Easy to like, harder to justify

The Samsung Galaxy A57 5G is the most expensive phone in the Galaxy A series for 2026, and the A series has been the highest-selling Android lineup year after year. The Galaxy A5x phones sit squarely between Samsung’s budget options and the flagship S series, aiming to strike the right balance between value and the convenience features people actually care about.

When I received the Galaxy A57 5G for review, I was just about to leave for a trip to Seattle. Instead of easing into the review slowly, I pulled my SIM out of my Galaxy Z Fold 7, the most expensive phone Samsung sells in the US, and dropped it into the $550 A57 5G. The plan was to swap back when I got home.

That was a month ago. The SIM is still in the A57 5G, which probably tells you how much I liked it. But the more time I spent with the phone, the more I’ve noticed its imperfections.

The first thing anyone notices about the Galaxy A57 5G, and the thing I like most about it, is the build. Specifically, how thin and light it is. At 161.5 x 76.8 x 6.9mm and 179g, the A57 5G is 20g lighter and 0.6mm thinner than the A56 5G, and slimmer than most phones in this price range. Everyone I handed it to during my trip had the same reaction: a quick look at the back, followed by some version of, “Wait, this doesn’t feel like a real phone.”

The best part is that Samsung hasn’t used plastic to get there. It’s a proper glass-and-metal build, and it feels right up there with flagship devices. In fact, the in-hand feel convinced me to use it without a case. That was a decision I regretted approximately one day into the trip, when the phone slid off my lap as I was getting out of the car. I picked it up expecting the worst, but the A57 5G was basically unscathed.

Naturally, I ended up repeating this very scientific experiment several more times during my trip. The phone is really slippery, and ended up facing about half a dozen drops from 3-4 feet onto marble floors, tarmac, and hardwood (really hoping my boss isn’t reading this (how many times?! — ed.)). To my surprise (and relief), though, the front and back glass have stayed completely intact, with just some minor scuffs to the aluminum frame. Samsung’s using Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on both sides, and clearly it’s earning its keep.

The A57 5G also gains IP68 dust and water resistance this year, up from IP67 on the A56 5G. That extra digit means it’s now tested for immersion at 1.5 meters for 30 minutes, up from one meter. I didn’t run any pool tests, but you can confidently expect it to handle spills, rain, and the occasional dunk in a sink.

The phone comes in four colors: Navy, Icy Blue, Gray, and Lilac. Samsung’s US website only lists the Navy option. I have the Gray unit, and I’ll just say it: I hate this color. It’s the kind of joyless, do-nothing gray that makes the phone look invisible. The glossy back also picks up smudges easily; a frosted matte finish would have looked far better, but I’m guessing Samsung wants to keep some visual distance between the A series and its flagship S phones.

Samsung has dropped the individual circular cutouts of recent A series phones and gone back to a vertical pill-shaped camera island that looks like a budget Samsung phone from the late 2010s. The rest of the design is pretty standard. Power button and volume rocker on the right edge, both nice and clicky. One nano-SIM slot with eSIM support, no microSD.

The in-display fingerprint scanner is quick and reliable nine times out of ten, though I do wish Samsung had placed it a little higher up on the screen. No headphone jack, in case you were wondering, and at this point, I don’t think anyone reasonably expects one.

The Galaxy A57 5G has a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with a 1,080 x 2,340 resolution, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and HDR10+ support. Samsung has trimmed the bezels significantly this year, and if it weren’t for the slightly thicker chin, the other three sides would feel right at home on a flagship. Watching content is genuinely enjoyable, with the vibrant, punchy colors Samsung’s AMOLED panels are known for.

The multimedia experience is helped by the phone’s stereo speakers, with the earpiece doubling as the second channel. They aren’t flagship-grade, but they’re good enough that I never felt like I was using a cheap phone. Plenty loud, a bit of body to the sound, and no harsh distortion at higher volumes. Calls came through clearly on both the earpiece and loudspeaker, even in noisier environments.

Samsung claims the display can reach 1,200 nits in high-brightness mode, with a peak of 1,900 nits, and in regular use, I had no complaints. The screen was easy to read indoors and outdoors alike.

But then I went hiking in Olympic National Park. We pulled up to the trailhead, I got out of the car, and the A57 5G’s screen was essentially unreadable in direct sunlight. My first thought was that Samsung had oversold the brightness, but then I noticed the phone was warm. The culprit was Android Auto. I had been using the A57 5G for navigation on the drive in, and the phone had quietly throttled its max brightness to deal with the heat.

