The Galaxy A54 isn’t the fastest, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad phone

A short performance demonstration featuring the Galaxy A54 is making the rounds on Twitter, and it's not helping its case. As much as the phone improved in different areas, performance in the general UI is still lacking, and the recent tweet appears to attract a lot of attention for the wrong (or right) reasons.

Although the Galaxy A54 looks similar to a flagship phone, particularly when viewed from the rear, performance is far from reaching the heights of the high-end Galaxy S23 series.

Much like we explained in our Galaxy A54 review, the Exynos 1380 chip offers enough power for a decent experience in mobile games if you don't set your expectations extremely high. But on the other hand, the chip's performance doesn't provide the smoothest One UI experience in general usage, and the device tends to hiccup.

The Galaxy A54 is not a bad phone, but it could be cheaper

Technically speaking, Samsung has had issues with One UI performance in mid-range phones for a while now. The way the Galaxy A54 behaves is not all that surprising for people who have had experience with Galaxy phones that aren't flagships.

However, Samsung improved this year's Galaxy A5x model in other ways, which means that despite these performance hiccups, the Galaxy A54 is not inherently bad and does represent an improvement over previous generations. The device has superior build quality with a water-resistant body, a bright 120Hz display, great cameras, great battery life, excellent stereo speakers, fantastic firmware support, and good gaming performance.

So then, the biggest issue is that the Galaxy A54 might cost too much. If Samsung can't fix these general UI performance hiccups in mid-range phones, something's gotta give, and many people seem to rightfully believe that the phone needs to be cheaper than $450-$500. And through deals and discounts, sometimes, it is.

Hopefully, the next-gen Galaxy A5x will address these problems one way or another, either by becoming more powerful or more affordable. But until that happens (if ever), you may want to avoid the Galaxy A54 if general UI performance is important to you and you set your expectations to the level of higher-end Galaxy devices that cost a few hundred dollars more.

UI performance is not the Galaxy A54's strength, and that's true for many lower-cost Samsung phones. But that's not to say the Galaxy A54 is disappointing in every area, as that couldn't be farther from the truth.