Samsung Galaxy A73 5G is an upper mid-range phone from Samsung. It is the successor of A72, which lacked 5G support.
With 8GB RAM and a staggering 256GB of storage, the phone is currently available at Tk68,499 in the Bangladeshi market.
Aesthetics
With a metal-like frame and sturdy polycarbonate back, Samsung Galaxy A73 5G surely feels like a premium phone.
To some extent, it even feels more premium for its price.
Weighing only 181 grams, the phone is on the light side. It is also on the thinner side with only 7.6 mm of thickness.
The phone is available in three colours — grey, mint and white.
I personally loved the grey colour and that is also the version that came to me for review.
The volume up/down buttons, as well as the power button, are located on the right side while the left side remains clean.
Up top, you will find a second microphone and the SIM tray.
On the back side, you will see its quad-camera setup accompanied with a flash.
If you didn’t notice yet, the bad news that came with the phone is the lack of a headphone jack.
Yes, you will not be able to use your 3.5mm headphones directly with this phone.
You will either need to move to a Bluetooth headset or grab a USB C converter.
The phone is IP67 dust/water resistant up to 1 meter for 30 mins.
The phone has an in-display fingerprint sensor which is accurate and fast. But I felt like the positioning of the sensor could have gone a bit higher.
Performance
Samsung Galaxy A73 5G rocks Snapdragon’s 778G chipset, and it performs outstanding.
During the average day-to-day usage, I did not notice any lags whatsoever.
Playing games was also a very smooth experience.
Graphics-intensive games such as Asphalt 9, Call of Duty Mobile, and Mobile Legends performed very well.
I did find some lags while changing the camera modes in the built-in Camera app. But those looked more like review unit issues.
Snapdragon 778G is good for Samsung in many ways, one of which is the fact that Samsung had previous experience with the device and their OneUI is heavily optimized for the chipset.
However, I would have recommended using at least Snapdragon 870 chip considering that the phone costs 69k.
Samsung smartphones mostly stand on the expensive side.
It has a brand value and assurance that the phone will not stop working after the warranty period ends.
The brand itself is much older and hence, reliable.
However, even considering everything else, it seemed weird that Samsung would go for a chipset Realme used in a phone for less than half of its price.
Keep in mind that 778G is not a bad chipset in any way.
It is able to do all the things you would expect from your Galaxy phone.
It is just that there are no stop signs in being better when it comes to chipsets and 870 scores around 31% more than 778G, according to the AnTuTu benchmark.
In 778G powered Galaxy A73 5G, you will be able to play some games in ultra settings while some might perform well in high graphics settings.
Samsung brought the best out of the 778G chipset due to its years of optimization and experience with the chip.
Display
The display of the Samsung Galaxy A73 impressed me. The phone rocks a 6.7 inches Super AMOLED Plus display with a 120Hz refresh rate.
The peak brightness of the display goes as far as 800 nits, which is enough to use the phone under direct sunlight.
The colour production was really neat on the display. Images looked crisp and well-detailed.
The display also supports HDR10 playback and all the major OTT platforms including Netflix supports HD playback.
There is a hole punch cut-out at the centre of the display.
The front of the phone is protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection.
Camera
Samsung Galaxy A73 5G has a quad-camera setup on the back. It has a 108 MP, wide main camera with a 12 MP ultrawide camera, a 5 MP macro and a 5 MP depth sensor.
Under daylight or good lighting conditions, the images come out very well. So well that you may have difficulties figuring out if the image was captured in a flagship phone or not.
Images captured at night or in low light conditions also turned out fine.
I could not find any noise or grains in the images.
However, it requires the phone to be held firmly to prevent blurry shots.
In the camera app, toggling to 0.5x takes you to the ultrawide sensor.
While the ultrawide sensor can capture a lot of area in a single frame, it lacks details, especially on the sides.
The macro mode, with a 5 MP sensor, gets some good closeup shots.
The images are very much usable and look nice.
The portrait feature, available on both the front and rear cameras, captures some neat portraits.
The ability to tweak the bokeh, and lighting after the photo has been captured is nice to have.
The phone has a 32 MP selfie camera on top, which captures decent selfies and portrait shots when the lighting conditions are good.
Battery
With a 6nm chipset inside, the 5,000 mAh battery lasts for around a day with some bars left.
With a light to medium usage, it might go as far as a day and a half.
Galaxy A73 supports 25 Watts charging.
However, Samsung does not provide any power brick inside the box.
Verdict
If you want a flagship-level look and performance to some extent and do not want to spend a fortune on that, you can definitely get this phone.
With Samsung’s brand value and reliability added, Galaxy A73 is a nicely optimized phone and offers a package hard to ignore.
