The Samsung Galaxy A14 5G is an inexpensive phone that doesn’t offer much to differentiate itself from the competition

Samsung’s new Galaxy A series smartphone is set to challenge its competition. The Samsung Galaxy A14 is the most cheap 5G device in the company’s A-series portfolio ever. It is a decent smartphone that many customers would choose at this price point. I used the device for more than a week and put it to the test. Read this Samsung Galaxy A14 5G review to learn how the smartphone, which features a mid-range Exynos CPU, a 5,000mAh battery, a 90Hz refresh rate screen, a 50MP primary camera, and more, functioned in real life.

The Galaxy A14 cuts corners with a drab look and a slower processor that occasionally leaves me waiting for apps to load. But load they did, and if you’re only looking for a phone that can handle the majority of daily tasks, the A14 could be a good choice as long as you don’t require speed. So, let’s have a look at how the Samsung Galaxy A14 5G performs a year after its release.

Price when reviewed: €176 | Check price at Amazon

Samsung Galaxy A14 KEY FEATURES

The Samsung Galaxy A14 5G has a 6.6-inch FHD+ display, a 5000mAh battery, and a 50MP+2MP+2MP camera system. Though it lacks the ultrawide of key budget rivals, the 50MP main camera performs admirably for the price. All of this is driven by the Exynos 1330 chip. Let’s see how it holds up in our tests. Samsung’s pledge of two OS upgrades and four years of security fixes ensures that it will be supported for considerably longer than most inexpensive smartphones. It’s worth emphasizing that we’re evaluating the Galaxy A14 5G in the United States, which has a Dimensity 700 chipset. The Exynos that India is getting may function differently in terms of endurance.

SAMSUNG GALAXY A14 5G UNBOXING

The Galaxy A14 5G comes in a half-height white container that includes a thin paperboard sleeve with a print of the phone on top and a paperboard tray containing the phone. The list of accessories is minimal; you just get a USB-C cable.

CAMERA

The Galaxy A14’s cameras, despite the existence of a 50-megapixel main camera, are mixed. I used the phone on multiple day outings, including a visit to a Brooklyn anime food festival and a weekend trip to San Diego Comic-Con.

Outdoor photographs turned out well as long as there was little movement. My dessert photographs of a cheesecake and rabbit milk pudding turned out well at the anime food festival, but most of my other photos were blurry, either due to congestion or movement by performers during a Taiko drum display.

Still, one could argue that Samsung’s risk paid off. The A14 5G’s main sensor produces decent, well-balanced images, at least in favorable illumination. Contrast and exposure are mostly accurate, and the detail is good. You can see some of Samsung’s aggressive color science here, which favors social media pop over a naturalistic depiction of a scene. The effect isn’t too bad, and it makes sense given the target audience of young and casual users. The A14 5G compensates for the lack of a telephoto lens by cropping in on the 50MP main sensor. This does highlight the hardware’s limitations, with photos being slightly grainy even at 2x.

Night mode isn’t as effective here, generating muddy, blurry images. It doesn’t help that there is no OIS to aid out, so any stabilization must be done algorithmically. That could explain why Samsung tucked Night mode down in the More menu. The newer Samsung Galaxy A15 5G improves the camera offering slightly, replacing the 2MP depth sensor for a 5MP ultrawide to bring wide-angle images to the cheap shooter, but without more time with it, I can’t say if there’s a significant improvement to the entire experience.

DESIGN AND SCREEN

The Galaxy A14 5G comes in a single color, black, and has a shiny plastic body. It feels a little bulky in the hand, with the back featuring a blocky design with no rounded corners. The top-left corner houses three cameras: a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 2-megapixel depth camera, and a 2-megapixel macro camera.

There is a teardrop notch on the front for the 13-megapixel front-facing camera. In addition to its 1,080p resolution, the 6.6-inch display boasts a refresh rate of 90Hz. While the $200 Moto G Stylus operates at a constant 90Hz, the A14 offers an “adaptive” mode that adjusts to 90Hz when scrolling through text and animations while swiping between apps. I found the impact to be very smooth, particularly when reading articles or playing games.

The phone’s single speaker produces audio, which was easy for me to accidentally block when holding the phone horizontally to watch videos. It’s worth noting that Motorola’s current budget phone series includes stereo speakers across its Moto G phones. While the Samsung phone’s initial 64GB of storage should be sufficient to get you started, you can increase it to 1TB via the phone’s microSD card port.

In benchmark testing, the Galaxy A14 5G’s Geekbench score was higher than that of the Moto G Stylus, but it doesn’t seem that way in real life. The phone’s Mediatek Dimensity 700 processor is sluggish, and I frequently observed the A14 taking an extra beat to unlock itself whether I had another program open, pressed a text box to access the keyboard, or switched between apps. Software upgrades can improve this over time, and the current performance is plenty adequate for casual use. However, this phone would not be capable of handling a large number of productivity documents or more graphically demanding apps.

HOW’S THE PERFORMANCE?

The Samsung Galaxy A14 5G we have here is based on the Dimensity 700, a low-end 5G-capable platform from a while back. The Galaxy A22 5G, a two-year-old handset, used it, as did the Galaxy A13 5G from last year. So the A14 5G’s core remains unchanged.

However, just as there were numerous A13s last year, there is another version of the Galaxy A14 5G this year, which is powered by the Exynos 1330, Samsung’s own 5G processor designed for cheaper smartphones. That one features a slightly beefier CPU; the two strong cores are the newer Cortex-A78 ones, clocked at 2.4GHz (2x Cortex-A76 @ 2.2GHz in the Dimensity). There’s also the GPU, which is a Mali-G68 MC4 on the Exynos and a Mali-G57 MC2 on the Dimensity, which sounds like a significant increase. Overall, the Exynos-equipped Galaxy A14 5G should deliver better performance.

Unfortunately, we have not tested an Exynos 1330 handset to include in this comparison, so we will do the next best thing. We’ll include a Galaxy M53; its Dimensity 900 has the same CPU and GPU combination as the Exynos 1330, so the figures should be quite comparable.

The Exynos version is offered in India, whereas the Dimensity is available in the United States. For other regions, contact your shop, carrier, or the local Samsung website. While Samsung does not often mention individual chipsets, they do usually quote clock rates, thus the 2.4GHz vs. 2.2GHz difference should be obvious.

With that preface out of the way, let’s have a look at some benchmark data from the US-bound Dimensity 700-equipped Galaxy A14 5G.

The aforementioned data show that the Galaxy’s implementation of the Dimensity 700 is comparable to other handsets using the same chipset and provides about average performance for the class. That is true for the US version, but the Indian version should yield scores comparable to the Galaxy M53, making it the clear front-runner. As a result, the Indian version appears to be significantly more desirable in terms of performance.

The advantage of Dimensity 700 chipsets is their ability to sustain their original level of performance under continuous load. That’s what we saw on the Galaxy A14, for the most part, except a minor drop in CPU results over an hour into the test. The GPU stress test ratings, however, were excellent.

Buy it if...

• Excellent battery life.
• Android 13 boasts a feature-rich One UI on top.
• A very capable main camera.
• Great selfies.

Don't buy it if…

• Slow charging, even for the class.
• Not the brightest or most contrasty display available.
• There is no ultrawide camera, and macro is virtually non-existent.

FULL SPECIFICATION