Cheap telephones are having a moment. For the primary time, you may pay a mere $250 for a smartphone and anticipate it to obtain safety updates for 4 years. You’ll discover clean efficiency that may crush most smartphone duties, even gaming, and seize agreeable pictures that gained’t make you wish to gouge your eyes out. That’s been my expertise with Samsung’s Galaxy A13 5G.
This Android telephone won’t look all that nice—its plasticky construct feels low-cost and attracts so many fingerprints—however I’ve used it for almost a month with hardly a hiccup. If you hate spending cash on a telephone and don’t care to have the perfect cameras, the A13 5G has the fundamentals down for a really low value.
A+ Phone
For low-cost telephones, you on the very least want a tool that may run your entire favourite apps and video games with out an excessive amount of stuttering or lag. The Mediatek Dimensity 700 processor contained in the Galaxy A13 5G succeeds right here. Apps open comparatively rapidly, switching between them is snappy, and I’ve hardly ever seen this telephone decelerate. Even video games like Pako Forever and Dead Cells carried out admirably on the machine.
There’s a 5,000-mAh battery cell that retains the A13 5G chugging alongside for greater than a full day. If you’re conservative sufficient, you will get two full days out of this telephone, however more often than not I ended up with a full day and a half of battery life. Like most inexpensive telephones, there’s no wi-fi charging, and don’t anticipate it to recharge to one hundred pc rapidly.
You solely get 64 gigs of storage, which is on the low aspect for a telephone at this value, however there’s a MicroSD card slot that allows you to broaden that area for those who want extra. Other perks embody NFC so you can also make contactless funds with Google Pay (essential on any telephone, in my view), an influence button that doubles as a fingerprint sensor, and a headphone jack.
Samsung’s software program interface isn’t so simple as you’d discover on telephones just like the Moto G Stylus 2022 or OnePlus Nord N20 5G—and there are loads of Samsung apps—however you may uninstall lots of them, and there’s nonetheless a great deal of customization. Samsung has a leg up on its friends with regards to software program assist: It guarantees two OS upgrades and 4 years of safety updates. No different telephone on this value vary comes shut. (The A13 5G launched on Android 11 however has already been up to date to Android 12, and it’ll get Android 13 as properly.)
The display screen is likely one of the few elements of this telephone that’s disappointing. It’s a low-res LCD panel with a 90-Hz screen refresh rate. Sure, interacting with the show feels pretty clean. But for those who look intently, issues can seem fuzzy. This didn’t tremendously have an effect on my expertise utilizing the telephone, however the poor display screen brightness did. It may be exhausting to learn the display screen once you’re outside in direct daylight, and it doesn’t assist that Samsung’s auto-brightness characteristic is gradual to regulate. Most of the time, I needed to manually set the display screen brightness.
The digital camera system gained’t win any awards both. Don’t be fooled by the triple-camera array. It’s a 50-megapixel most important digital camera paired with a 2-megapixel macro and 2-megapixel depth digital camera. The latter is simply helpful for bettering portrait mode pictures with a extra correct blur impact, and I’ve hardly ever discovered a necessity for the macro digital camera (which helps you to take super-close-up pictures of objects).