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Samsung Galaxy A57 two-minute review

According to sales figures, Samsung‘s budget-friendly A-series phones generally sell better than their pricier S-series siblings (aka the best Samsung phones). So, while the Galaxy S26 Ultra is the brand’s newest flashy flagship, a good deal more buyers are probably considering the Samsung Galaxy A57 instead.

Google, and various Chinese brands offering more for less right now, Samsung’s top-end mid-range phone feels a little less valuable than it should.

Galaxy S25 Edge: thinness. The phone’s training regimen has seen it shrink to 6.9mm thick, which is thinner than anything else in Samsung’s roster beyond the Edge.

This doesn’t result in a massive overhaul of the Galaxy A’s hand-feel, not with the height and width still stretching the hand, but it’s a nice touch that makes the device look a little more svelte.

There’s clearly also been some weight loss, with the Galaxy A57 tipping the scales to 179g; again, this is a spec beaten only by Samsung’s year-old lean machine.

Samsung has toned down the fun of its A-series color options over the past few years, and it’s no different this time around. I tested the ‘Awesome’ Icyblue (scare quotes my own), and there’s also Awesome Navy, Awesome Lilac, and Awesome Gray (now that’s what I call an oxymoron). So that’s blue, blue, nearly-blue, and gray.

On the right edge of the A57, the power button is within easy thumb reach, and the volume rocker is only a small stretch higher. I appreciated that the phone’s edge slowly curves up just ahead of the power button, which meant it was simple to naturally find the button with my thumb without needing to look.

The A57 has a triple-camera rear module on the back, which looks identical to those of the last few A-series generations, and it doesn’t stick out too far, so the phone didn’t wobble much when I put it flat on a table.

The Galaxy A57 also has an IP68 certification, which means it’s safe against ingress from small particles, and can survive submersion in water of up to 1.5m for up to 30 minutes (that may sound specific, but it’s what the ‘8’ stands for). When a phone has IP68, you can rest assured that it’s safe for all everyday functions.

Samsung Galaxy S26 also runs on, except here you get a tuned-down version of that same software.

Some may miss the flagship phone’s various premium features (you don’t get generative AI tools like Drawing Assist, for instance), but I actually preferred the Galaxy A57’s interface: you don’t get inundated with AI features, random reminders, and gimmicky tools that do little.

One feature you do get is an upgraded version of Circle to Search. If you press and hold the home button, you can circle anything on screen and Google search it. The selling point of this feature is that it gives you the ability to find the outfits of people you see online — a pretty niche use case, it must be said — but I found Circle to Search pretty useful for searching for actors I recognized, settings in videos that I wanted to locate, and sports teams that I didn’t recognize by their uniforms.

A common feature of mid-range smartphones is bloatware, but the Galaxy A57 is pristine and clean out of the box. You get barely any unwanted pre-installed apps (I can overlook Netflix and Spotify, given how ubiquitous they are), and there are barely any Samsung apps pre-installed either.

I’m a fan of the look of One UI, and it offers loads of customization options. You can bend the wallpaper, color palette, and icons to your will, and add Samsung-made widgets and tools that change how you use the phone.

I like to set up Modes on Galaxy phones, which let me quickly change various settings at the tap of a button. For example, I can design a Game mode, which mutes notifications and boosts screen and performance power, or set up a Sleep mode, which automatically turns on my alarm and switches the display to an eye-friendly grayscale. To easily switch these Modes on and off, I can plonk a carousel on my home page. It’s pretty impressive stuff.

A53 was the last model with a different main sensor), and in 2026, it’s starting to show show its age. It’s simply not competitive compared to other similar-priced phones.

The main camera is a 50MP f/1.8 unit, which is joined by a 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide lens and a 5MP f/2.4 macro lens. Around the front, there’s a 12MP f/2.2 selfie snapper.

In anything shy of blinding sunshine or studio lighting, the Galaxy A57 struggled to capture an adequate level of vibrancy or color detail — for instance, in the camera samples below, you’ll see foliage that looks desaturated and lacks dynamic range. An upgraded ISP (Image Signal Processing) chip was cited as an upgrade with this phone, but it’s not made a significant improvement.

Get some strong sunlight, and some colors do seep through, but you can’t control how sunny it is outside, and besides, sunshine didn’t always fix the problem. Other phones do well to edit photos to pull out the contrast and boost the saturation if needs be, and I was surprised by how light-touch (read: ineffectual) the Galaxy A57 could be.

For some praise, I’ll point to the auxiliary lenses. I was impressed by how consistent the color was between lenses — I often find ultra-wides lack the color of their main siblings — and the lack of distortion on the wide lens. The macro was a little finicky at finding focus on close subjects, but it’s definitely more useful than many others I’ve tested (though it doesn’t come close to making up for the lack of a dedicated zoom camera).

Selfies on the Galaxy A57 were a little better, offering some contrast that will make social media pictures look postable, though, as you can see in the pictures below, Portrait mode struggled with fluffy strands of hair.

The A57 offers you a reasonable range of expected camera modes, including Night and Samsung’s stalwart Food, and there’s also the A-series-exclusive Fun mode, which basically offers you Snapchat filters on your camera app. Single Take isn’t available by default, but you can enable it via the Camera Assistant app in the Samsung Store.

Video recording hits 60fps at 1080p or 30fps at 4K, with a slow-mo app that doesn’t reveal its framerate.

Once you’ve taken a photo, you can use a few tools to brush it up in the Gallery app. There’s no built-in chatbot to AI slopify your pictures like in the S26 series, and instead, you get Object Eraser and a remaster tool, which auto-applies edits. The latter’s actually pretty good, and I found it reliable for adding some zest to the default pictures that otherwise lacked it.

Poco X8 Pro Max. Unfortunately, every 3DMark test I ran crashed, which wasn’t necessarily the fault of the phone (sometimes, new devices just don’t like benchmarking software), but it did mean I wasn’t able to dig much further into the A57’s numbered performance…

… until I started actually playing games.

The A57 could handle well-optimized games like Call of Duty: Mobile, but only on lower graphics settings. Try to match the display quality with some resolution or graphics effects, and the handset would suffer. It would also heat up a little during longer gaming sessions, which is not something you’ll encounter with most Snapdragon-powered phones, for instance.

So, the Galaxy A57 is no performance wunderkind, even if you can play certain titles with compromises. But if you’re not a gamer, you can ignore all that, as the phone has all the performance credentials necessary for non-intensive everyday tasks like scrolling and streaming. If I weren’t an avid gamer, I’d probably deem the Galaxy A57 powerful enough for me.

Audio-wise, you’re looking at support for Bluetooth 6.0, with the built-in stereo speakers about as passable as on any other phone at this price point. And no, there’s no 3.5mm jack, so you’ll have to use the USB-C port for wired audio.

Performance score: 3.5 / 5

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First reviewed April 2026