back when I worked for Metro by T-Mobile (awful company), I bought myself a Galaxy A52 5G with the intent of upgrading to it from my years-old LG G7 ThinQ.
Despite having now owned the A52 and using it regularly for probably over a year, I still haven't moved my stuff over to it, and I probably Won't.
As a midrange device, it seemed to have everything I could possibly want - current version of Android, a 120Hz OLED screen, headphone jack, microSD expansion. A win-win-win on all front, surely!
And then, after testing the device on the side for a few months, the Issues became apparent.
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The in-screen optical fingerprint reader is Awful. Just horrendous, the least functional garbage I've ever encountered. I'm not kidding when I say it will only scan your finger in the exact same orientation you registered it in. If you registered your thumb at a straight angle to the phone, it will NOT read your thumb when it's at a natural diagonal angle - you know, the way it'll be when you're holding the damn thing. Even when you do hold it at the correct angle, it's still wildly hit-or-miss, not to mention it takes about a full second. This, compared to my G7 with its back-mounted fingerprint scanner below the camera, the Best and Most Optimal position for one, which scans your fingerprint and unlocks the device in about as much time as it would take to press the power button.
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The screen is just Weird. The colors out of the box are absurdly oversaturated, so you go into display settings only to find you have two options - oversatured or undersatured. There's an illusion of customizability, but none of the slider bars changed anything significantly. After mulling between the two, I settled for undersaturated. The white balance is really yellow, there's Nothing you can do about that. It's 1080p, which should be fine, but it exhibits bizarre... I dunno, shimmer? ghosting? around black text on white backgrounds. It's not a dealbreaker, but it looks Bad.
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Touch sensitivity. This is somewhat related to the screen, but is the real killer for me. Most of the time it Just Works, no issues! But then, randomly, sometimes when you turn on the screen, the touch will be all sorts of fucked up. Swiping up to go home will just Stop Working, it'll just scroll in whatever app you're in. And then the "Accidental Touch Protection" screen pops up, demanding you perform a simple gesture to unlock it. So you try to, but before you can even finish the gesture, the screen vanishes as quickly as it appeared. You try to swipe to home. Still nothing. Accidental Touch Protection begins to flicker in an out of existence. Your device has become Unusable. The solution? Turn the screen off for like 10 seconds or so, then turn it back on. It now magically works like normal again.
These are all relatively small annoyances, but they add up to a strong feeling of cut corners and made-to-cost design, which, yeah, it was. But I'm a picky boy with expensive taste (to my great detriment, I SHOULD be saving up my money)
As much as I love my headphone jack and microSD, I may just cave and buy an S23 Ultra or something. I can live with a USB-C to 3.5mm dongle, I can set up local photo and video backups, and as long as I get a high enough storage option I can easily fit my FLAC collection on the system storage, I suppose.
