Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: The New Mid-Range King

The mid-range phone market is starting to feel a little bit saturated with how many different choices there are, but that’s not a bad thing really as it simply gives more choice to the consumer when it comes to having affordable options, and an option like the Samsung Galaxy A57 5G is more proof that you can have a mid-range phone that still feels worth it. Compared to other phones around this price range, like the recently reviewed Google Pixel 10a, the Galaxy A57 both looks and feels more premium.

It’s not a top-tier flagship, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad phone. On the contrary, Samsung has done a great job at delivering a solid phone for the $500-$600 range. At $549.99 which is the base price for the 128GB model, what you get feels fairly reasonable for that cost. I’d have liked if the phone started at $499.99, because if you need double the storage, as it is now you’re looking at $609.99. The good news is that these will eventually come down in price, likely later in the year, and then you’re going to be looking at one heck of a deal. I’ve been spending the past few weeks reviewing this phone and there are lots of things I quite like about it, as well as a few things I don’t. The big question is, is the Samsung Galaxy A57 worth your money? Let’s dive into this review and find out.

Samsung Galaxy A57

Rating

$549.99

When it comes to mid-range devices, the Samsung Galaxy A57 is a phone that shows up and delivers a very solid experience to the user across the board. While it isn’t perfect, no phone is, and for a phone that sits around $549.99, you get a really good camera, pretty good performance, great battery life, and a really, really nice-looking display. If you’re used to having phones that are in the flagship tier, I don’t think this is going to replace those. However, if you never spend more than $600 on a phone, I feel like the Galaxy A57 gets you as close to flagship as you might get without going above this price point.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Great battery life
• Affordable price point
• Slim bezels to really make the screen pop
• Good photo quality from the primary camera
• Lightweight and comfortable to hold
• Pretty good performance most of the time, even in demanding games
• Six years of software updates
• Fast charging speeds

Cons

• Performance can feel a tiny bit slow sometimes
• Launch price feels a bit high
• Limited color options in the US

Disclaimer

Samsung provided us with the Galaxy A57 for review. We’ve been reviewing it for the past couple of weeks to see how it stands up. This is not a sponsored review, and Samsung did not see this review before it was published.

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Samsung Galaxy A57 Specs

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Hardware

When it comes to hardware and the general design of the Galaxy A57, Samsung didn’t come out of the gate with anything too wild or outlandish. It kept things pretty simple and instead of making a design that was flashy, it instead delivered a more minimalist approach with one or two subtle touches. For example, the little indent on the right side of the phone frame that curves ever so slightly outward before flattening out again where the power and volume buttons are. The entire rest of the frame is flat, save for the rounded corners, of course.

The back of the phone is like much of the rest of the A series phones with a glossy finish that has a mirror-like sheen. While this does look nice laying flat on a surface, glossy backs like this are a fingerprint magnet and it’s never been a personal favorite of mine. If you don’t like fingerprints, you’re wiping the back of your phone down then you probably care to admit and that honestly just becomes exhausting. So instead you just end up dealing with the smudges most of the time.

The one upside in this department with the Galaxy A57 that I reviewed is that it’s the lighter Awesome Gray color, which makes the fingerprints a little harder to notice. The best part of the design is really the display, which now has some very slim bezels that make the screen really pop. Watching videos and playing games on the phone in landscape mode becomes quite enjoyable as the screen almost feels edge-to-edge. The bezels are still there but they’re almost not noticeable.

In terms of hardware, you’re not looking at anything too wild here. The phone is powered by an Exynos 1680 chipset, it has 8GB of RAM, and starts at 128GB of storage. Samsung also sells a 256GB model. This chipset isn’t going to stand toe to toe with Qualcomm’s flagship chipset but it does well enough in performance where performance matters the most.

It also has a pretty decent battery that kept the device going for long enough stints that I never really had to worry about charging it at strange times during the review. Camera-wise Samsung didn’t break the mold but the 50MP main camera produces some pretty good photos that come out looking nice in most lighting situations. Overall, the hardware and design choices Samsung made are good, if not a little safe, but good. If I could change anything, anything at all, it would be swapping the glossy finish out for a matte finish, and I would flatten out that camera bump as much as possible. I would also like to see all of the color options available in the US directly from Samsung. Other than that, Samsung has done a solid job with the hardware and design.

