Samsung Galaxy A55 5G review

Verdict

If you want a Samsung Galaxy phone that feels and looks expensive without costing an absolute fortune, you’ve found it. Charging speed and raw performance could be better, but a large chunk of the Galaxy A55’s prospective audience will barely notice the difference most of the time.

Introduction

The Samsung Galaxy A55 is a mid-range phone that anyone aside from the truly smartphone-obsessed could believe is one of Samsung’s most expensive models. 

Sure, there are phones with better cameras and faster processors. But Samsung has nailed the swish look and feel of the Galaxy A55, and that matters to many people, myself included. 

That it’s also perhaps the most iPhone 15-like Samsung phone, despite being far from the company’s most expensive, is not unpleasant either.

Bad bits? There’s no actual zoom camera, charging speed is slow compared to the many Chinese brands’ phones, from Xiaomi, OnePlus, Honor and co, and it’s not the obvious pick for gamers. But it’s a pleasure to use, and seems a relatively sensible buy at £439. That’s for the 128GB storage version, as reviewed. The 256GB edition costs £489.

Design

• Great IP67 water resistance
• Quality glass and metal design
• Significantly larger than the base Galaxy S24

I’ve heard the Galaxy A55 described as a lazy refresh of the Galaxy A54. While it doesn’t look hugely different, it will feel quite different, and more expensive. 

This phone has a glass front, a glass back and aluminium sides, not the plastic sidewall used in the last generation. Such a combo alone is enough to make the Galaxy A55 feel like a high-end phone, but Samsung goes further. 

The front glass is Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+: high-grade stuff. Like a lot of Samsungs, water resistance is excellent too. The Samsung Galaxy A55 is rated at IP67, meaning it can survive full submersion in fresh water at a depth of 1.5m. 

This phone’s presence isn’t a full match for the basic pitch of a more approachable alternative to a Samsung Galaxy S24, though. The Samsung Galaxy A55 is quite a wide phone, a handful. Part of that is down to the large display, but the squared-off sides make this potential issue all the clearer. The Galaxy A55 is wider than the iPhone 15 Pro Max or Samsung Galaxy S23+, for example, at 77.4mm. 

Think of this as a bigger-screen phone, not a handset that is a like-for-like swap for a base Samsung Galaxy S24 or iPhone 15. They feel, and are, substantially smaller. Still, you could argue this makes the Galaxy A55 an even better deal — more phone, less cash. 

Nothing too obvious is missing either. There’s an in-screen fingerprint scanner, which is not the fastest but works OK, and face recognition. The Samsung Galaxy A55 speakers are loud and robust-sounding too. As is the norm these days, the phone has no headphone socket, but you can fit a microSD into the SIM slot to add to the 128GB or 256GB storage. 

I do recommend getting hold of a case, and one isn’t supplied. The coloured aluminium is fairly susceptible to nicks and scrapes, and they show up as bright silver in a sea of, in my case, blue. You won’t see any of these grazes in my pictures, but by the end of testing the phone was already looking a little tired.

Display

• Respectably high max brightness
• OLED richness and contrast
• Standard centrally-aligned punch hole

The Samsung Galaxy A55 has a 6.6-inch OLED display. This means it’s closer in size to the Galaxy S24 Plus than the Galaxy S24, but slightly smaller than the 6.7 inches common among moderately priced big-screen Androids. 

Screen borders aren’t tiny, but there’s a very deliberate sense of style to the way the screen border closely matches the curves of the phone itself. 

All the usual OLED characteristics are here. The Samsung Galaxy A55 provides super-rich colour, with an option to tone down those tones in the Settings menu if you like. Black levels are impeccable, with just a small amount of greying of the screen area in very bright environments due to internal reflections. Maximum refresh rate is 120Hz for a smoother appearance.

Maximum brightness is 922 nits, seen in bright environments or when you play HDR video. The Samsung Galaxy A55 doesn’t strike me as a massively bright phone despite that respectable figure, perhaps because its ramp-up can be a little conservative when unlocking. Or due to the slight contrast loss of internal screen reflections. 

Still, it doesn’t feel as though you are missing too much compared to the top Androids. Typical of a mid-range phone, the resolution is elongated Full HD (2340 x 1080 pixels), not ultra-high res.

Camera

• No zoom camera
• Good general image quality in almost all scenarios
• No 4K/60 video

At a glance, you might guess the Samsung Galaxy A55 has cameras similar to the Galaxy S24+. It does not. Most notably, there’s no zoom camera. The third lens is a 5MP macro, more of a filler cam than something you’d find in a true top-end Samsung. 

If you shoot zoomed photos, you’re getting a digital crop, not the real deal. You can get away with 2x zooms just fine, but beyond that is a stretch.

There are a couple of other compromises involved too. The Samsung Galaxy A55 doesn’t offer as faithful a preview image as I’m used to from high-end Samsungs. Sure, that means pictures often end up better than you’d guess, but it is not ideal. 

Video shooting is limited too. The top mode is 4K, 30 frames per second, not the 4K/60 that is the go-to mode for everyday shooting in a Samsung Galaxy S24 Plus. 

That aside, the Samsung Galaxy A55 is a pretty satisfying little phone camera. I didn’t spot any of the red flags I often see in these competitively priced mid-range phones that appear to promise so much in the camera department. 

There’s no major evidence of purple fringing in either camera, edge-of-frame integrity is perfectly solid, and down at pixel level, the Samsung Galaxy A55 manages to avoid the painterly appearance many Samsung phones had years ago. 

