You don't need to spend hundreds of dollars on a phone when all you want to do is make some calls, send some texts and maybe play a couple games among us. I've spent three months with three of Samsung's Galaxy A phones. All of which come in at under $200 and I have to say, they do a little bit of everything I need them to do. But they do come with a few trade-offs.
We give a lot of attention to Samsung's Galaxy s phones which start at seven hundred dollars for the Galaxy s 21 FE. But you might not want to or even can spend that much money just to have a phone The Galaxy A02s starts at 130 dollars, The Galaxy A03s at 160 dollars and The Galaxy A12 at 180 all of them have a six and a half inch screen that's a similar size to the Galaxy S phones, but the resolution is locked to 720p. They all have a small teardrop style notch for the front-facing camera and they have three or four rear cameras depending on the phone. All three phones run Android 11 with road maps and plans to get more software and security updates for a few years. Which is particularly important if you want to hold on to the phone for a few years.
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Before going through what these phones can do, I just want to set some expectations by going over what they don't do.
None of these phones support 5G
They do not have a high refresh rate display.
They have a tiny 32 gigs worth of onboard storage
They do not wirelessly charge
And they all come in a plastic body
Despite having multiple cameras on the back of these phones, the image quality ranges from being just okay when I took photos of outdoor locations and donuts while outside to pretty muddy when I took photos of burritos and cocktails at an indoor restaurant. But these phones have great battery life easily stretching to two days, even when I would spend half the day watching Youtube videos, listening to podcasts, playing games and taking video calls throughout.
All three phones also have a headphone jack which gives you way more flexibility as to what headphones you can use for the phones and thankfully they all have a Micro SD card slot which you're going to need because with only 32 gigs of space, you're gonna need a little bit more room to fit more photos or if you want to even take any video at all. When I loaded in my last Android backup to the first of these phones for review, I barely had enough space to even take 30 photos unless I deleted some apps to make some room.
Samsung Galaxy A02s
So you might now be thinking we said all three phones do a little bit of everything right? So I should totally just get the cheapest of the phones right? No, not necessarily. The AO2S has the fewest frills of the three phones which is to be expected because it's the cheapest. It has no fingerprint sensor on the phone so to unlock it, you need to either use a code, a pattern, a pin or no code at all if you're not concerned about anyone accessing your phone easily. But the bigger problem with the AO2s is multitasking, likely because the phone only has two gigs of memory on board; whereas the other two phones have three gigs.
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The phone played my podcast fine and I could browse the web on the phone okay but when I started trying to do both or other combined tasks, the phone would often crash either the music or the web after a few minutes.
Unless you need a phone that you don't really plan to use very much, it's hard for me to recommend the AO2s even at $130. It's perhaps a good burner phone or a small step up from a flip phone.
Samsung Galaxy A03s
For thirty dollars more, The A03s is worth it on its own just from the fingerprint sensor inclusion. Just that lets you get into the phone way faster than having to enter in a pin or a pattern. The A03s is also the newest of the three phones. So it should be getting slightly longer software and security update support over the A02s and the A12 and the phone is three gigs of ram up from the two gigs on the A02s which makes multitasking so much better. I do feel some lag when entering and exiting apps but most other tasks I threw at it were just fine. I could even video chat while playing Among Us at the same time.
Samsung Galaxy A12
The $180 A12 adds a fourth camera to the back of the phone, which means that it does capture slightly more detail in its photos. However that little bit of extra detail wasn't substantially better than what I could get off the A03s or the A02s. For all three of these phones, you'll want to make use of good lighting in order to get the most out of the images; Since the level of detail is a bit more crunchy than crisp, especially in lower lighting.
I also found lag on the A12 when rotating it between horizontal and vertical landscapes while watching videos and reading the news. Overall the A12 could be a good fit for someone who really wants that fourth camera and plans to throw in a micro SD card slot to take advantage of the additional space for more photos and videos.
So the most important question to me with these phones is, How good will you look on a video call? We took some footage the other day of what a video call would look like over zoom just to give you some idea of what the quality is like over that or Duo or any other video calling app you use. In general the front-facing camera isn't great. When you can, you might want to make use of better lighting or plugging in some headphones for some better sound. Those tests were done using just the phone itself so you can have an idea of what it would be like to take a quick video call when holding your phone without wearing any headphones or having the time to set up any good lighting.
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Conclusion and Our Recommendation
Of the three phones we tested, we would recommend the Galaxy A03s the most right now. That phone will get the most years of software support and provide a good balance of power for the price. But if you really want the phone to last as long as possible, I highly recommend factoring in the extra $30 to buy a micro SD card to expand the storage on the phone. 32 gigs of space just isn't enough for most people's photos and videos. So that was a short overall review and kinda comparison of the budget Galaxies. Hope you liked this one. Do check out our other posts as well and share this one with your friends and family.
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