This wasn’t a one-off either. Over the course of the trip, the screen turned unreasonably dim three or four more times, almost always during or right after a long Android Auto session. This kind of throttling isn’t abnormal, but the frequency at which it happened was — I’ll get into the phone’s thermal behavior in detail in the performance section.

There’s also an always-on display option for glanceable notifications. I keep it off on every Samsung phone I use, but it’s there and works as you’d expect.

The Galaxy A57 5G comes in 128GB and 256GB variants in the US, with no microSD option, so pick carefully at checkout. My 128GB unit had just about 105GB free out of the box, and I learned that the hard way when I tried to transfer data from the Fold 7, and the A57 5G didn’t have enough room for my WhatsApp backup. That’s mostly the fault of 15 years of family WhatsApp groups sending daily good morning messages, but the point stands: 105GB isn’t much in 2026, and you’ll have to rely on cloud storage if you plan to keep the phone for a few years.

Inside, you get 8GB of RAM and the new Exynos 1680 chipset. On paper, it’s a minor update over the Exynos 1580 in the A56, with the same CPU cores and just one core shuffled from the efficiency cluster to the performance cluster. Benchmarks land it right around the competition, though you can clearly see the Galaxy S25 FE pulling ahead.

How is the phone in real-world use, though? Honestly, better than I expected. Coming from the Z Fold 7, I was almost expecting to feel frustrated by the A57 5G’s performance, but that didn’t happen. In regular use, the A57 5G can feel perfectly fine. Apps open quickly enough, scrolling is smooth, and switching between everyday apps usually does not feel like a problem. For long stretches, the phone does a good job convincing you that it is not much of a downgrade from something more expensive.

The illusion does break, though, and almost always under heat. Use the phone outdoors on a sunny day, in the car, or with Android Auto running, and the Exynos chip pretty clearly starts struggling with thermals. I was walking around San Francisco trying to record a selfie video when my phone started taking 2-3 seconds to register my taps. The video itself came out stuttery. And this wasn’t a hot day; it was 70°F out.

It got worse than that, too. Just yesterday, I plugged the A57 5G into wired Android Auto, and the phone became almost completely unresponsive. It kept dropping the Android Auto connection on its own, like it physically couldn’t keep up. Even after I unplugged it, the A57 5G took 5-6 seconds to open the most basic apps for a full 20 minutes after.

Even outside those Auto-adjacent moments, there were too many smaller reminders that this is a mid-range chip. I had days where typing would suddenly lag behind for a second or two, or the camera app would take an extra beat to respond. I also noticed the phone sometimes felt slightly warm when I picked it up in the morning, even before I had really started using it. On those mornings, it already felt sluggish.

I have seen similar behavior on older Exynos-powered Samsung flagships, and none of this was bad enough to make me give up on the A57 5G. Most casual users will probably think it feels smooth enough on a normal day, but I would definitely worry about how this phone will feel two or three years from now.

Gaming is a similar story. The A57 5G can run most graphics-heavy titles, but it isn’t powerful enough for a consistent high-fps experience. I played a few sessions of PUBG Mobile, and while the phone doesn’t get scorching, 30 minutes of sustained gameplay leaves it noticeably warm and visibly throttled.

The Galaxy A57 5G ships with Android 16 and One UI 8.5 on top. The latter is Samsung’s newest software skin, the one that debuted with the Galaxy S26 series, and as of writing, my Z Fold 7 doesn’t even have it yet. Visually, it’s not a dramatic departure from One UI 8, but it genuinely feels like Samsung has figured out how to make its skin feel light and nimble for the first time in years.

Menus are clean, animations feel smooth, and the phone rarely feels bogged down by the software itself. You get good customization options, Edge Panels, Modes and Routines, Samsung Wallet, Secure Folder, Link to Windows, and Samsung’s usual suite of first-party apps. If you’ve used a Samsung phone in the last few years, you’ll feel right at home within minutes, with a little less friction.

What you do not get is the full flagship feature set. Samsung DeX is missing, so you cannot connect the A57 5G to a monitor and use it as a desktop.

The same applies to Galaxy AI. The A57 5G does not get the full range of AI features found on Samsung’s flagship phones, but it does include a handful under Samsung’s “Intelligent features” branding. Best Face lets you pick a better expression from motion photos, AI Select can capture parts of the screen and offer context-aware suggestions, and you can create custom camera filters based on existing images. Object Eraser is also here for cleaning up photos.

The biggest software win is support. Samsung promises six years of major OS upgrades and security updates for the Galaxy A57 5G, which is genuinely impressive and one of the strongest reasons to consider the phone in the first place.