Colour is large realistic, not too overblown, and I like how the patina of grain you can often see when looking super-close is evidence of a certain confidence Samsung has this camera resolves more detail than noise in good lighting. At night, you don’t really get a good preview of what the final image will look like in the camera app, but the end results are very solid. They are much brighter and clearer than they seem on-screen, without going overboard. 

The Night mode kicks in automatically, but you can select it manually too (this hasn’t seemed necessary in my testing). Here are some shots taken using the Galaxy A55:

Is there still more evidence of picture processing than in the very best phone cameras? Sure. Tiny bare tree branches often look as if they are outlined in white, which is a side-effect of sharpening. And with indoor lighting, images can look a little stodgy.  

Want the specs? The Samsung Galaxy A55 has a 50MP standard camera that takes 12MP pics as standard. I do think it’s sometimes worthwhile engaging the 50MP mode. While there’s no grand difference in perceived detail at a standard crop, the 50MP pics will look more natural if you end up significantly cropping for a print. 

The second camera is a 12MP ultra-wide, one that produces solid results and not too dramatic drop in image quality during the daytime. Our final camera, the 5MP macro, is the closest we get to a filler camera. It’s better than the 2MP hardware seen in some phones, but it’s unremarkable. I often forget it even exists as you manually need to switch to the Macro mode to use it.

Performance

• Solid everyday performance
• Below average gaming performance
• No significant throttling or overheating issues

The Samsung Galaxy A55 has a Samsung Exynos 1480 processor. This is a recent chipset at the time of review, having been introduced in this phone. 

Its primary benefit is a 4nm architecture, which should in theory come with efficiency benefits. Sure enough, the Samsung Galaxy A55 does not get notably hot under pressure, and suffers from effectively zero throttling in 3D Mark’s fairly challenging 20-minute Wild Life Stress test. 

This is not the most powerful phone you can get for the money, though. The Pixel 7a’s Tensor G2 beats it on single and multi-core CPU performance, and the GPU is dramatically more powerful. This phone scores 3881 in 3D Mark’s Wild Life test, compared to around 6300 points in the Pixel. 

It represents a solid 37% increase over the graphics power of the Galaxy A54 and its Exynos 1380. But plenty of phones beat it in terms of raw performance per pound or dollar, including the OnePlus Nord 3, Poco F5 and Poco X6 Pro.

However, the disparity is only truly notable in a few outlier cases. The Exynos 1480 is roundly comparable to a MediaTek 7200 Ultra. We’re talking about graphics performance comparable with the Snapdragon 865, announced in 2019. 

This is not an ideal gaming phone then, but it is at least punchy enough to play Honkai Star Rail at around 30fps, high settings. Gamers can do better elsewhere but I have no complaints about the general performance, which is sound.

Software

• Uses Samsung’s classic interface
• Lots of preinstalled apps
• …Some of which are useful

The Samsung Galaxy A55 runs Android 14, and has the same OneUI 6 interface as Samsung’s higher-end phones. It does not try to pack too much into any one screen — a spread-out approach I find looks silly on its largest phones. But you can increase the number of app rows and columns on home screens and the app drawer if you like. 

Samsung arranges its interface a little differently to most, though. The app library comes in horizontally arranged pages, not a vertical scroll. New to Samsung? It takes a little while to get accustomed to, but all moves by with the right kind of practised poise. 

The Galaxy A55 is also, like other Samsungs, loaded with apps you may or may not actually want. These come predominantly from Microsoft and Samsung. And Google’s usual suite of apps is here too. 

One of my first moves with a phone like the Samsung Galaxy A55 is to move Samsung’s browser app out of the way, as I don’t find it as good as Chrome. However, it’s not as easy to dismiss all of Samsung’s stuff as bloaty junk, as with some other manufacturers. Samsung Health, SmartThings and Wearable are all legit platforms. There’s just not much cause to use them if you will not buy more Samsung gear. 

The Samsung Galaxy A55 features quite a lot of what may seem like junk, then, but Samsung at least has the good grace to hide much of it in folders. 

Battery life

• Its “fast charging” is pretty slow
• Solidly dependable stamina
• No wireless charging

In one important sense, the Galaxy A55 get an important advantage over its Galaxy S24 and S24+ cousins. It has a 5000mAh battery, while they have 4000- and 4900mAh cells because being slim becomes all the more important as a phone’s cost rises. 

Does this lead to amazing battery life? Not particularly. The Samsung Galaxy A55 has solid but ordinary stamina, and was a noticeable step down from the Nubia Z60 Ultra I used beforehand. But, hey, that thing has an unusual 6000mAh battery so it’s not an entirely fair comparison. 

I don’t have any issues getting the Samsung Galaxy A55 to last a full day, but it’s no two-day stamina road warrior. I’m typically left with just a 20% or so slice of charge left at bedtime. 

Charging speed proved more of a thing I had to learn to accept, though. After using a string of Chinese phones with ultra-fast charging, the Galaxy A55’s 25W seems flat-out slow. You’ll also need to provide your own compatible charger, as one is not supplied. 

15 minutes on charge gets you to 26%. A 50% charge takes 29 minutes and it reaches 100% at 83 minutes. You may get slightly better or worse results depending on the specific charger you use (assuming it’s compatible with Samsung fast charging). 

This feels like a rather old model of fast charge in 2024 if you’ve experienced phones that can full charge in 30 minutes or less. 

The Samsung Galaxy A55 also lacks wireless charging. However, I don’t consider it a great loss considering Samsung was working with a limited budget here. And if we did get wireless charging, you can bet it would be of the slow kind. 

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