Samsung Galaxy A34 review

Bigger, faster AMOLED display

The Galaxy A34 has a large and spacious 6.6-inch display at its disposal. That makes it bigger than last year's A33 at 6.4 inches, the Galaxy A54 at 6.4 inches, and the A53 at 6.5 inches. It is a FullHD+ panel with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels - slightly less than last year, but with a new 19.5:9 aspect ratio. We like the slightly wider and less tall aspect Samsung is going for in this generation, though that is a matter of personal taste.

The 120Hz Super AMOLED panel on the Galaxy A34 performs decently well. In our testing, it managed a decent, though fairly low maximum brightness of 476 nits on the slider. A number that can, however, boost all the way up to a very good 1009 nits with automatic brightness enabled and in bright ambient lighting conditions. The Galaxy A34 is perfectly usable outdoors.

The Galaxy A34 does very well with color accuracy. It has two color modes. The default Vivid mode aims towards the DCI-P3 color space and covers it fairly well, though with a slight blue tint. You can correct for it using the included color temperature slider and get deltaE values close to what we consider color-accurate.

If color accuracy is what you are after, you should go for the natural display mode instead. It covers the sRGB color space nearly perfectly with deltaE values low enough to be considered color-accurate.

Display color settings

The Galaxy A34 lacks HDR support on its display. There is no HDR decoder on board the device either. On the plus side, the Galaxy A34 has the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification. This allows services like Netflix to offer up FullHD streams and saturate the phone's resolution.

Widevine • HDR support • Netflix playback capabilities

High refresh rate handling

The Galaxy A34 has a 120Hz refresh rate, which is up from last year's 90Hz and great to see. However, the phone has pretty much no automatic refresh rate handling to speak of. In the display settings, you will find two options for refresh rate - Standard and High.

Display refresh rate settings

Both of these actually act like hard toggles. That is to say that once you select 120Hz, the phone runs at 120Hz with practically no exceptions. There are no extra modes the phone can switch down to, like 90Hz or even 60Hz. The UI and apps and games, with very few exceptions like Google Maps, just stay locked at 120Hz.

Galaxy A34 working at 120Hz

This includes things like video playback, which is also done at 120Hz instead of the much more efficient 60Hz that many other high refresh rate phones automatically trigger. There is no system in place to detect an idling static image on screen and lower the refresh rate either.

The only way to lower the refresh rate is by manually switching over to the 60Hz mode.

Galaxy A34 working at 60Hz

This lack of any form of automatic switching is a bit perplexing and kind of wasteful in certain scenarios. On the plus side, you can rest assured that the high refresh rate mode always means exactly 120Hz. This is kind of convenient for high refresh rate gaming and takes away a lot of the wondering. We tried a few titles that we know can push past the 60fps mark, and most worked well, making use of the high refresh rate on the Galaxy A34.

High refresh rate gaming on the Galaxy A34

All things considered, we will have to dock some points here due to the total lack of refresh rate automatic behavior on the Galaxy A34. It's not a major deal by any means, but it is still worth mentioning.

Battery life

The Galaxy A34 has a sizeable 5,000 mAh battery, the same as last year's model. The Dymensity 1080 has had a somewhat spotty track history in our testing, scoring amazingly well inside the Realme 10 Pro+ but disappointing in both the Redmi Note 12 Pro and Pro+.

We are happy to say that with 133 hours of endurance in our proprietary test, the Galaxy A34 has stellar battery life. It performed very well across the board in both on-screen and off-screen tests.

We were particularly impressed with how well the phone handled itself during the web browsing test, which, as per our testing protocol, was done at its maximum 120Hz refresh rate.

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. 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 patterns check out our all-time battery test results chart where you can also find all phones we've tested.

Charging

Update, Apr 12: We've updated the charging results below based on further testing.

The Galaxy A34 is not a particularly fast-charging device. Still, it keeps up with its peers well-enough. It's charging speed with a Samsung 25W PD+PPS adapter is about what we have come to expect in recent years. It should be noted that the Galaxy A54, which we also reviewed recently, charges noticeably quicker for some reason.

The Galaxy A34 went from dead to 27% in 15 minutes, then 49% in 30 minutes. A full charge took just shy of an hour and a half.

Loudspeakers

The Galaxy A34 has a hybrid stereo speaker setup. One dedicated speaker is on the bottom of the phone, and an amplified earpiece handles the other channel. Naturally, this means that the balance between the two isn't great. The bottom speaker is definitely louder and clearer. However, the stereo effect the two produce together is pretty convincing and pleasant to actually use for multimedia consumption.

In terms of loudness, the A34 scored a "GOOD" rating in our proprietary test. The actual quality of the sound is also very good. There is no noticeable distortion, even at high volumes, and the sound stage is fairly rich. The mid-tones could have been presented a bit better, but the highs sound great, and there is even some bass.

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.