Review: Samsung Galaxy A32 5G

For years, the best cheap phones came from the likes of Motorola. No longer. Samsung, facing little Android competition at the top end of the market, is coming for Motorola's lunch.

Samsung has always sold cheap phones, but it only recently shuffled them all up into a more simplified (and less confusing) Galaxy “A series” branding. There are still a few too many A-series phones, but this strategy is finally paying off. Now Samsung produces good phones that don't break the bank. 

The Google Pixel 4A might still be our favorite budget phone, but if you don't want to spend a dime more than $300, the Galaxy A32 5G is your next best bet. Just a note before we dive in: There's a standard Galaxy A32 and the A32 5G. They're two very different phones, and we haven't tested the former. 

The A32 5G usually costs $280, but it has dipped to $205 previously. Whatever sub-$300 price you pay for it, it's tough to find a part of this phone that disappoints. 

It starts with performance. The phone has MediaTek's Dimensity 720 5G processor with 4 gigabytes of RAM, which differentiates it from the ocean of phones powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips. If you're worried, don't be. Performance is mostly smooth, delivering few stutters and hangs. Sure, apps don't launch with lightning speed—that's par for the course in this price bracket—but I never once found it super sluggish or frustrating to use. It's certainly less stuttery than OnePlus Nord N200 5G ($240), though not as smooth as the Moto G Stylus 5G ($400) or the Pixel 4A ($350). 

It even managed a nearly hourlong session of Dead Cells with very, very few dips in performance during gameplay. It didn't even get too hot. Playing is even better with the new 90-Hz screen refresh rate, which bumps the number of times the display refreshes from the traditional 60 frames per second to 90. The experience of using the A32 5G feels slightly smoother. 

The 6.5-inch screen itself is not an OLED panel like most Samsung phones, but LCD, and it shows. Blacks aren't as deep, and there's no always-on display for you to casually check the time (OLED tech is less of a battery drain, which is why phones with them can ambiently show you notification icons as well as the time 24/7.) 

For what it's worth, OLED isn't common at this price. (That's one of the reasons why I like the Pixel 4A so much.) But the A32 5G's screen is just fine. The 1600 x 720-pixel resolution isn't the sharpest, but it's colorful and bright enough to see in sunny conditions. The size might be a bigger problem. I have large hands and have to shuffle the phone up and down to reach parts of it. Speaking of hand placement, there's only a single bottom-firing speaker. It sounds decent, but I kept blocking it when holding the phone in landscape mode. 

More satisfying is battery life. Can every phone last two full days on a single charge, please? That's what you'll get with average use thanks to the 5,000-mAh cell in here, and it's great. Forget needing to plug in every single night!

Samsung manages to pack the A32 5G with all the other features available on other budget phones, like a MicroSD card to expand the 64 gigs of built-in storage, a side-mounted fingerprint sensor that doubles as a power button, as well as a headphone jack. 

Better yet, it includes a near-field communication (NFC) sensor for contactless payments. I've just been tapping my phone on New York City's subway turnstiles to get through instead of using plastic MetroCards—something I can't do with any of Motorola's G-series budget phones. 

And as the name suggests, there's 5G support. Samsung does it better than competitors like the OnePlus N200 5G or N10 5G. It's still sub-6 5G, so there are no gigabit-like speeds like Samsung's pricier 5G phones, but it's faster than 4G LTE and will work on all three major carriers. For the OnePlus Nord phones, you're limited to sub-6 5G on just T-Mobile. The A32 is also one of the few cheap phones with C-band spectrum support, which promises broader 5G coverage. 

The camera is often the weak link in cheap phones; that was especially true on the most recent phone I tested, the aforementioned N200 5G. It was so mediocre I wanted to stop taking photos altogether. Thankfully, that's not the case on the A32 5G. 

During the day or in well-lit scenes, the A32 5G's 48-megapixel main camera manages to capture lots of detail while keeping exposure in check. Some detail is lost or has a smoothed-out look when indoors or as the sun begins to set, but it's not as egregious as it was on the N200 5G. As typical for Galaxy phones, Samsung strips out a lot of the shadows and oversaturates colors.

At night, there's a lot of grain, but if you stand still long enough with the A32 5G's Night mode, the photo will stay sharp. Sharper, at least, than competitors like the N200 and Moto G Stylus 5G, though comparison shots by the Pixel 4A came out on top. 

Joining the main camera is an 8-megapixel ultrawide, a 5-megapixel macro camera, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor for better portrait mode photos. Portraits look OK, though the subject loses more detail than I'd like. The other two cameras don't impress me. I would've rather seen Samsung skip them if it meant a better main camera. 

The ace up the A32 5G's sleeve? Unlike with most cheap phones, Samsung is promising two years of Android OS upgrades and regular security updates for a minimum of four years. OnePlus offers one OS upgrade and three years of security updates, and Motorola limits it to one OS upgrade and two years of security updates. Longer software support means your phone will likely last longer, and Samsung is raising the bar here. Pixel phones get only three years of security and OS upgrades.

You're left with a renaissance phone of sorts. It does reasonably well in almost every department, from battery life to performance. For a sub-$300 phone, that's remarkable. It does all this without looking offensive, feeling too plasticky, or disappointing you in any meaningful way.