samsung: Samsung Galaxy M53 5G review: The quintessential Samsung mid-ranger

The button placement is standard with a side-mounted fingerprint scanner on the right side. The fingerprint scanner works accurately and remains easy to reach. At 176 grams, the phone is rather light but one-handed operations aren’t really going to be easy. It doesn't feel too slippery or unusually large — a problem a few modern-day smartphones suffer from.

The smartphone comes with a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED display — pretty similar to its predecessor. There's a small hole right in the centre of the screen for a selfie camera. It has a large 6.7-inch Super AMOLED Plus display similar to the Galaxy M52 5G, with a tiny hole at the top for the selfie camera. The display comes with a full HD+ resolution and offers 120Hz refresh rate. The display is a clincher for Samsung here as very few devices high refresh rate AMOLED display in this price category. Not only that, the display is bright enough for most activities. Games look good on it as does video content with optimum brightness levels and vibrant colour reproduction. You can tweak the display settings as you want as Samsung does give a few options there. The display of the Galaxy M53 5G gets a big thumbs up from us.

Samsung Galaxy M53 5G review:

Even with Samsung's lofty promises of offering software upgrades to most of its phones for a long time, the Galaxy M53 5G would get only two years of OS updates. It, however, will get security updates for four years. It's a pretty standard offering to be fair and not many people will complain about it.

The smartphone runs Android 12 with Samsung OneUI 4.1 baked on top. OneUI is one of the better custom UIs out there but the amount of bloatware is pretty surprising. You get Byju's Learning app, Spotify, Netflix, PhonePe, Amazon Prime among other apps pre-installed on the phone. You can, of course, junk them if they are of no use.

The Mediatek Dimensity 900 is a pretty competent processor and ensures that day-to-day running of the phone is smooth and lag-are. Loading apps was a breeze and the 120Hz refresh rate makes it even more smoother. While there's a vapor cooling chamber in the Galaxy M53 5G, the smartphone never really heat up during our time with it. Even while casual gaming, there was no heating as such. Surprisingly, the smartphone can handle gaming very well. For instance, games like Asphalt 9: Legends and Call of Duty Mobile run pretty smooth and didn't have any stutters as such.

The M-series of smartphones — when launched a couple of years ago — were pitched as battery 'monsters' with big capacity. The M53 5G in terms of battery size is pretty 'normal' — 5000mAH. But it does almost a full day with above normal usage. What's missing is though is a charger. Samsung doesn't give you a charging brick with the Galaxy M53 5G — for many a good reason to look at competition — and it is a big surprise. Samsung does say that the phone supports 25W fast charging though we didn't notice it with an older Samsung 25W charger.

The two 2MP camera do a satisfactory job though there's not much to home write about them. Macro camera is a bit of a hit-and-miss on the Galaxy M53 5G. As is the Night mode. We weren't too impressed with the low-light performance of the camera. The details — even with Night mode — were often lost and photos weren't really great to look at.

The 32MP selfie camera does a really good job in daylight. Even the portrait mode works fine as the edges were nicely detected and colours were accurate. Samsung has given a SuperSteady mode in the camera app for better video recording but the videos were a bit shaky. There's electronic image stabilisation but we still thought that video recording was a bit off the mark.

Samsung Galaxy M53 5G review: