Big on screen but light on thrills

Introduction

For the right person, a mid-range phone can be the perfect balance of features and cost. It’s a delicate balance, because you’ll inevitably lose out on something when you compare it to more expensive phones. 

Samsung walks that tightrope every year, focusing on a couple of key parts of the experience while compromising on a few others to bring the price down to a more palatable level. 

The Samsung Galaxy A57 is the latest in a long line of mid-market phones, and while not perfect, it hits the mark in a few areas. Let’s get into it.

Design

• Premium metal and glass build stands out
• Lightweight design
• A bit of a fingerprint magnet

There are both good and bad elements in the design department, but for the most part, the A57 does a really good job of disguising the fact that it’s not one of the more expensive phones. There’s no plastic to be found anywhere, with both front and back adorned with Gorilla Glass Victus+. 

I really like how Samsung’s played with glass finishes to add some visual contrast. The dark, glossy back plays off nicely with the slightly opaque, frosted finish on the camera island, making it look better than the more expensive Galaxy S series in some ways. 

At least, it is until you actually pick it up and use it, because that glossy, dark finish on the back is a proper fingerprint magnet. One touch, and smears will appear. It’s the reason so many more expensive phones now use a frosted, matte glass finish. This tends to hide fingerprints much better. Perhaps then, a case of giving with one hand and taking away with the other. 

It’s a similar thought when looking at the aluminium frame and the front of the phone. Because I do really like that raised area on the right edge where the volume and side buttons live. It makes that aluminium edge less boring somehow, but then, there’s a bit of a chin in the bezel, where Samsung hasn’t quite managed to give us a uniform bezel on all four sides and corners around the display. 

Still, it comes across as a well-thought-through and purposeful design. The thing I noticed first when I unboxed it was how thin and lightweight it seemed. For a phone with such a large display, it has a nimbleness that belies the numbers on a spec sheet. Still, it’s slightly thinner and lighter than the Galaxy S26 Plus, and considerably more so than the Galaxy S26 Ultra. 

It’s obviously still a way off being as skinny as the S25 Edge, but at the same time, when you realise it’s packed in a battery that’s the same capacity as the larger and heavier S26 Ultra, it’s impossible not to be impressed. 

It shares the same water and dust resistance rating as its more expensive cousins too. So if you happen to like walks in the rain, it should cope just fine. 

Display

• 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED display
• A fantastic panel for the price
• Optical fingerprint sensor is hit-and-miss

Just like its design and build, the display is a highlight on the A57. Using it to watch movies or game on, I was never left with a sense that I was using an inferior display, even though technically I was. 

It doesn’t quite reach the same brightness levels of the S26 series, but it’s still very bright, vivid and colour-rich, making it a joy to stream videos and get hooked into social media feeds on. The fact that it’s 6.7 inches diagonally helps too. It’s an expansive canvas with few noticeable weaknesses. 

Any weaknesses it does have only show in other areas. As an example, it can hit 120Hz refresh rates, meaning it can ramp up to be super smooth and sharp, even with quick animations. However, because it’s not an LTPO panel, it can’t adapt those refresh rates at small 1Hz increments like the top-tier phones. 

You might not notice it at all while watching video or even gaming, but you might notice it when moving quickly from a static page to a moving one. Like when you swipe quickly to go to the Home Screen from a browser page. Going from not moving, to moving, the display often leads to the odd frame drop and stuttering animation. It’s not horrendous, and maybe not even noticeable if you’re not used to the most premium devices on the market. 

This lack of ultra-adaptive refresh rate also affects the battery life. But I’ll get more into that later on. The short version of that takeaway is that the less efficient display means that if you use your phone a lot, you’ll drain the battery faster than you would with a more expensive Galaxy S-series phone. 

One other weakness in the display has nothing to do with the display itself, but rather with the fingerprint sensor built into it. Unlike the more premium models, it doesn’t have an ultrasonic sensor, but uses an optical one. And it’s not a great optical sensor, in my experience. It takes a comparatively long time to set up, and you have to hold your finger on it for a second or two before it registers. Plus, in my experience, the first attempt fails fairly frequently. 

There’s a possibility I’ve just become too accustomed to the high-end ultrasonic scanners on more premium devices, but I’ve also used mid-range devices with optical scanners that aren’t as slow and finicky as this one. 

Despite the minor compromises, however, I will say this: if your time is spent mostly on social media, YouTube and video watching or casual games, I think you’ll struggle to find a better display than the A57’s for that. It’s a really wonderful canvas for just about everything.  

Software 

• OneUI 8.5 based on Android 16
• Smattering of AI features, but not full Galaxy AI support
• Six years of OS upgrades

There’s not a huge amount to cover on the software side that hasn’t already been addressed in our other recent Samsung reviews. The One UI 8.5 version of Samsung’s Android skin is largely the same as what you’ll find on the Galaxy S26 series. 

That includes a smattering of AI features built into apps like the Gallery app for editing photos using voice dictation, or getting Bixby (Samsung’s oft-neglected built-in assistant) to change your phone settings for you. 

It does lack some of the features that require more power, though. You’re not going to get DeX, Samsung’s desktop-like interface for external monitors, as an example. The more proactive and pervasive system-wide AI features are also missing. Elements like ‘Now Nudge’ can remind you of upcoming appointments, but they lack the agentic feel of the built-in AI tools. 