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Display

Right off the bat, I think it’s important to establish that I really have zero complaints about this display. It’s bright, colors are vibrant, blacks are nice and deep black, and I think that’s a true testament to how nice Samsung’s Super AMOLED display panels really are. When you pair that with the super slim bezels like Samsung has done on this phone, it’s quite nice. And you really just don’t expect to see that too often with phones that cost around $550. So, kudos to Samsung for putting a really nice panel in this device and making displays of this quality more accessible to a wider audience.

In terms of brightness, the Galaxy A57 has a peak brightness of 1,900 nits. I took this phone outside for some photos during a pretty sunny part of the day and I wasn’t surprised at how easy it was to see the display even in direct sunlight. It doesn’t show up as well in photos, but looking directly at the display, it was easy enough to see everything without much of an issue. That means you should have zero problems seeing anything on the display when you’re indoors.

As for display smoothness, it’s pretty good. The refresh rate is 120Hz so, not the fastest out there or bleeding edge or anything, but still very, very smooth and it’s becoming a standard to have even more basic refresh rates at this amount, which I love to see. I really like this display for a phone that isn’t costing people an arm and a leg to buy, and I hope more manufacturers follow Samsung’s example and use displays this good on the mid-range devices.

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Performance

Performance is one of the more crucial aspects of a phone for me in determining if it’s worth your time and money. I know that performance doesn’t matter as much to everyone, but it is an important aspect of the device because the last thing you want is a phone that lags or limps along in its tasks. You want it to be quick, you want it to be snappy. It doesn’t have to be the best performing device on the market, but it should still be able to get through just about any task without feeling and looking like a laggy mess. I’m happy to report that the Galaxy A57 has pretty decent performance in day-to-day use and even while gaming.

On the gaming side of things, you do have to set your expectations a little. For instance, when I loaded up Genshin Impact for the first time, I had to set the graphics settings accordingly to ensure that the game felt playable. Genshin is pretty well-optimized, so I was able to tune the graphics pretty high and still get a good enough frame rate to keep gameplay enjoyable. However, performance wasn’t good enough to where I was able to max the graphics out and still get 60 frames per second. It was almost there, but not quite there, and I think that’s honestly pretty good for a phone of this price.

The only place I think that the cracks start to show a little with performance is with the fingerprint sensor. It’s pretty slow to unlock the device compared to other phones I’ve been using. It’s obviously nowhere near as fast as the Galaxy S26 series phones, and it’s not nearly as fast as the Pixel 10 Pro or the 2026 Motorola Razr. This isn’t a HUGE deal, but I do enjoy when the fingerprint sensor works faster and this, to me, shows where the performance has its faults. That’s all. In day to day use cases, the performance is perfectly fine for the most part. I don’t feel like anyone who buys this phone would be unhappy with it.

In addition to using this phone normally, we also like to test performance with benchmarks. We do this so that we can gather how the phone feels and performs in a day-to-day scenario as that’s how we normally use phones, and that’s how most everyone else is going to use phones, too. So, we put the Galaxy A57 through the same benchmark tests we do with every other review, which is Geekbench 6, AnTuTu, and 3DMark. That way, we also get to measure performance based on scoring.

Benchmarks

To start with the benchmarks, we run the phone through Geekbench 6 to see how it handles the CPU and GPU tests. It’s single-core score came up with 1378 which is about what I expected to see based on the chipset used. The multi-core score was 4,509, and the GPU score 6,634. Overall nothing record-breaking but pretty good for a mid-range phone I think.

Next, we run the phone through AnTuTu Benchmark and this gives us a score of 1,346,009. It’s decent but it won’t be surpassing the likes of Samsung’s flagship phones.

Lastly, we put the phone through the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test to put the phone to its limits with this particular test graphically. Its best loop score was 1,662 and its lowest loop score was 1,655, while its stability was 99.6%. Quite honestly, this isn’t too bad for a mid-0range phone and it’s a little impressive that the lowest loop score was only 7 points behind the best loop, with a high stability score no less. Again, nothing groundbreaking here but a solid performance for its tier nonetheless. Still, it’s nice to know that if you ended up with this device the performance shows up and shows out.