The Galaxy A5x series’ 5,000 mAh battery has remained unchanged for approximately forever, but it’s enough to comfortably get through a full day of heavy use. Throughout the trip and the weeks after, I consistently got 5.5 to 6 hours of screen-on time before the phone dipped below 15%. It’s not quite a two-day phone, but it’s the kind of battery life that kept my battery anxiety in check even when I left the house at less than 100%.

Charging is handled via a 45W wired connection with a USB Power Delivery charger, taking the A57 5G from zero to full in just under an hour and 15 minutes. A 30-minute top-up gets you to about 60%, which is great. There’s no wireless charging here, which isn’t unusual at this price, though it’s worth pointing out that Google’s Pixel A series phones include it.

Samsung clearly put work into other parts of the A57 5G, but the cameras don’t seem to have gotten the same love. You get a 50MP main shooter and a 12MP ultrawide on the back. There’s also a 5MP macro camera, just so Samsung can say this phone has three rear cameras. If Samsung actually wanted you to use it, it would have improved the macro over the last six or seven generations, or at least added autofocus. Just use the main camera’s zoomed-in shots for close-ups and pretend the macro sensor isn’t there, as I did.

If you want to check out all my samples in full resolution, you can see them all in this folder.

The ultrawide camera is more useful, but only in good lighting. Anything less than that, and photos quickly turn soft and noisy. The ultrawide video is worse, with softer detail and colors that don’t match the main camera well. While walking through the rainforests in Olympic National Park, I switched to the ultrawide hoping to capture the scale of the trees, and immediately regretted it.

The 50MP main camera and 12MP selfie camera do most of the heavy lifting, and they do it well. Without pixel peeping, almost every photo I took with the A57 5G came out looking great. The phone handles high-dynamic-range situations confidently, Samsung’s signature punchy colors give every shot a pop, and there’s plenty of detail in well-lit scenes. The main camera also holds up better than I expected in low light, producing usable shots with good color and controlled noise.

Human subjects look good too, with close-to-accurate skin tones and good detail. Portrait mode works well nine times out of ten, with good background blur, though I did notice the phone stumbling with subject detection at times. I’m glad Samsung lets you shoot 2x portraits with the main camera; they’re slightly softer but still good enough for social media.

As for video recording, the quality is good, with solid dynamic range and the same pleasing color treatment, but it’s getting a little tiring to see only 30fps at 4K (1080p does get to 60fps) from both the main and selfie cameras.

One thing the image quality can’t hide is that the camera app itself feels held back by the processor. Switching between lenses takes an extra second or two, and while the shutter is generally quick enough, you can tell you’re using a mid-ranger and not a flagship.

The Galaxy A57 5G has me conflicted because there is so much about it that I genuinely like. It is thin, light, well-built, comfortable to use, and easily one of the nicest mid-range phones I’ve held in years. The display is great, the main camera takes photos I’d happily post, the battery comfortably lasts a full day, and One UI 8.5 runs lighter than any version of Samsung’s skin has in years. Even after switching from the Z Fold 7, I never felt desperate to move my SIM back. That says a lot.

But the A57 5G also leaves a few obvious upgrades on the table. A more capable processor would have fixed half the complaints in this review on its own, including the thermals, the stutters, and the camera app’s occasional lag. The ultrawide camera could have used a real upgrade, and the macro camera just deserves a quiet retirement. Wireless charging would have been nice, too.

None of these is an obvious dealbreaker. The biggest problem with recommending the Galaxy A57 5G is Samsung’s own Galaxy S25 FE ($534.99 at Samsung). It has significantly more power, a dedicated telephoto lens, wireless charging, and the badge of being part of Samsung’s flagship lineup. Even at MSRP, it’s only $100 more than the A57 5G, and it’s already been going on sale for the same price as the A57 5G, and sometimes even less.

If you want something smaller, the superb Pixel 10a ($499 at Amazon) offers the full Google Pixel experience for slightly less. It runs an older but still flagship-grade Tensor chip, includes wireless charging, has one of the best point-and-shoot cameras in any price range, and gets seven years of software updates — one year more than Samsung’s phone. What you give up is the bigger display (though you might prefer the compact size), the faster wired charging, and the thin profile of the A57 5G.

So, should you buy the Galaxy A57 5G? I don’t think anyone buying it would walk away unhappy, especially if you can find it discounted to $500 or below. At full price, though, I’m not sure who should pick the A57 5G over the S25 FE or the cheaper Pixel 10a.

The real kicker is that all of these complaints are identical to what we said about the Galaxy A56 5G less than six months ago. So while the A57 5G does most things well, the moments it doesn’t are the kind that tend to multiply with age, and Samsung is well overdue to give its top A series phone a true upgrade.