Cheap phones are have a moment. For the first time, you can pay just $ 250 for a smartphone and expect it to receive security updates four years. You’ll find smooth performance that can crush most smartphone tasks, even games, and capture nice photos that won’t make you want to take your eyes off them. This has been my experience with the Samsung Galaxy A13 5G.
This Android phone may not look great – its plastic construction looks cheap and attracts so many fingerprints, but I’ve been using it for almost a month with no issues. If you hate spending money on a phone and you don’t mind having the best cameras, the A13 5G has the basics at a very low price.
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For cheap phones, you need at least one device that can run all your favorite apps and games without too much fuss or delay. The Mediatek Dimensity 700 processor inside the Galaxy A13 5G is successful here. Apps open relatively quickly, switching between them is fast, and I’ve rarely seen this phone slow down. Even games like Nails forever i Dead cells it works admirably on the device.
There’s a 5,000 mAh battery cell that keeps the A13 5G running for more than a full day. If you’re conservative enough, you can take two full days out of this phone, but most of the time I ended up with a day and a half of battery life. Like most cheap phones, there is no wireless charging and don’t expect it to recharge 100 percent quickly.
You only get 64 gigabytes of storage, which is the lowest for a phone at this price, but there’s a MicroSD card slot that allows you to expand that space if you need more. Other benefits include NFC so you can make contactless payments with Google Pay (in my opinion, a must on any phone), a power button that works as a fingerprint sensor, and a headphone jack.
Samsung’s software interface isn’t as simple as you’d find on phones like the Moto G Stylus 2022 or the OnePlus Nord N20 5G, and there are many Samsung apps, but you can uninstall many and still have many. customization. Samsung has an edge over its peers in terms of software support: it promises two operating system updates and four years of security updates. No other phone in this price range is approaching. (The A13 5G was launched on Android 11, but has already been upgraded to Android 12 and will also get Android 13.)
The screen is one of the few parts of this phone that is disappointing. It is a low resolution LCD panel with a screen refresh rate of 90 Hz. Of course, the interaction with the screen feels pretty smooth. But if you look closely, things can look blurry. This did not affect my experience with the phone much, but it did affect the low brightness of the screen. It can be hard to read the screen when you’re outdoors in direct sunlight, and it doesn’t help that Samsung’s auto-brightness feature is slow to adjust. Most of the time, I had to manually set the screen brightness.
The camera system will not win any prizes either. Don’t be fooled by the three-camera array. It is a 50 megapixel main camera combined with a 2 megapixel macro camera and a 2 megapixel depth camera. The latter is only useful for enhancing photos in portrait mode with a more precise blur effect, and I’ve rarely found the need for the macro camera (which allows you to take photos of very close-up objects).