• Best Loop: 1,662
• Lowest Loop: 1,655
• Stability: 99.6%

Thermals

On top of putting the phone through benchmark tests, we also like to test the thermals to see how well the phone stays cool during activities that are generally going to be more taxing on the hardware. In this case, 4K video recording, after at least an hour of gameplay in a game like Genshin Impact because of its demand on the phone’s resources, and after the 3D Mark Wildlife Stress Test. We use the 3DMark test as a thermal benchmark because it’s designed to push the phone’s resources to its limits, and that ends up with the phone getting to a reasonably high temperature compared to normal use. 4K video recording after a 10-minute period, and high-end gaming after at least an hour do the same thing. So, with that said here’s what we’re looking at.

In the 3DMark Wildlife Extreme Stress Test, the phone came up with a temperature of 98.7 degrees which is pretty good. You also have to remember that the chipset inside of the phone isn’t exactly a performance beast. So, it’s not putting out any wild temps because it’s not producing as much heat. It also somewhat speaks to the cooling performance of this phone.

For the Genshin Impact test, the phone wasn’t that much warmer, reaching temps of only around 102.3 degrees. For a game that is generally very taxing on resources, not bad at all. That being said, a lot of phones have stuck around this temperature after the Genshin thermal check, even phones with more powerful chipsets. So this is par four the course.

Lastly, for the 4K video recording we test the thermals after recording video for 10 minutes. Normally we do this with the phone recording in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second. Unfortunately, this phone doesn’t do 60 frames per second in 4K, and will only go up to 30 frames per second. With that being the case, the temperature was 91.5. This is a little lower than a lot of other phones and I suspect this is why. But at the end of the day thermals on this phone are good and that’s what matters.

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Battery Life and Charging

Much like the performance, the battery life is an important part of any device these days. The phone is probably the single most used tool in the day-to-day life of most of us, and with that in mind, you want it to last you through the day without any issues. That issue being that you end up needing to charge it in the middle of the day. Now I can’t say that no one would need to charge the phone before sliding into bed and plugging the phone in. However, most people probably won’t have to worry about that.

The Galaxy A57 comes with a pretty decent battery with a capacity of 5,000mAh. Far from a huge capacity like some OnePlus phones we’ve seen this past year, but more than good enough and the battery life lasts a while. Overall this phone lasted for about 16 hours, 10 minutes, and 25 seconds until it was down to 1% left. At that point we plug it in and let it charge to test how long it takes to get back to 100%, which was about 1 hour and 22 minutes to a full charge.

Not the fastest but fast enough thanks to the 45W charging speeds. In many cases you aren’t likely to have the phone down at 1% before plugging it in. So you should be able to expect a full battery in under an hour. More than enough time for you to wake up take a shower, maybe make some coffee and eat breakfast and by the time you’re done getting ready, your phone is at 100% and ready to go.

In my general day-to-day use, I was pulling the phone off the charger at around 7AM in the morning and by the time I was ready to plug it in at night it would have about 34% left. That was with a mix of uses including scrolling through Reddit about an hour throughout the day, some YouTube videos, a little gaming, and the occasional web browsing and messaging friends back and forth through Telegram and Discord. Overall battery life and charging is pretty good here and unless you’re a very heavy user, you shouldn’t have any problems with this lasting you the entire day and then some.

Benchmarks

Like with the performance, we test the benchmarks here too just so you have a number to see in terms of how long the battery lasted, and how long it took to charge. For the battery test, we pull up a 24-hour live 4K video and let the video run until the phone’s battery reaches 1%. For the Galaxy A57 this took, as mentioned above, 16 hours, 10 minutes, and 25 seconds. For charging speeds, it took about 1 hour and 22 minutes to get back to 100%. Overall, not bad.

