I don’t want to oversell it – it’s not a flagship phone. Yes, you will still see stuttering here and there when switching between apps. You may need to force close an application from time to time. But for the most part, I’ve had a perfectly good experience using the A14 5G not only to catch up on Reddit and Twitter, but also to answer emails on the fly, monitor work tasks, and even to make phone calls.
This brings me to the battery. My sister lives in India so we don’t get a chance to catch up often. The other day, I spent four hours on a video call and the battery only dropped to 50 percent—I expected it to be lower! That same day, I used my phone’s GPS while driving to a dog park in Manhattan and snapped lots of photos of my delicious fried chicken sandwich at a local Irish restaurant called Bua. By bedtime (which is, well, past midnight for me), the phone was at 11 percent with a whopping 9 hours of screen time. This was an unnaturally busy day. On days when I don’t spend hours on video calls, I had 30 percent left two full days with a single charge. It’s nice not having to refill every night.
This brings me to the 50-megapixel primary camera. It shoots photos very quickly, and even has a night mode that you can use to get great, clear images in low light (unlike the Moto G Play). Of course, your nighttime photos will be a little blurry from time to time. There’s a bit of over-processing at times, softening some features in faces and other details, plus some colors can be exaggerated. However, I’ve still been pretty happy with most of the results for a $200 phone. This includes selfies I took with the 13-megapixel front-facing camera (which also supports night mode). There’s a macro camera if you fancy it, and it works OK for extreme close-up shots, but only if you have a good amount of light.
A Star Is Born
The only major gripe I have with this phone in everyday use is the mono speaker. It just doesn’t get very loud, it doesn’t sound great, and it’s easy to get stuck in landscape mode when you’re playing video games. The easy fix is to just use headphones – wireless or wired because, yes, there’s a headphone jack.
There’s also a microSD card slot to expand the 64GB internal storage (which is more than you’ll find on similarly priced peers), plus the ability to make contactless payments with the communication sensor on near field (NFC) so you can leave your wallet at home. I pay almost exclusively with my phone these days when I’m out and about, so this is a big win for me.
The Galaxy A14 5G also supports … 5G, as the name implies, which is another rarity at this price since most phones under $200 support 4G LTE. It’s supported by every major US carrier, from AT&T and T-Mobile to Verizon. Best of all, Samsung is promising two Android OS updates, meaning that since it’s already running the latest Android 13, it’ll still get Android 15 in 2024. It’ll also get four years of security updates , which is practically unheard of for such a cheap phone.
It’s almost impossible not to marvel at the value of the Galaxy A14. It does almost everything so well for so little, and that’s exactly what we should be looking for more of in our devices.
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