Samsung Galaxy A54 long-term review

Performance, smoothness

The Galaxy A54 is the choppiest, laggiest phone we've reviewed long-term in a long time. It actually reminds us a lot of a non-Pro Redmi Note from a few years ago. It just doesn't seem like its chipset was chosen for any reasons having to do with performance, smoothness, or the ability to handle a lot of things on a day to day basis.

Instead, it feels like Samsung knew it was cheaper to buy these from its own shelves than go to Qualcomm or MediaTek, which is fine in principle, but this chip is much more fitting of a handset that would cost half of what the A54 is even currently going for. At such a price, we'd praise it. At the A54's price, it's its biggest downside, and by quite some margin.

It's not unusable, far from it, but it's so much laggier and choppier than, for example, the Poco F5 that we've recently reviewed long-term, that it's been hard to wrap our heads around the fact that two similarly priced devices can perform so differently in this area. Microstutters show up at the randomest of times, and if you try to heavily multitask, you'll definitely know how much of a struggle that is for the Exynos 1380.

Again, this chip would be praiseworthy on a device going for half the A54's price. But in this range, it's just not good enough, especially in late 2023, and especially considering that this is Samsung's best selling model. As for the smoothness rating, this is the least smooth phone we've reviewed long-term in the past two years. It takes that unfortunate cake for sure.

That said, bear in mind that due to the insane number of mid-range and entry-level phones out there, we can only long-term review a select few each year, so we're definitely not saying this one is the least smooth of all of those out there in the market. Just out of everything we tried long-term.

Given that very important caveat, perhaps it's most fitting to compare with the Poco F5, since these two are quite close to each other, price-wise. And in terms of performance and smoothness, it's no contest, the Poco wins by a mile. That said, performance and smoothness aren't everything, so we'll compare things a bit more in-depth in the Conclusion of this review.

Battery life, charging

Battery life on the A54 has been outstanding. It's the best battery life we've gotten from any phone we've reviewed long term in recent times, and while it's not a lot better than most of the ones we graded 'great', the difference is still pretty obvious in day to day life. Perhaps this is the one redeeming feature of this chipset, then.

With our use case detailed below, we never needed a midday top-up during our time with the A54. Not once. And when we did finish our 12-16 hour days off the charger, we were generally left with a generous serving of battery capacity still in the tank. Based on that, we'd say that the maximum screen on time we could theoretically reach with our use would be at a minimum 8 hours, and 9 hours seems very reachable too. That is - let's say it again - outstanding.

Battery life snapshots

Now, the fact that the battery lasts so much partly alleviates the lack of fast charging. Sure, Samsung calls its thing 'fast', but in this day and age, that's more funny than accurate, considering what the A54's competitors are capable of. The A54 isn't horribly slow, mind you, at just over an hour to go from zero to hero, but it definitely isn't winning any awards. You also have to provide your own charger, because Samsung wants to save the planet one profit increase at a time.

Our use case involves mostly Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, about an hour or so on 5G, Bluetooth and location always on, about an hour or two of listening to music or podcasts via TWS earbuds, around an hour of phone calls also via TWS earbuds, and about 30 minutes of GPS navigation through Waze. The usual caveats apply: if your use case is much heavier than ours, with more time spent on mobile data, and especially in areas with spotty connectivity, then your screen on time numbers will definitely be lower than ours.