Cheap telephones are having a moment. For the primary time, you possibly can pay a mere $250 for a smartphone and anticipate it to obtain safety updates for 4 years. You’ll discover clean efficiency that may crush most smartphone duties, even gaming, and seize agreeable images that received’t make you wish to gouge your eyes out. That’s been my expertise with Samsung’s Galaxy A13 5G.
This Android telephone may not look all that nice—its plasticky construct feels low-cost and attracts so many fingerprints—however I’ve used it for practically a month with hardly a hiccup. If you hate spending cash on a telephone and don’t care to have the very best cameras, the A13 5G has the fundamentals down for a really low value.
A+ Phone
For low-cost telephones, you on the very least want a tool that may run all your favourite apps and video games with out an excessive amount of stuttering or lag. The Mediatek Dimensity 700 processor contained in the Galaxy A13 5G succeeds right here. Apps open comparatively rapidly, switching between them is snappy, and I’ve hardly ever seen this telephone decelerate. Even video games like Pako Forever and Dead Cells carried out admirably on the system.
There’s a 5,000-mAh battery cell that retains the A13 5G chugging alongside for greater than a full day. If you’re conservative sufficient, you will get two full days out of this telephone, however more often than not I ended up with a full day and a half of battery life. Like most inexpensive telephones, there’s no wi-fi charging, and don’t anticipate it to recharge to 100% rapidly.
You solely get 64 gigs of storage, which is on the low facet for a telephone at this value, however there’s a MicroSD card slot that permits you to develop that area if you happen to want extra. Other perks embrace NFC so you can also make contactless funds with Google Pay (vital on any telephone, in my view), an influence button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, and a headphone jack.
Samsung’s software program interface isn’t so simple as you’ll discover on telephones just like the Moto G Stylus 2022 or OnePlus Nord N20 5G—and there are plenty of Samsung apps—however you possibly can uninstall a lot of them, and there’s nonetheless a great deal of customization. Samsung has a leg up on its friends in terms of software program assist: It guarantees two OS upgrades and 4 years of safety updates. No different telephone on this value vary comes shut. (The A13 5G launched on Android 11 however has already been up to date to Android 12, and it’ll get Android 13 as nicely.)
The display screen is among the few components of this telephone that’s disappointing. It’s a low-res LCD panel with a 90-Hz screen refresh rate. Sure, interacting with the show feels pretty clean. But if you happen to look carefully, issues can seem fuzzy. This didn’t tremendously have an effect on my expertise utilizing the telephone, however the poor display screen brightness did. It could be exhausting to learn the display screen once you’re outdoor in direct daylight, and it doesn’t assist that Samsung’s auto-brightness function is sluggish to regulate. Most of the time, I needed to manually set the display screen brightness.
The digicam system received’t win any awards both. Don’t be fooled by the triple-camera array. It’s a 50-megapixel fundamental digicam paired with a 2-megapixel macro and 2-megapixel depth digicam. The latter is barely helpful for bettering portrait mode images with a extra correct blur impact, and I’ve hardly ever discovered a necessity for the macro digicam (which helps you to take super-close-up images of objects).
