Samsung Galaxy A23 5G Review: A Budget-Friendly Option with Solid 5G Connectivity and Good Camera Performance

The Samsung Galaxy A23 5G is a budget-oriented smartphone that offers solid 5G connectivity. The monochrome design of this smartphone is made of plastic with a smooth matte finish when touched. You will find a round plastic frame and overall, the A23 5G feels quite solid when held. However, there is no Ingress protection like you would find on higher-tier Galaxy A series phones.

Display:

The A23 5G's display is a 6.6-inch PLS LCD with a 1080p resolution, Gorilla Glass 5 protection, and a 120Hz refresh rate. This panel is sharp enough with a pixel density of 400 PPI, and the colors are fairly accurate. The contrast is quite good for an LCD, but there is no HDR support. The brightness is decent but nothing special, we measured a maximum of 430 nits with a manual slider and this can boost to about 510 nits in auto mode. An issue is that there's no ambient light sensor, the phone uses the selfie cam to determine the level for the auto brightness and it's not that reliable.

Performance:

One clear upgrade over the 4G model's display is the 120Hz refresh rate as opposed to 90Hz. The refresh rate will dial down to 60Hz when you stop touching it too, to save energy. However, the high refresh rate is meant to make your user experience more smooth and fluid, this is also limited by the hardware of the phone. In our case, we encountered plenty of hiccups and slowdowns even when just doing some standard everyday tasks such as opening and closing apps, browsing around, or using the camera all require a bit of waiting for things to load. We believe the reason is that we have the version with just four gigs of RAM, hopefully, the variance with 6 or 8 gigs don't have the same issues with slowdowns. We suspect the RAM is the bottleneck here because the chipset itself is a pretty solid one, it's a Snapdragon 695 5G, and we've seen these quite often recently in the mid-range. You'd expect decent performance here.

Software:

There is no issue with the software either, the A23 5G has already received an update to Samsung's latest One UI 5 based on Android 13. It's feature-packed and bloat-free and you get solid software support from Samsung as well. One UI 5 brings a few new features like modes, these are profiles that you can set up to control your phone's behavior based on what you're doing like do not disturb while you're at work. Another standout new feature is that you can set a video clip as your lock screen background.

Audio:

For audio, the Galaxy A23 5G has a headphone jack and a single bottom-firing speaker. It's loud, scoring a very good mark on our charts, and the sound quality is good too with decent vocals and even a bit of bass.

Security & Battery

You can wake up and unlock the phone with a side-mounted fingerprint reader built into the power button and you can get the A23 5G with 64, 128, or 256 gigs of storage which is expandable through microSD. The A23 5G has a large 5,000 milliamp hour battery and battery life is excellent, the phone a star tests to earn a final endurance rating of 138 hours. The phone supports 25 watt charging but unlike the 4G model, you don't get a charger in the box here. With the proper Samsung adapter, we were able to charge the phone from 0 to 58 in half an hour.

Camera:

Finally, we're on to the cameras, and the A23 5G has quite a few though the secondary ones are of a budget nature. On the back, there's a 50-megapixel main cam with OIS, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel macro, and a 2-megapixel depth camera. The front camera is 8 megapixels. The image results are decent enough, though not as good as what you would find on smartphones with higher prices. However, for the price point offered, the A23 5G provides good camera performance and solid 5G connectivity.

Samsung Galaxy A23 5G is a solid budget-friendly smartphone that offers 5G connectivity, a decent display, and good camera performance. The design is made of plastic and has a smooth matte finish. The display has a 1080p resolution, Gorilla Glass 5 protection, and a 120Hz refresh rate. However, there are some limitations such as no Ingress protection, no ambient light sensor and the performance is not as smooth as expected. The phone is powered by Snapdragon 695 5G and runs on Samsung's latest One UI 5 based on Android 13. The battery life is excellent and supports 25W fast charging. Overall, The Samsung Galaxy A23 5G is a great option for those who are looking for a budget-friendly phone with 5G connectivity.