Samsung Galaxy M53 review

6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED with 120Hz refresh rate

The Galaxy M53 maintains a slight edge over the A53 when it comes to display size - it stands at 6.7 inches in diagonal, compared to the 6.5 inches of the higher-end model - same as last year then. The panel is branded Super AMOLED Plus and has a 1080x2400px resolution and a 120Hz maximum refresh rate.

We measured just over 800nits of maximum brightness in bright ambient conditions with the adaptive brightness enabled and 403nits when operating the slider manually. These are pretty great numbers for a handset in this class, though the A53's 30-ish extra nits do award it the bragging rights.

Color handling is implemented in the usual Samsung way. There are two modes - Vivid and Natural, the first one being the default. In Vivid mode you get a five-position temperature slider as well as RGB sliders behind an 'Advanced settings' button. This Vivid mode supports a wide color gamut and is fairly accurate for displaying DCI-P3 content, though we did measure slightly higher deviations from the targets than we did on the older model. The all too typical faint blue tint can be overcome by nudging the temp slider in the warm direction.

Natural mode was similarly not quite as accurate for displaying sRGB content as was the M52, but was still closer to the targets for our test swatches than Vivid was for DCI-P3.

Samsung makes no claims for HDR capability on the Galaxy M53 and HDR checker apps list no HDR support whatsoever - the M52 would at least play HDR in YouTube, but not the M53. The Widevine L1 certification does mean you can get FullHD resolution in Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

You get the usual Motion smoothness menu item in display settings for enabling the 120Hz refresh rate. The Standard options delivers 60Hz across the board, as expected.

The High setting, conversely, pretty much locks things at 120Hz - there's no adaptive activity-based switching of any sort. That means that even for video playback you'd be getting the full 120Hz (in the Gallery, YouTube, Netflix, Google Photos - everywhere, basically), which is hardly ideal in terms of battery life. The actual renderer will render things at different fps depending on content, but the screen will refresh at 120Hz anyway. The usual exceptions apply as well - the camera viewfinder and Google Maps do force a switch to 60Hz.

What's most admirable is that the M53 does allow for high frame rate gaming and will keep the display at 120Hz for games that can go beyond 60fps, only leaving it up to GPU's performance to limit the frame count.

Samsung Galaxy M53 battery life

The Galaxy M53 has a 5,000mAh battery inside - same as on the M52, but a far cry from the 7,000mAh of the M51. With the A53 now at 5,000mAh too (the A52 bunch had 4,500mAh power packs), the M model has lost this nominal advantage as well.

It still maintains an edge in some areas though. In our testing, the M53 was good for 14 hours of Wi-Fi web browsing (at a constant 120Hz) which is more than an hour on top of the A53's result. The 20:45h of looping videos offline (at 60Hz) is slightly better than the A53's number too. The M53 wasn't quite as good at voice call longevity, but the 27:31h result isn't half bad either.

The overall Endurance rating of the Galaxy M53 adds up to 114h - not as good as the M52, but respectable nonetheless. Obviously, the 156h result of the M51 is no longer possible.

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 - check out our all-time battery test results chart.

Charging speed

There's no charger inside the Galaxy M53's box, a reality we'll have to learn to live with. We do have a standard 25W Samsung adapter which is what the M53 is rated for so we tested the phone's charging speed with that one.

We measured 1:33h for a full charge from flat and the battery indicator was showing 44% at the half-hour mark. Charging power peaked at a little over 20W. That's what you can reasonably expect to get with pretty much any recent adapter that adheres to the USB Power Delivery standard. If you have one of the older 15W Samsung adapters lying around, you'd be looking at longer charging times, though we didn't have one for testing.

The M53 is more or less as quick to charge as the A53, with the A33 somewhat quicker. The A52 5G from last year was marginally quicker than this year's model too, when using the same 25W adapter, but then again it came bundled with a 15W one, which was slower - which one is the 'correct' comparison?

30min charging test (from 0%)

Higher is better

• Oppo Reno7 5G
  90%
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  77%
• OnePlus Nord CE 5G
  67%
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  58%
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  57%
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  53%
• Oppo Reno7 Lite 5G
  52%
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11S 5G
  51%
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (25W)
  50%
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  50%
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  45%
• Samsung Galaxy M53
  44%
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  34%
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (15W)
  30%
• Sony Xperia 10 IV (65W PD)
  26%

Time to full charge (from 0%)

Lower is better

• Oppo Reno7 5G
  0:37h
• Honor Magic4 Lite
  0:59h
• OnePlus Nord CE 5G
  1:03h
• Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite 5G
  1:04h
• OnePlus Nord N20 5G
  1:08h
• Oppo Reno7 Lite 5G
  1:11h
• Samsung Galaxy A33 5G
  1:15h
• Xiaomi Redmi Note 11S 5G
  1:17h
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (25W)
  1:19h
• Samsung Galaxy A53 5G
  1:24h
• Samsung Galaxy A52s 5G
  1:28h
• Samsung Galaxy M53
  1:33h
• Samsung Galaxy A52 5G
  1:39h
• Samsung Galaxy M52 5G (15W)
  1:48h
• Sony Xperia 10 IV (65W PD)
  2:35h

Speaker test

As before, the Galaxy M53 has a single loudspeaker. Similarly to the M52, the latest model isn't overly loud either, only making it into the Average tier when it comes to volume. The Galaxy A53 is louder and has a pair of speakers so it's a clear step up in this department.

Single bottom-firing speaker on the Galaxy M53

Sound quality is pretty decent though, a notch better than on the M52 and without glaring faults throughout the frequency range.

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.