Galaxy A02S, A03S, A12 Review: Samsung’s Under-$200 Phones Do More Than I Thought – CNET [CNET]

Samsung’s Galaxy S22 and other Galaxy S phones entice buyers with their premium design and features, but those larger screens and multiple cameras do not come cheap. Luckily, Samsung has brought similar features and designs to its Galaxy A series, which includes phones priced as low as $130. Between supply chain constraints and economic hardships brought on by the pandemic, low-cost phones have become particularly important: Even the cheapest phones should allow you to keep up with the news, join video calls, take clear photos and play games.

Even Samsung’s cheapest phones, which I’ve been testing for months, can handle these basic but necessary tasks. The Galaxy A02S ($130, £139, roughly AU$245), A03S ($160) and A12 ($180) can easily load webpages, stream music, play YouTube videos and take video calls, even despite using lower-powered processors than Samsung’s midrange and high-end phones. The phones’ 6.5-inch screens, capped at 720p resolution, are clear and large enough to run apps and multitask for the most part. But there are some limitations, depending on the device, particularly when it comes to performance and camera quality.

What they all have in common

Other than their screen size, all three phones have some benefits in common. These include battery life, software support and rare features such as headphone jacks and expandable storage.

The 5,000-mAh battery inside each phone easily made it through two days of use, despite having the screen on for upward of four hours a day. That held true even when I spent half the day streaming YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, taking video calls and playing games.

All three phones will receive years of software and security updates, which is particularly important for anyone looking to hold onto a phone for longer than a year or two. Samsung has committed to four years of security updates for these Galaxy A phones, which is a substantial improvement over cheaper phones that previously only received a year or so of support.

Each phone also has a headphone jack, which gives you a simple option for plugging in wired headphones. That’s a rare find on modern phones, with headphone jacks getting the axe ever since the iPhone 7 dropped it back in 2016.

However, these phones are still all under $200, and compromises certainly had to be made to achieve that low price. The biggest among them is that all three phones only have 32GB of built-in storage. That’s basically nothing. By comparison, Apple’s new $429 iPhone SE doubles that with 64GB storage, while Samsung’s midrange A53 has four times that amount of storage at 128GB. When I began testing the phones, my most recent Android phone backup occupied most of the space. I was left with just enough free space to take about 30 photos until I deleted some apps. 

However, all three phones also have a microSD card slot for storage expansion. So you’ll want to budget another $20 to $30 for a microSD card if you plan to use these phones to take pictures, download videos or install more apps than the built-in storage can handle.

Other features these phones lack are more understandable at this price range. None of the phones support any version of 5G. They also lack wireless charging. And even though each phone has three or four rear cameras, the image quality ranges from being just OK to downright muddy and blurry. The cameras performed better when snapping outdoor photos of things like buildings and street doughnuts, but struggled when shooting burritos and cocktails in a dim restaurant. 

The big difference is the way these phones juggle multiple tasks. You can indeed buy the cheapest of these phones, the $130 Galaxy A02S, but a few key drawbacks will likely make you want to spend $30 more for the $160 Galaxy A03S. If you decide a slightly better camera is what you want, another $20 gets you the A12 with a fourth lens.

Galaxy A02S

Like

• Cheap price at $130
• Runs Android 11 and is actively updated
• Large screen

Don’t Like

• Has trouble with basic multitasking
• Muddy photos
• No fingerprint sensor

Galaxy A02S: When the lowest price is what matters 

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$180 at Best Buy

$138 at Amazon