@trinsec @obi I have a Galaxy A53. Ask away... 🙂

(BTW, I've never noticed any lag, but maybe I'm not a "power user"? 🤔)

@petetaylor

Ooh! Yay, I've got a couple questions:

- I've read about people just scrolling websites and the screen regularly stuttering during that. The whole interface feels slow and starting up apps would take a second or two to load. Camera is also sluggish, and people tended to miss the perfect camera moment by having a slow camera there.

I've also read that during an October update and turning off features fixes most if not all of them. But those reports are less abundant. You're not having any moment that you think 'darn, I wish this thing was faster'?

From reports of people online I saw frustration and that people were disappointed in the speed, and that they regretted buying it and would love to swap it for other phones. That's a bit scary for me for that price.

- How's the vibration of the phone? Is it pretty strong, or is it more like a zooming of a washing machine (which means less attention grabbing than a RAKTATATA vibration)?

@obi

@trinsec @obi Okay, I can only tell you my experience with a phone bought direct from Samsung in the UK (so, I presume Exynos processor 🤷‍♂️ ).

I have not experienced stuttering when scrolling through websites, although that may be something that I've just adjusted to. I'm not the sort of person to inspect whether my phone is hitting 120Hz constantly etc. I would not say that the interface feels slow. The exception is the camera, but I'll expand on that later.
I, personally, have never thought "I wish this phone was faster". I would say that it's the fastest phone that I've owned, however, I have never owned a "flagship" phone, so my point of reference is only mid-range and less.

@petetaylor

This sounds pretty hopeful so far. When'd you acquire the phone? And yeah I'm not asking for checking whether it's actually 120Hz, just your user experience with it. A stuttering would be noticeable.

I never owned a flagship either. I mean, I'm living with an ancient A3 for almost 5 years now. ;)

I'll eagerly await your camera expansion.

@obi

@trinsec I've had it since April. In terms of the web browsing, I use Edge (don't judge me!) with the "Tracking prevention" set to "Strict", which seems to block pretty much all ads and so pages load quickly and run smoothly. I also use Firefox occasionally as I really want to like their mobile browser, but after many years, it still doesn't match the quality of their desktop browser. However, using it to browse the web is equally smooth. I just tried out Chrome and that also seems snappy and smooth.

What I will say is that all the browsers take a good 3-4 seconds to load into memory. Re-opening once they're in memory is pretty snappy, but I guess if you have a lot of other apps open and the browser gets unloaded from memory, it'll be a few seconds to re-open it again. The only time this affects me is on the rare occasion that I play a game. This may or may not be important to you.

@petetaylor

I know it'll likely not play Doom smoothly as it's not a gaming phone with a Snapdragon. That's fine. I play turnbased games or puzzles anyway. Star Realms was doable on my ancient A3, so it certainly should be doable on a more modern phone. I only can't play it on the A3 anymore due to storage problems. The 128GB of the A53 should certainly be an improvement over the 16GB that my old phone has. ;)

Does the A53 have the option too that with a doubletap on 'home' it loads up the camera? And if so, is it all speedy enough? Usually I'd want to take a picture of something quickly at that point.

I regularly click the context menu and go 'close all apps', so I am certainly used to the fact that first time loading of any app would take a little bit of time. But once they are loaded I do expect them to just do my biding snappily.

I use Vivaldi as browser myself. Which might be equal or faster than Chrome in speed. So that seems good.

@petetaylor
p.s. Nothing wrong with Edge nowadays, now that they're Chromium-based. At job I prefer to run Edge over Chrome now since that's way faster.

@petetaylor

I'm also idly wondering.. You have it since April. Would you say that whatever performance you had back then, it's definitely improved with updates you've gotten since then?

Like, maybe you didn't really see the performance back then as problematic as you found it fine already, but maybe it's gotten even smoother nowadays? Or have you noticed zero difference anyway?

@petetaylor

As a last question: How's the vibration? Is it clearly felt, or do you think 'what is that zooming feeling.. the fridge? The washing machine? Why does it keep zooming.. mm.. oh wait, the phone?'.

My A3 is pretty lousy, sometimes I wonder if my neighbours are having a music going or so.. (I'm deaf, so I would feel it, not hear it) and my phone likes to be obscure with the vibrating.

I appreciate all the answers you've given so far!

@trinsec This is strange, I thought I'd typed out a long-winded answer to this question, but I guess I didn't! 🙄

The vibration is pretty good (as smartphones go). I think it helps that it's somewhat thicker than phones that I've previously owned. What I didn't realise until I went to reply to this question, is that I've had the vibration set to the minimum of 3 levels!

I just tried it out on maximum setting, with the phone lying on my desk. There are seven different "patterns" of vibration available, and some seem to be more noticeable than others (I tested this wearing noise-cancelling headphones, listening to music). I don't know what your A3 offers, so I don't know how well/badly this would compare.

@petetaylor Hey thanks! I didn't realize there were intensity levels available for the vibration, I've put it to max now. 😁

I've finally made a decision and went for the A33, the lighter brother of the A53. Most features are similar, and the CPU is the same.

I like everything about the phone except the size, but that's to be expected as I'm used to something a tad smaller than a 5" screen.

@trinsec Speaking honestly, I've not noticed any improvements since owning the phone. I recently got the Android 13 update and was slightly concerned that it may cause performance issues, but I think the days of Android updates bringing huge changes (and associated "issues") are probably over now, thankfully.

So yeah, I didn't experience issues when I got the phone and haven't experienced any since.