The Samsung Galaxy A33 5G is more of an entry level phone into Samsung’s A series lineup, but this has some important upgrades over its previous version which don’t make it feel much of a compromise from its higher end siblings.
The Galaxy A33 5G starts at around 25,500 Rs., so let’s check out how good it is.
BUILD
The A33 feels really nice in hand, its relatively compact size makes it have a very good balance of screen area and ease of use, and its build quality is also great with a very solid feel on its back (No flexing on back panel) and its sides.
I actually prefer the matte black finish on its plastic sides over its more expensive cousin’s chrome sides, and its satin matte finish at back also makes this a very grippy phone that you can use easily without a cover.
The A33 update also brings IP67 ingress protection rating on this phone, which is rare in this segment, so you can just wash it in a bowl of water when you get smudges.
The buttons on this phone feel surprisingly clicky for something in this price range, and these buttons and the SIM tray are also made with recycled materials.
Speaking of the SIM tray, this is a dual SIM 5G Phone, with one of the slots being shared for adding external storage with a MicroSD Card.
DISPLAY
Samsung phones generally come with really great displays, and the A33 is not an exception to that trend. We have a 6.4 inch Full HD+ Super AMOLED Display on its front that runs at 90Hz and is protected with Gorilla Glass 5, and while you will find inky blacks on other AMOLED panels too, the colors on the A33 are really nice with tuning options available, and it also gets plenty bright to be readable outside.
The in-display optical fingerprint sensor is fast, and works well, even though it is situated a bit too low, which you should get used to.
While this phone does have a light sensor, we have a ‘virtual’ proximity sensor on this, which can sometimes not work perfectly, and this didn’t become an issue in general use, but I enabled the lift to wake feature, and it started to wake up in my pocket sometimes and started pressing buttons on the emergency dialer, so I hope that this can be fixed with a software update.
CAMERAS
Focusing on the cameras, we have a 48 megapixel primary shooter that is optically stabilized, along with an 8 megapixel ultra wide camera, a 5 megapixel macro camera, and another 2 megapixel sensor that is used for depth calculations for portrait mode. The selfie camera on front is a 13 megapixel shooter surrounded with a teardrop notch of the pre monkeypox times.
OIS is something you don’t usually see in this price range, and the primary camera performs really well for this segment, there’s plenty of detail, and good dynamic range. By default, some colors can look a bit too saturated, but you can turn off scene optimizer in settings to tune that.
You can actually take full 48 megapixel images from the main sensor, and the 48 megapixel images do actually have seriously more detail, and it also allows the camera to have a 2x zoom which works better than regular digital zoom.
Photos from the wide angle camera were good too, and are perfectly fine for social media, but they of course aren’t as sharp as the main camera.
The macro lens on the A33 is also not an afterthought, and once you can nail its fixed focus, you can get nicely detailed images when you have a good amount of light.
In low light, the primary camera is able to capture very bright images in very low light using its night mode, which have fair amount of detail.
The low light performance on the wide angle camera isn’t amazing, but lots of mosquitoes were biting me at the same time, so I couldn’t hold the phone steady for long exposure.
The portrait mode on the A33 also works well, the adjustable blur on it looks quite natural, but it can miss some strands of hair, we also have portrait mode on the front camera which works nicely, but my unshowered hair was a bit too complicated for it.
You’ll also get nice images from the 13 megapixel selfie camera, and all camera also have in built face filters if you want to experiment with those.
Samsung also has some special image processing features like the ability to remove unwanted objects from your images, along with a studio light mode while using the portrait mode which can replace the background.
The video quality at 4K 30fps is impressive from the primary camera, and it’s also decently stable with the OIS that the camera has, but if you want smoother video, you can switch to 1080p which will crop in the image a bit and offer additional electronic image stabilization.
The 1080p video from the wide angle camera is alright, but it can give you interesting field of view.
PERFORMANCE
THe A33 5G is powered by Samsung’s 5nm Exynos 1280 Chipset, which has an Octa Core CPU which is much faster than last year’s model, and the performance for me in general tasks has been quite good.
I did receive software updates for this, which seems to have improved performance, and switching between apps, and using it in general has been a smooth experience.
It works very smoothly 99% of the time, but there are times where you may notice some minor stutters with the animations, but these occasional jitters are perfectly fine, especially in this range.
As for gaming, the phone was able to play BGMI smoothly at HD, even though FPS wasn’t the highest, and intensive games like Genshin Impact were still playable, but had choppy framerates during heavy action.
The phone stayed decently cool while playing BGMI, but games like Genshin Impact did make it heat up in its upper area, and sometimes the phone also heated up while doing seemingly regular things, but it only happened occasionally.
The 6 GB RAM version of this phone comes in at 25,499 Indian Rupees, and you can have the 8 GB version for 26,999 Rs., and both of these versions have 128 GB of storage.
Personally, I think the 6 GB version should be fine too, especially considering that Samsung does offer their RAM Plus feature which boosts the RAM with virtual method by up to an extra 8 Gigabytes, but if you are planning to keep this phone for more than a couple of years, then I will definitely consider the 8 GB model, especially because Samsung is offering 4 years of OS updates for the A33, so this will be on the latest Android version for quite some time, and we might even get 5G in India by then which this phone obviously supports.
SOFTWARE
Another strong point of Samsung phones is their One UI, and we have its version 4.1 running over Android 12, and this skin is feature rich with options like inbuilt document scanning, and you can even customize it like a custom ROM with the Good Lock app and tweak many things.
Even as a stock Android person, I do appreciate one UI, and how it offers so many features without being heavy, though, I do disable some features like the edge apps.
SPEAKERS
The 2022 update on this takes away the headphone jack, but this phone does have a surprisingly good implementation of its onboard stereo speakers, which have a great channel balance, and they sound loud and clear, if a bit tinny
BATTERY LIFE
The battery life on the A33 5G has been quite good for me, as I was able to get 7 to 8 hours of screen on time with my general use indoors with the screen on 90Hz, so if you are a light user, you should be able to get more than a day of usage on this easily.
We don’t get a fast charger in the box, but the phone does support 25 watts fast charging which will take its battery to 50% in 30 minutes.
CONCLUSION
So overall, the A33 5G is a pretty well rounded device in the ‘kind of affordable’ segment, I am actually quite surprised at how little of a compromise there is while using this phone when you compare it to higher end devices. It has a great display, a great set of cameras, a design that looks attractive and feels very good in hands, great speakers, really good software and software support, and it also performs really well in day to day tasks, and it will also run most of the games nicely.
The one minor problem I felt was that its virtual proximity sensor doesn’t work that well, and while this isn’t a problem with this phone, Samsung’s own A52, which is overall a better phone is also selling at almost the same price, so you may also want to check that out.
⭐ Check out on Samsung Website: https://bit.ly/3wLp6cB