and don't forget there are even some upgrades with the 52 like keeping the headphone, jack and expandable storage. Don't get me wrong, I love the s series, phones and if money was no object, then I'd obviously go for one of those, but I think a lot of people, disregard phones like the a525g and perhaps don't realize just how much quality is on offer here. So before you go and upgrade to your next flagship, it might be worth checking out the series, because you could end up saving yourself a lot of money but still get the phone that you want.

So I'll ask you this. Would you be happy to buy a mid-range phone instead of the latest flagship and, if not, what's missing from a phone like the a52 5g that you'd want to have? Let me know what you think about this phone in the comments section. Thank you very much for watching, and I'll see you all in the next one.

Source : InsideTech