Samsung Galaxy A23 5G review

Design, build quality, handling

All recent Galaxy A and Galaxy S phones are lookalikes, which is quite nice. Samsung has made one stylish shell, beautiful in its simplicity because of the one-piece rear panel, without a separate camera tile to interrupt the seamless design.

The Galaxy A23 5G has a flat Gorilla Glass 5 sheet to keep its display safe. The plastic frame is thick, also made of plastic, and slightly curved. And then, there is the plastic back with a matte finish.

Fingerprints and smudges do stick on the back of our black model, and if that bothers you, we suggest exploring the rest of the color options - white, peach, and blue. They also accumulate nasty stuff over time, but it's just not visible because of the lighter hues.

The Galaxy A23 5G does not feature any sort of ingress protection. This year Samsung is offering the IP67 rating down to the Galaxy A33.

And now, let's take a closer look at the Galaxy A23 5G.

The front is home to the 6.6-inch PLS LCD screen of extended 1080p resolution. It's the same size and resolution as the Galaxy A23 4G, with the droplet-shaped notch included. But the refresh rate has gone from 90Hz up to 120Hz, probably enabled by the new faster hardware.

The screen seems bright enough and with punchy colors, but we will talk about these in a bit.

There is a noticeable chin below the screen, and the size of the other bezels could be more minimalistic. But for a rather cheap smartphone and one with an LCD screen, these are perfectly fine.

The earpiece is above the display notch, behind a razor-thin outlet. There is no visible grille.

The back of the Galaxy A23 5G is a familiar affair, a seamless piece of plastic that has a small bump for its quad-camera setup. Here you can spot the 5MP ultrawide cam, the 50MP primary, the 2MP depth sensor and next to them are the 2MP macro camera and the single-LED flash.

We are fond of this design, and we like that Samsung has made it standard for most of its recent phones. This way, you get their best design from the flagship to the midrange phone.

The Galaxy A23 5G offers a tri-card slot that can take two nano-SIMs and a microSD card. It's on the left side.

The volume and the power/lock keys are on the right. The surface of the lock key also accommodates the fingerprint scanner - it's always-on, satisfyingly fast and with great accuracy.

There is a lonely microphone at the top of the A23 5G.

The primary mic is at the bottom, together with the USB-C port, the loudspeaker, and the 3.5mm audio jack.

The Galaxy A23 5G measures 165.4 x 76.9 x 8.4 mm and weighs 197g - that's the same as the Galaxy A23 and the Galaxy A13 phones. The 6.4-inch Galaxy A33 5G is slightly shorter and lighter, though.

Our experience while handling the Galaxy A23 5G is positive - it's a solid and well-built smartphone, one that offers a secure grip and feels safe in hand. We didn't feel we needed a case for protection or for improving the grip.