Gadgets. Galaxy M52 review: Ever so light and comfortable

Users crave a phone that’s comfortable to hold and yet is full-featured. Small smartphones are almost non-existent, so that leaves us with devices that come with screens of between 6.4 and 6.7 inches diagonally across. If they’re packed with a big enough battery to run that screen, they become unwieldy and heavy. It’s a familiar story.

Samsung has managed to come up with a smartphone that has both screen size and massive battery, but is somehow really slim and light. This is the Galaxy M52 and its in-hand feel is one of its biggest plus points. This is still a large phone, with a screen that is 6.7 inches, and it is broad, so ergonomics could perhaps have been a bit better. But it is still more comfortable to hold in comparison with other phones of that size.

The M52 is not Samsung’s only ‘52’ phone. The company has several others in its A series and the differentiation is getting entirely challenging. The recent A52s 5G even has the same processor. It feels a lot like Samsung shook its box of specs and features and just happened to come up with a mix of things that aren’t so very different from its other phones — or from competing phones. All the same, the M52 does have pretty good things going for it.

This is a device that has Gorilla Glass 5 on the front and polycarbonate on the back. It’s glossy plastic, so it can easily be mistaken for glass. It has a very fine pattern of pin stripes on it that I rather like, but it’s not easy to see, specially on the ‘Blazing Black’ version we have. The other is an icy blue and a white. Yes, it shows fingerprint smudges and no there isn’t a case in the box. We have to be thankful there’s a cable and charging brick these days.

The M52 has a great sAMOLED+ display and thankfully not an LCD, like some phones from the M series. It’s as bright and dazzling as you would expect from Samsung, the king of display tech. There’s the usual dot for the camera that we’ve all now become used to and that we’re not bothered by at all. The colours are deep and vivid and viewing angles perfect. Not just that, the screen has a 120Hz refresh rate, so feels fast. Around the edges, no 3.5mm jack and no unexpected buttons. Just the power button, which also houses the fingerprint scanner, and the volume rocker. Also the SIM tray that has place for two SIMS or one SIM and a memory card.

Running the phone is the Snapdragon 778G, proven to be a fast and efficient chip that’s also 5G capable. So you do get support for 11 bands for when 5G does happen in India. You have either 6 or 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. Android 11 and OneUI 3.1 make up the software on this phone and all is smooth except for the fact that there are lots of unwanted apps sitting there like unwanted guests. You may not want Facebook, Snapchat, Moj, Daily Hunt, etc, but they’re all there. You can throw out all of these but, of course, the trend of Samsung, Google and Microsoft apps being right there continues and most of them are necessary anyway. You also have to be really careful when setting up the phone because you’ll end up with more apps and suggested content if you agree to things while wanting to get on with starting to use the phone.

For those who take photos on the phone casually and without too much involvement in the details and the process, the standard set of cameras on the M52 should do fine. They include a primary 64MP, a 12MP ultra wide and a 5MP macro. The front camera is a 32MP.

The battery is a 5,000mAh supporting 24W charging. That’s nowhere near the phones you get from Realme, Xiaomi, and other players these days. You don’t even get the right charging brick in the box. It takes two hours to charge. There’s no IP rating and no stereo speakers. But despite that, it’s quite an all-rounder at Rs 26,999 and Rs 28,999.

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