Samsung Galaxy A51 review: Is it worth buying in 2023?

Last year, three of the top five bestselling phones worldwide were Samsung phones, according to Counterpoint Research. They ranked third, fourth, and fifth, after the iPhone XR and 11. If you live in the US, when you think of Samsung, you probably think of the Galaxy S or Note – but the Samsung phones that sold so well were midrange Galaxy A-series phones.

Samsung is making a big push to sell one of these phones in the US with the $399 Galaxy A51. This price puts it in direct competition with the iPhone SE, but there are plenty of other Android phones that fall under $500. What makes the A51 different is Samsung’s marketing budget and partnership. It is unlocked on Amazon and Samsung’s website, which is important for a midrange Samsung device, and is also available on AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and Xfinity Mobile.

Compared to the iPhone SE, the main draw of the A51 is its screen, a larger 6.5-inch OLED. Samsung is saying that the phone is “terrible” in three specs: screen, camera, and battery life. It even made a boners meme-filled advertisement to bring those points home. (You should check it out because the ad is really great.) Sadly, the Galaxy A51 is not good enough.

Samsung Galaxy A51 review – Good Stuff or Bad Stuff

Last year, three of the top five best-selling phones worldwide were Samsung phones, ranking third, fourth, and fifth, after the iPhone XR and 11. If you live in the US, when you think of Samsung, you probably think of the Galaxy S or Note – but the Samsung phones that sold so well were midrange Galaxy A-series phones.

Every phone has trade-offs, and $399 phones have more than $1,000 ones. So phone makers need to pick their priorities, and Samsung clearly picked the screen. Since it’s the thing people look at and interact with hundreds of times per day, it’s a good thing to pick.

But I can tell not just about the screen, but what lies beneath it-specifically, the hole-punch selfie camera. I have no problem with hole-punch cameras. In fact, I generally prefer them to notches of any size. But for reasons beyond comprehension, Samsung put a small chrome ring around the camera. It catches at certain angles when the light hits it just enough, making it difficult to open. It’s weird.

The other thing below the screen is an optical fingerprint sensor. I’m not sure if Samsung doesn’t have enough representatives with these sensors or what, but it’s too slow. It can take up to a second for a green animation to filter through it, allowing you to unlock the phone. It is also not the most accurate sensor, especially in direct sunlight.

Unfortunately, this evaluation also extends to the processor and RAM. In the US, most familiar Samsung phones use Qualcomm processors, but the A51 uses a Samsung Exynos 9611, a midrange chip that is not powerful enough to make this phone feel smooth. Apps take a long time to load, especially if they have not been opened recently and therefore are not already active in the 4GB of RAM.

Once you are in a browser or app, things run at a good enough speed. But every now and then, the phone struggles to render a screen or load the next thing in its feed.

As I said, various phone manufacturers have to make choices when it comes to less expensive phones. For example, Apple paired the older iPhone 8 body with its smaller screen and massive bezels for the iPhone SE, but it provided the fastest mobile processor available: the A13 Bionic. Samsung chose differently.

Battery life is fine, but it does not live up to Samsung’s claim that it is “long lasting.” I’m getting more than one day of use, which is definitely better than the iPhone SE. But with a 4,000mAh battery and 1080p screen, I was a little surprised that I wasn’t getting even better battery life. In theory, those specs should have resulted in something more impressive, and I wonder if perhaps the Exynos processor is partially to blame.

Finally, there is the camera system, which has more lenses than necessary. The main lens has a 48-megapixel sensor that outputs 12-megapixel images by default. Those images, like almost any camera these days, are decent enough in good light. I was pleasantly surprised to see a nice white balance, something that Samsung sometimes misses. But Samsung’s unnatural tendency to lift shadows is still sticking around.

You probably know what’s coming: it barely performs in low light – in fact worse than the iPhone SE. And when you actually zoom in on the details of the A51, there is a lot more noise than you would find on other smartphone cameras – including 48-megapixel ones.

It has a 12-megapixel ultrawide and a 5-megapixel macro camera, neither of which is particularly useful for getting great shots. I did have some fun using them, though. There is also a “5-megapixel” depth camera that doesn’t seem to do anything useful, at least as far as portrait mode is concerned. Finally, the selfie camera is 32 megapixels, and it produces photos that often look over-processed.

Finally, software. Samsung’s UI customizations on top of Android continue to be good for large-screen phones. But Samsung continues to allow carriers to junk up its phones with crapware: My Verizon-based review unit was absolutely loaded with games and services that no one would want. I also wish I could say that I am confident that this phone will get software updates for more than two or three years.

Of the three “terrible” things that Samsung promised, I think the Galaxy A51 only hits one and a half of them. The screen is awesome, the battery life is great, but the camera does not impress. The Pixel 3A (and, possibly, the adjacent 4A) and the iPhone SE amaze with how good their cameras are for $399. But the pictures of the A51 certainly look like they come out of a midtier phone.

A good $400 phone is hard to make, and none of them can be terrible across every possible metric. But you want to feel at least some parts of the phone as if they came from something much pricier. Except the screen, the Galaxy A51 is not amazing enough.

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