This is Samsung's Galaxy A57. From their A series is this year's top-tier mid-ranger. And its claim to fame is being thinner and lighter than ever. But besides that, has Samsung managed to make this phone a worthy successor to the popular A56? Let's run the A57 through our gauntlet of tests and find out. The Galaxy A57 has a lot to live up to. The A series phones are typically strong contenders in the mid-range scene. And that scene is changing, too. Many competitors are now packing huge silicon carbon batteries to entice customers. Samsung hasn't gone that route with this year's devices, but they did bring some refinements. With the A57, the form factor has become thinner and about 20 g lighter than last

year's A56. They maintain the same looks, though, and the materials haven't changed. Gorilla Glass Victus Plus and aluminum. Though Samsung has made the design more watertight. Now it's rated at IP68 instead of IP67. That means it can withstand being submerged in water that's a bit deeper. The screen of the phone is again a 6.7-in OLED panel with a 1080p resolution and a 120-Hz refresh rate. Although it's just 1080p, it's now a Super AMOLED Plus panel, which has a regular RGB subpixel matrix as opposed to the more widespread diamond pentile. That means theoretically the image should be more crisp here, but truthfully, even if there are more subpixels on the panel, we couldn't see a difference with the naked eye. What you can notice, though, are the slimmer

bezels this year, which lend a more premium look to the device overall. The brightness of this panel is the same as the A56's. We measured a maximum of over 1,200 nits in automatic mode, and it goes even higher, over 1,800 nits, when lighting up a smaller portion of the screen. And the refresh rate behavior hasn't changed, either. The 120-Hz makes movements on screen appear smooth, and it's adaptive, going down as low as 60 Hz while the screen idles. For audio, there's a pair of stereo speakers. And in our testing, the A57 earned a loudness score of good. The sound is rich, too, with good vocals and highs and decent bass. You can have a listen for yourself through our comparison tool linked below.

The A57 has an optical under-display fingerprint reader. It's reliable to unlock the phone, but perhaps because of the animation, it doesn't feel lightning fast. Like last year, you can get the Galaxy A57 with 128 or 256 gigs of storage on board, but now there's also a 512-gig option available. Out of the box, the Galaxy A57 gets Samsung's latest One UI 8.5 interface on top of Android 16. This is what you'd get on the Galaxy S series flagships. And you have many of the same features as the flagships, too, like an improved

Bixby assistant integrated with Perplexity AI. You don't get Samsung's DeX connectivity, though. And some AI-based features are missing, such as the natural language editing for photos. If you'd like to find out more about One UI 8.5, you can check out our dedicated video. And for support, the Galaxy A57 comes with a promise of six major OS updates. The chipset of the Galaxy A57 is an Exynos 1680. Just like last year, Samsung has gone for an in-house chipset rather than a Snapdragon one. It's a just-released chipset, and it offers improvements in both CPU and graphics over last year's Galaxy A56. And in

benchmark tests, the A57 does a decent job. However, it is outclassed by many competitors these days, which are going for the same money. So, in the end, the performance is solid, but not spectacular for the price point. At least the thermal management is excellent here. The A57 went through our prolonged stress test with only a little throttling. Samsung hasn't changed the battery capacity this year. It's again 5,000 mA hours. But even so, the efficiency seems to have gone up considerably. The A57 earned an overall active use score of about 14 hours, which is much better than last year. Still, as I mentioned earlier, competitors are making even bigger strides in regards to battery life.

The Galaxy A57 supports 45-W wire charging, just like the previous model. The charging speed is about the same as last year. We charged from 0 to 64% in half an hour, and a full charge took 69 minutes. There is still no wireless charging support, which some competitors do have. The cameras of the A57 include a 50-megapixel main cam, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and a 5-megapixel macro cam, all the same as last year. But despite that, we're getting different results due to changes in processing. The main cam's daylight photos come out detailed with punchy colors. They're better than last year. There's an improvement in both sharpness and dynamic range.

Human subjects are rendered nicely, too, with again good sharpness and lifelike skin tones. At two times digital zoom, the results are fine, but with a loss in sharpness as expected. The ultrawide camera's photos are good for the class, and even though they're a notch below ideal sharpness, they're still an improvement over the previous model. And here are some close-ups taken with the macro camera. They're tricky to take, requiring a lot of light, and the results are just usable. In fact, you can get an even better result by using the two times zoom from the main camera. In low light, photos from the main camera are very good. The detail and

noise performance are solid for the class. Dynamic range is excellent, and even difficult scenes are developed well. We did notice the color rendition can be off in some scenes, though. While there is a night mode, we wouldn't say that its results are better than the default photos. The ultrawide camera's shots at night aren't great. They're soft and noisy. At least the dynamic range is decent. Moving on to selfies, in good lighting, they have great detail and good sharpness. Colors are nice, and dynamic range is wide, too. Stick around to the end of this video to see the selfie video quality.

The video recording capabilities haven't changed. The main, ultrawide, and selfie cameras can shoot in up to 4K resolution at 30 FPS. Main camera videos are very good with great contrast and dynamic range, vibrant colors, and good detail, if a bit high on the sharpening. The ultrawide's footage is a bit too contrasty and is on the soft side, though it's still all right for a mid-range ultrawide. And the electronic stabilization does an excellent job at smoothing out the footage. Nighttime video from the main cam is pretty good, too, with solid detail and dynamic range and accurate colors. So, there you have it, the Galaxy A57.

There's plenty to like here, a lightweight build, thinner screen bezels, better ingress protection, and good speakers. And in our testing, we found that the camera quality and the battery life are now better than the A56. However, looking at the competition, the battery still falls behind, and so does the chipset performance. And we wish we'd seen improvements in the charging speed, too. Overall, while the A57 is a good mid-ranger, for the price Samsung is asking for at launch, you can get a lot more bang for your buck elsewhere.

Still, this isn't a bad phone. So, once the price has settled down a bit, it might make more sense. Thanks for watching, guys. If you're looking for alternatives, you can check out reviews of the Galaxy A56 and the Nothing Phone 4a Pro. Let us know what you think down below, and I'll see you on the next one.