Samsung Galaxy A14 5G review

The Galaxy A14 5G's 90Hz LCD is okay

The Galaxy A14 5G is equipped with a 6.6-inch LCD - no AMOLED for this one. It's a FullHD panel, though, so it's not all compromise. The resolution is 1080x2408px (yes, 8 extra) in a 20:9 aspect ratio, working out to a pixel density of 400ppi.

In our brightness testing, the A14 was good for 519nits - that's both when operating the slider manually and when it's the Adaptive brightness in charge (there's no boost under bright light).

Since it's not an OLED display, there's some illumination when displaying black. Contrast ratio works out to 1334:1, a fairly standard value for recent Samsung LCDs, which is bested by some competitors. Still, there are no dramatic contrast shifts when viewing at an angle, and remains usable outdoors in bright light as well. Naturally, there's no competing with OLEDs for contrast and some rivaling OLEDs can also beat the A14 when it comes to nits too.

There are no color modes on the Galaxy A14. The panel covers the sRGB color space and goes just a bit wider than that. It's not particularly accurate though, and there's a significant blue shift to white and the entire grayscale range.

The Motion smoothness menu gives you two options for refresh rate - Adaptive and Standard. Standard is the 60Hz-all-the-time option, while Adaptive is a fancy way of saying that the A14 will operate at 90Hz while you're touching it and dial down to 60Hz after a couple of seconds of inactivity, almost regardless of what's being displayed on the screen. That said, we did also get constant 90Hz in games (arcade ones line Pac Man and 1945 Air Force, but also Dead Trigger 2), which is really nice, even though the phone doesn't have all the GPU power in the world.

Samsung Galaxy A14 5G battery life

You get a 5,000mAh battery inside the Galaxy A14 5G, as 8 out of 10 smartphones on sale today (entirely made up statistic, but it can't be far off). We expected to see similar endurance to the A22 5G we reviewed a while back, given the combination of display, battery, and chipset. That's more or less what got, only slightly better across the board - is that Android 13 vs. Android 11 at play?

The A14 5G was good for 31:35h of talk time (29:00h on the old model), and there was an improvement in standby of about the same magnitude. We got an hour extra in video playback - 16:42h, and the most significant bump is in web browsing where the A14 was good for 19:29h. All those small increases combine into an overall Endurance rating of 130h.

Our battery tests were automated thanks to SmartViser, using its viSerDevice app. The endurance rating denotes how long the battery charge will last you if you use the device for an hour of telephony, web browsing, and video playback daily. More details can be found here.

Video test carried out in 60Hz refresh rate mode whenever possible. Web browsing test done at the display's highest refresh rate whenever possible. Refer to the respective reviews for specifics. To adjust the endurance rating formula to match your own usage - check out our all-time battery test results chart.

It's worth noting here, once again, that we're testing the US version of the Galaxy A14 5G with a Dimensity 700 chipset. The Exynos one that India is getting may be performing differently from an endurance standpoint.

Charging speed

The Galaxy A14 is rated for 15W charging. Since it comes with no adapter in the box, we used a trusty 25W Samsung unit that's the default option for higher-specced Galaxies and should be good enough to max out the A14's capabilities. Our power meter peaked at 13W, which is close enough.

Charging speed is what we'd call slow, even for the class. It charged 30% in 30min, and it took 2:22h for the battery to reach 100%. We have tested some budget devices that charge slower than the A14, but some competitors will beat these results comfortably.

Speaker test

The Galaxy A14 has a single speaker on the bottom, while quite a few of potential competitors have a stereo setup, even in this price range. Samsung's most affordable handset with stereo speakers is the A33 5G, which is some 35-40% more expensive than the A14.

Anyway, the A14 earned a 'Good' rating for loudness in our testing - not too shabby, in fact, in comparison to other models in the lower end of the A-series. Sound quality is pretty decent too, if not impressive in any way - there's little in the way of bass, but vocals and treble sound nice and clear.

Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.