Cameras 

• Three cameras, but includes a junk macro lens
• Solid performance, but can struggle with HDR processing
• No telephoto lens for zoom, but digital zoom is solid

It’s in the camera department that you start to see the obvious signs that we’re dealing with a mid-range phone. There are three cameras, as is fairly typical, but one of those is a low-resolution macro camera, which effectively acts as a backup lens for close-up photography. You do get an ultrawide lens as well as the main camera, alongside that macro camera. 

How well this camera serves you will likely depend on when you usually take photos, and in what conditions. Outside in bright daylight, it does a pretty good job of delivering sharp, bright and vibrant photographs. 

There’s a little over-sharpening and contrast boosting in the processing that makes images ‘pop’ on screen. Being critical, it can often appear overexposed, particularly in the brighter parts of the image, but that’s being quite nitpicky. 

It struggles at times with scenes where there’s bright backlighting and HDR needs to kick in, often leaving the shadowed foreground object a little too dark. On that note, there are times when shadowed areas in not-so-well-lit indoor scenes, or even grey clouds in the skies, can be a little grainy and noisy. 

One of the plus points is that the main sensor is large enough and pixel dense enough that you can punch in to 2x zoom and still get a pretty decent image that doesn’t obviously lack in sharpness.

It makes up for the lack of a dedicated zoom camera slightly, but putting it side-by-side with the Galaxy S26, with its 3x zoom camera, the A57 does struggle with anything beyond 2x zoom. Image quality falls away quite rapidly once you go above that 2x mark and, in my testing, really not worth going anywhere beyond 5x zoom. 

Indoors, away from super bright light sources, it does a decent job of capturing colour and detail. You will probably start seeing that aforementioned noise and grain in darker parts of the image, and see the camera struggle a bit with focusing, especially moving objects like Richard Parker – my pet cat. 

At night time, launching into the dedicated night mode can result in some bright, in-focus images. The primary camera is definitely stronger than the ultrawide, which can sometimes struggle to contain details in brighter parts of the image. But it’s hard to be too critical. The important thing to note is that regardless of the conditions, it’s possible to get a good enough image that you’d be happy to share on social media. 

Of course, it’s not as strong or versatile as phones that cost twice as much, but as I suspect anyone buying this will be happy enough with the results. 

As a video maker, the lack of 4K recording at 60fps was a tad disappointing. Shooting 4K at 30fps is okay, but I often found the footage a little grainy, lacking in sharpness and smoothness. Particularly when panning across a scene, there was some stuttering and a rolling shutter-like effect. Having to jump down to 1080p to get 60fps means you effectively have the choice between sharp footage or smooth footage; you can’t have both. So I’d say it’s definitely not the phone for wannabe content creators. 

Performance

• Mid-range Exynos 1680 power
• Can handle most daily tasks just fine
• Not quite powerful enough for high-res gaming

Performance, like cameras, is another area where you’ll see a difference between these mid-range phones and the top-tier models. But, just like the camera department, whether or not it’s got enough juice depends very much on what you do. 

For the most part, the experience of using the A57 is fluid and smooth. As mentioned when I was talking about the display, there’s a little bit of stutter and frame-dropping in the user interface when going between static and moving content on screen, but once it’s going, it’s responsive and quick. 

Inside, the phone has the Exynos 1680, which is a very middle-of-the-road type of processor. That said, it’s got enough grunt that it’ll handle most of your casual tasks easily enough.

Casual games aren’t a struggle at all, but I did notice it would often drop the resolution in some games to keep gameplay smooth. Mario Kart Tour, which has long been my go-to game on mobile, didn’t look as sharp as it does on more powerful phones. But, crucially, the gameplay isn’t hampered by frame-dropping at all, and so it feels pretty smooth. 

It’s a powerful enough chipset that it can also handle quite a lot of the AI-based tasks on the phone. Using Bixby to call up settings options wasn’t as snappy and instant as the S26, but it wasn’t too much of a hindrance either. 

As is always the case, tempering expectations is advised with performance. You’re not going to be able to play the highest fidelity games in their highest settings. If you did, you’d soon find the phone chugging to a halt. But if your game time mostly involves games like Block Blast, Mario Kart or something more casual, the A57 has more than enough grunt for those. 

Battery Life 

• Same 5000mAh battery as S26 Ultra
• One day for most users, but can squeeze more out
• Full charge in 75 minutes

Tempering expectations is also advised with the battery. Samsung advertises this phone as having a two-day battery, and whether or not that’s achievable very much depends on your screen time and the type of phone user you are. But, for busy power users, I think you’ll get one full day, not two. 

When the screen’s on, even playing the casual games I mentioned before, the battery seems to drain a little quicker than the more powerful S26 models, even the smallest one, which has a smaller battery. My suspicion is that because it can’t drop as low as 1Hz on static pages, and is at a minimum of 60Hz all the time, it uses a lot more energy to power that display. Especially considering how bright it is. 

On my lighter days (I’m a pretty light user already) I could make it last two days. But that’s true of most phones these days. It’s very conservative with battery use in standby mode with the always-on display disabled, so if your screen use is 2-3 hours a day and mostly low-intensity tasks, I think two days might just be possible. 

Charging speeds when empty are fast enough to be convenient, but not market-leading. A full charge takes about 75 minutes, but you can get 50% topped up in 25 minutes in those times when you’ve run empty and you’re in a rush to get out again. You just need to make sure you have a compatible 45W charger to get those speeds.

Should you buy it?

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