Samsung Galaxy A14 5G detailed review - good for my parents

Samsung offers smartphones across all price ranges like cheap, low-midrange, proper-midrange, upper-midrange and flagship. Their Galaxy A14 falls under the low-midrange category. So A14 is a budget phone and it was the best-selling phone on Amazon. My mom daily drives this Galaxy A14 and I get to use it whenever I want to. I have got thoughts on this phone, it has both pros and cons. It's a really good phone, but it's not for the younger generation who are quick with their phones. This is a review article, and I am going to share my long-term thoughts on the Galaxy A14, with you guys. I can help you to make the right decision.

Inside The Box

No charger, and no extra accessory for the Samsung Galaxy A14 - a budget phone. Only a type-c to type-c charging cable, a SIM ejection tool and a quick start guide. So the basic cable only, I wonder when they’re going to exclude the charging cable too. By the way, these new C to C cables can transfer data too at a much higher speed. I think people who buy budget phones don’t earn a lot of money. So these big companies should give free chargers and maybe even an OTG accessory for the budget phone. I do not care about the flagship phones that much, because usually they are for rich people.

Design & Build

I really like the design of this phone. As a budget phone, it looks pretty cool. Samsung is well known for making quality products, even their low-budget phones are built well enough. The Galaxy A14 feels pretty solid when I hold it, nice weight balance. Most importantly the A14 doesn’t feel cheap from an in-hand feel point of view. The phone has a flat front and black, which feels kinda boxy but I don’t mind.

Gorilla Glass 5 for the front display protection. Plastic material on the back and for the frame. The frame has a slight curvature, which feels fine. The phone is on the thicker side by having 9.1 mm thickness. The phone is pretty big and weighs about 201 grams. The dimensions are 167.7 x 78 x 9.1 mm. Ports, buttons and cutouts are in okay positions. I like the back cam design - overall cool look and solid build.

The Display

Samsung is one of the best display makers. They are innovating so much in the display industry. The Galaxy A14 has a pretty good PLS LCD display. PLS panel is a new type of flat panel display technology developed by Samsung. The main difference is that IPS panels offer more optimized liquid molecular alignment, which makes for a slightly better viewing experience. Hence, PLS screens offer 15% more brightness than IPS panel types.

You can clearly say that it’s an IPS panel on your first interaction. But I was kinda surprised that there was no noticeable weirdness going on. The display has thick bezels as expected on a budget phone, but even thicker on the bottom side. I didn't have issues with the display, even though Samsung tends to optimize budget displays for a slightly vibrant look.

I like accuracy, but I have seen that a lot of people kinda like saturated colorful displays, sometimes they even like over-exposed images. The display supports 90 Hz, and I have a good consistent smooth experience with the scrolling. But I am going to discuss about some other issues like big performance issues a bit later in this review. The display is 6.6 inches, 104.9 cm2 and has 80.2% screen-to-body ratio. The resolution is 1080 x 2408 pixels, 20:9 aspect ratio with an amazing 400 ppi density. Overall, it is a pretty good display with great resolution and high refresh rate, which offers good experience. Let’s talk about an issue here.

The display has a teardrop notch on the top-middle. It’s a pretty small teardrop, the height of the notch is pretty low. So what is happening here, is the designers had to fit the status bar within the height of the teardrop notch. Sooo, as a result, it looks very weird to me, because the status bar is very very close to the top corner of the display. I am a web designer, and I feel like you need a little bit more padding from the top to make it look good.

Hardware Details

A lot of weird stuff going on here with the hardware side of things. Samsung is kinda known for shipping phones without Snapdragon processors in Asian countries, which is kind of a bummer. I don’t like this, and luckily there is no Snapdragon chipset version for the A14. We have two versions here for the 5G model. One with MediaTek MT6833 Dimensity 700 (7 nm) - SM-A146P, and another with Exynos 1330 (5 nm) - SM-A146B. Octa-core (2x2.2 GHz Cortex-A76 & 6x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) - SM-A146P, and octa-core (2x2.4 GHz Cortex-A78 & 6x2.0 GHz Cortex-A55) - SM-A146B. Mali-G57 MC2 - SM-A146P, and Mali-G68 MP2 - SM-A146B.

We have the Exynos 1330 version here, which has 2 slightly faster cores at 2.4 GHz vs 2.2 GHz on the other MT6833 version. This is the Galaxy A14 5G version, but the non-5G version has different proce­ssors than the 5G version. This's a bit messy situation that Samsung got going on here. I did the Geekbench 6 test on this phone, and the test took a long time to finish. So my mom’s phone has the model number SM-A146B. The single-core score is 834, and the multi-core score is 1944 - okay for a budget phone.

This phone is rocking 4 cameras in total, 3 in the back - looks cool. The main sensor is 50 MP with f/1.8 and PDAF. The macro camera is 2 MP with f/2.4, and the depth sensor is also 2 MP with f/2.4 aperture. The selfie shooter is 13 MP with f/2.0 aperture. A14’s base variant starts from 64GB - 4GB RAM to 128GB - 4GB RAM, 128GB - 6GB RAM and 128GB - 8GB RAM. The international version has support for a dedicated microSD card.