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Software

The software experience here is really not different from the Galaxy S26 aside from its lack of similar AI features. While there are some, the Galaxy A57 doesn’t have the same hardware that’s necessary to run some of those Galaxy AI tricks, so it’s missing a lot of those capabilities. However, the rest of the software experience is pretty much the same. The phone comes preloaded with One UI 8.5 layered on top of Android 16.

So you get a lot of the newer features that Samsung is offering and the software runs pretty smoothly for it. This includes the dual-sided panel that comes up when you swipe down from the top edge of the display. Swipe down on the left side and you get the notification shade. Swipe down on the right and you get the quick settings panel. I used to kinda hate this at first, but the more I have used it the more accustomed to it I have become. I still prefer the single panel like on the Pixel 10 Pro, but I have gotten more used to having it split up since a lot of phone brands use this design now.

Although the phone is missing some Galaxy AI features, it does have some available. Voice transcription is here and you can remove objects from photos if say, someone ends up in the background and inadvertently ruins your shot. Samsung is also promising six years of software updates with this device so you’ll get newer versions of Android for a while, alongside several years of security updates to ensure your phone stays as safe as possible from a software standpoint.

Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: Camera

I’ve said this a bunch of times at this point but cameras on smartphones have gotten pretty good across the board. There are still some floating around out there that produce some really terrible photos, but overall, even phones that cost a few hundred take decent pictures. The main camera on the Galaxy A57 is a 50MP sensor and in most lighting conditions the images produced from it come out with a pretty good level of detail and color reproduction.

Image quality stays when swapping between the main camera and the portrait mode shots, too, which was great to see as I love using that mode more than the standard photo mode. I do feel like Samsung, and not just Samsung but most phone brands, are stuffing a lot of features into these cameras that I feel like won’t be getting used by most of the people who buy these devices. If you’re someone who’s spending close to a thousand or more on a phone, then you are probably someone who might use the camera to its fullest.

In my experience, though, if you’re spending about $500 on a phone, and if you’re like me, you might only be using things like the standard photo mode, maybe the portrait mode, and then some video recording. Then you end up with a lot of features that are being underutilized. Like the macro shots. While the macro camera on the Galaxy A57 produces a decent enough image, it’s not something I used a lot and I almost think Samsung would have been better off leaving it out and maybe using a better quality sensor for the other cameras. Still, image quality is good so if you do use it, then you shouldn’t be disappointed.

The camera didn’t really struggle too much in most scenarios, even in low-light conditions. The only time it really had any trouble getting decent image detail is when it was quite dark and there just wasn’t enough of a light source to pull those details out. That’s the case with most phones though so that’s not really a slight on the Galaxy A57. You’re also not likely to be taking photos in the dark a lot, and when you do, chances are there will be enough other light sources around to make the image look nice enough. Overall the camera quality is good and I think most people who buy the phone will end up being happy with it.

Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy A57?

I think this is really a no brainer. When it comes to mid-range phones, I was pretty happy with the Pixel 10a and I maintained that it was the best mid-range offering, coming in at $499. Now that I’ve reviewed the Galaxy A57 though, I think this is the new mid-range king and that’s because it gives an overall better. The camera quality is about the same, though I do think the photos look a little nicer coming from the Galaxy A57.

Battery life is also pretty similar, but I think the biggest things that set this phone apart are its gorgeous display, and its performance. While the fingerprint sensor is a bit slow, I think overall the Galaxy A57 performs pretty well in most use case scenarios. So for $549.99, I think yes, this is a phone you should definitely buy if you’re looking for something mid-range. If you’re willing to spend a little more money, like $100 and up, then maybe this isn’t the device for you because then we’re starting to get pretty close to low-cost flagships. However, around this price point, this an excellent choice. Even more so when you consider the price will probably come down in the next six months, if it even takes that long.

You should buy the Samsung Galaxy A57 if:

• You’re looking to spend under $600 for a phone
• You want a really nice display and well-rounded performance
• You want a decent camera

You shouldn’t buy the Samsung Galaxy A57 if:

• You’re looking for a top-tier phone camera
• You want something that outperforms most phones
• You don’t mind spending at least $100 more for something nicer

The post Samsung Galaxy A57 Review: The New Mid-Range King appeared first on Android Headlines.

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