Samsung Galaxy A52s long-term review

Performance, smoothness, lag

The A52s is a special case in which it's kind of hard to talk about performance and smoothness separately, regardless of how subjective the latter might be. If you're interested in raw performance numbers from benchmarks, you should definitely take a look at our normal review, which has plenty of those. In long-term reviews we eschew the cold numbers in favor of trying to describe what they feel like in actual day to day use.

If we leave smoothness aside for just one second, performance on the A52s feels perfectly adequate for the price. It is after all powered by a chipset that punches ever so slightly above its current price point, and the Snapdragon 778G is miles ahead of the 765G and 750G of days past. The numbers don't paint an accurate picture since the leap from those older SoCs to this one is much more substantial. The 778G is practically an "almost flagship" chipset, if by "flagship" you mean something like the 870.

And yet, the Galaxy A52s feels slower in use than other devices we've handled which have been powered by the same chipset. We're assuming this has something to do with the software not being optimized enough, but can't know for sure. It's definitely not slow for a mid-ranger, but it feels about as fast as a Redmi sporting the Snapdragon 720G/730G/732G, and that's not a good thing when you consider that on paper the 778G should be much more powerful than those.

Everything works on this phone, but just a tad slower than we were expecting. It feels very much like a Redmi Note 10 Pro when it comes to speed, and it really should be head and shoulders above that. But it isn't. The same goes for smoothness. Recently we've praised Samsung for fixing its smoothness problems on high-end devices like the Galaxy Z Flip3 and Fold3, which are now almost imperceptibly less smooth than top of the line competitors from China, but it's clear that the Korean company hasn't applied the same attention to detail when it came to optimizing the software for the A52s.

And that's a real shame because with that Snapdragon 778G chipset and a lot more optimizations, it had the potential to be one of the best buys in the entire industry, with not a lot of caveats. As it is, the main caveat regarding this phone has to do with the fact that it's slower than it should be given the hardware, and it's anything but smooth.

There's plenty of lag everywhere, reminding us of the (not so) glorious days of TouchWiz and Samsung Experience, before One UI was called One UI. Transitions are laggy, animations are laggy, the app drawer is laggy if you open it and try to immediately scroll through it. It does settle after a few seconds from when it was opened, and then the lag is gone, but this isn't behavior we'd expect with an almost-flagship chip inside. The Google Discover feed, which you can have to the left of your leftmost home screen, is a laggy mess, and Samsung Free, the Korean company's alternative, is even worse.

There's also a bug in interpreting swipes, which means that sometimes, when you want to scroll horizontally through your recent apps, you'll end up closing one of them because the phone interpreted your horizontal swipe as a vertical one. The action of that app being dismissed is, of course, laggy too, adding insult to injury. Pressing the power button to bring up the lock screen is laggy about 70% of the time, and sometimes it's even buggy in that it takes you straight to the home screen with no fingerprint or face authentication. This only happened to us twice during our many weeks with the Galaxy A52s, but it seems like enough of a security issue to be worthy of noting.

The use of the Snapdragon 778G chipset was, on paper, the biggest upgrade the A52s came with compared to its predecessor. However, in real life use, while there are speed and smoothness improvements, they're nowhere near what we expected based on the hardware. We have a feeling that most of the problems described here come down to the software implementation, which means they could theoretically be fixed through updates, but this phone has now been out for many, many months, so we wouldn't hold our collective breaths.

Don't get us wrong, it's probably the best performing A series device yet (possibly tied with the A73), but that's a low bar to pass. Performance and smoothness for the price have always been areas where the A series lagged behind competitors, and while the A52s makes up some of the difference, it's still not amazing. It could have been better.

Battery life, charging

Battery life throughout our time with the Galaxy A52s has been solid, if not record-breaking. With our use case, detailed below, we were never anxious about not reaching the end of a day on one charge. This was very much a one-day smartphone for us, with some reserve left at the end of the day, but not enough to take us even to the middle of the next day. While some people want multi-day battery life from a phone, we feel like one day is enough, since you can always charge at night.

And charge at night is what you probably will do with the A52s, since charging is so slow, which means that midday top-ups can be a frustrating experience. So hopefully you don't spend all day on low signal mobile data in order to need a lot of those. Samsung has fallen behind in the quick charging game, and by a lot. It takes the Galaxy A52s one and a half hours to fully charge its 4,500 mAh battery, which is 50% to 100% longer than most of its competitors. That's with Samsung's 25W charger, which thankfully comes in the box this time around - the A52 was capable of 25W charging but only shipped with a 15W brick.

There's no sugarcoating the fact that Samsung really needs to get its charging act together, whether that be for flagships or mid-rangers like this one. There's no wireless charging on offer here, but that's par for the course for this price segment, so we don't think it's a huge omission.

Battery life samples

Now going back to battery life, the screenshots above show you snapshots of our experience on different days with 12-16 hours off the charger, with primarily Wi-Fi connectivity, about an hour or so on 5G, Bluetooth always on and connected to TWS earbuds for around two hours for calls and listening to music or podcasts. Location is also always on and there's around half an hour of GPS navigation per day with Waze or Google Maps. With similar use, these screenshots show about what you can expect, but bear in mind that any variation in use case will result in different numbers.