Software Details

Galaxy A14 comes with the latest Android 13 on its core. The skin is One UI 5.0 in this phone, which is a chopped-off version for the budget range. You cannot have the same heavy One UI 5.0 skin as in their flagships. But you do get a lot of customization options here. One UI is optimized for this phone because the processor is mediocre. The company has promised to release two major Android OS updates (Android 14 and Android 15) to the entry-level smartphone. Security updates will come up to 4 years as promised.

The Camera Check

Basically, the Galaxy A14 has only a really good main camera for the price. The 2 MP macro camera is not that useful and the 2 MP depth sensor is not a real camera that can shoot photos. So I am going to talk about the main camera in detail. I am really surprised about the image processing. I even like the output images more than my upper mid-ranger the OnePlus Nord. The images are vibrant but not overly saturated or overexposed. HDR is being handled really well. The shadows are maintained well enough.

My OnePlus Nord produces really contrasty images, which look overexposed sometimes and the shadows are lost in the contrast most of the time. I had to use G-Cam on my Nord to get balanced photos. I think by default the Galaxy A14 captures really good photos, but they are not flat or balanced. The main 50 MP sensor is doing a good job of capturing decent details. The main sensor is good at both capturing daytime and night-time shots.

In the daytime, when shooting in a dark environment, I can see noise, lack of details, and shadows are kinda falling apart, but overall the images even in dark scenarios look okay. At night it does well for its price. There is more noise and graininess in the default mode while shooting at night-time indoor conditions.

The night mode helps to improve the image. So you will get more details and light out of the night mode’s processing. It takes more than 5 seconds to take a shot using the night mode. The single selfie camera is great by the way. That 13 MP sensor is capturing plenty of details in good lighting conditions and the skin tone is also pretty good. Edge detection is good too when taking photos using the portrait mode of Galaxy A14.

This phone doesn’t have any mention-worthy features for video recording, like 4K or OIS. This phone can’t even handle 1080p 60fps video, probably. Only 1080p 30fps video recording is available from the rear and front cameras.

Performance Analysis

This is where things are not looking good. The A14 feels pretty slow to me. My mom is kinda slow with her phone. So it’s totally fine with her. In that sense, I am okay recommending this phone to parents who don’t do heavy tasks on their phones. You can’t play resource-heavy 3D games on this phone. Even normal tasks like opening and closing apps feel laggy. My OnePlus Nord is 3 years old and still pretty smooth. My mom’s Galaxy A14 is only 3 months old, but the opening, closing and scrolling animations are mostly laggy - not a good look.

The stock apps are optimized well and they scroll pretty smoothly. But most third-party apps and long web pages have issues like lags, jitters, stutters and hiccups. I mean the phone can run normal games, and even some big games will run fine, but there is a potential risk of longevity if you play big games for a long period of time.

If you want to use the phone for more than 2 years, I recommend you don’t do major software updates as it will make the OS heavy. Keep it on its base OS and try to restart the device at least once a week. Probably you should not keep multiple apps open on this phone. Doing these will keep your phone healthy and will prolong its life.

Features & Battery

Listen, it’s not all bad though. There is good stuff other than the performance part like the camera experience is good. Another good thing about this phone is, it has a pretty big battery pack, which has a capacity of 5000 mAh. It is a Li-Po pack and the screen-on time is very good. You will get around 8 hours of screen-on time with normal usage, under 50% brightness and without heavy gaming. Someone like my mom can use this phone for 4 days on a single charge. I can keep it alive for 2 days easily.

So only wired charging is supported, which tops out at 15 watts. It will take around 2 hours to charge it up, which is pretty good because I don’t like fast charging my daily driver either. This phone doesn’t have a ton of features like OIS, telephoto camera, HD audio codecs and so on. But it does have some useful features like 3.5 mm port, radio support for the Exynos version, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, USB Type-C 2.0 and a fingerprint sensor.

The fingerprint setup was pretty straightforward and easy. It’s side mounted and very quick to unlock. The face unlock also works well on this device. It also has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac - dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass.

Conclusion

The Galaxy A14 is an entry-level smartphone from Samsung and it has a mediocre processor. This phone is not for the younger generation who are on their phones most of the time playing games. I only recommend this phone to old people, like my parents. They don’t use their phones like I do. They’re not quick and snappy with it. If you are quick and you were used to using fast phones, this phone is not for you. You will immediately be able to detect hiccups on app opening and closing animations.

If this is gonna be your first phone, it should work for you. This phone has a good camera and a good battery though. And the design and build is also pretty good. If you wanna play games, I suggest looking for other Realme and Redmi phones in this price range. Their cheap Note series phones will offer more, pick one with a faster chip. But a lot of people like quality products from quality brands. Galaxy A14 is a quality product - perfect for my parents. I hope this review helps you to make the right decision.

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