The 50MP main camera is fairly well-specced for the price, but the accompanying 12MP ultrawide and 5MP macro lenses have all but been outshone by the competition, particularly the Nothing Phone 4a Pro, which is both cheaper and boasts higher-res, more advanced lenses. Really, you’d expect to find those secondary lenses on something in the sub-£300 market from any other brand.

It’s also not exactly a performance beast, featuring Samsung’s distinctly mid-range Exynos 1680 chipset and 8GB of RAM. It’s fine for day-to-day use in early testing, but it can’t hold a candle to the flagship-level A19 chipset in the iPhone 17e, nor to the Snapdragon 8 Elite in the Poco F8 Pro. 

But, again, at £529, you can kind of accept those shortcomings. It’s not a full-fat flagship, after all, and most mid-rangers have a particular ‘focus’, be it camera hardware, design or performance, where other areas take a hit to get to the price point.

However, that metric changes completely when you look at the 512GB/12GB model, which rather inexplicably, costs £699. 

That’s £170 more, for 4GB more RAM and an additional 256GB of storage, the former of which you probably won’t notice all that often in everyday use. £699 isn’t mid-range – that’s premium,  almost flagship-level money, and the A57’s shortcomings are much harder to forgive at that price point. What I’m trying to say is, avoid that model at all costs.  

Much better options available at the price

For £699, there are plenty of more capable phones than the Galaxy A57 available to you – case in point, Samsung’s own Galaxy S25 FE. The phone comes in at £649, and while you don’t get the same 512GB of storage as the A57, you do get much more bang for your buck in other areas.

The phone has a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen with an LTPO-enabled 120Hz refresh rate and those all-important symmetrical bezels, along with better performance from the Exynos 2400 chipset and nice extras like wireless charging – all for £50 less than the A57.

It’s even harder to vouch for the Galaxy A57 once you look beyond Camp Samsung at the price point. That’ll net you a phone like the £649 OnePlus 15R with its bigger, faster 6.8-inch 165Hz AMOLED screen, a much more powerful Snapdragon 8 Gen 5 processor, a frankly massive 7400mAh battery and similarly rapid 80W charging.

There’s also the £699 Motorola Edge 70, and while it doesn’t offer much of an uptick in the performance department, it’s impressively thin and light at 6mm and 159g, making it one of the slimmest options on the market – and complete with a relatively big 4800mAh battery and a gorgeous 6.7-inch 120Hz AMOLED screen.

Xiaomi’s 15T Pro is another solid alternative, coming in at £649. It packs not only the flagship-level Dimensity 9400+ chipset but also a premium camera setup comprising a 50MP main with a large 1/1.3-inch sensor, a 50MP 5x periscope, and a 12MP ultrawide, along with a 6.8-inch 144Hz AMOLED display that’ll give some of the best around a run for its money. 

In fact, you can even get proper flagship-level phones for the price. The Nothing Phone 3 cost £799 at release in late 2025, but at the time of writing, it’s available for just £559 at Amazon with 256GB of storage and 12GB of RAM – and you’re getting a much more capable phone than the Galaxy A57, with change to spare.

You’re getting oodles of power in the form of the Snapdragon 8s Gen 4, along with a proper high-end 6.6-inch screen with an LTPO-enabled 120Hz refresh rate and a peak brightness of 4500nits, a solid camera combination comprised of triple 50MP main, ultrawide and 3x periscope lenses, and to top it all off, Nothing’s stylish Nothing OS experience. 

And that’s not even mentioning the design, with the Phone 3 offering one of the most unique looks of any smartphone around right now. 

Frankly, the Galaxy A57 pales in comparison to any of these phones, and you’d be much better off with those than the overly expensive 512GB model. 

It’s likely down to the spiralling cost of RAM

But why is the 512GB Galaxy A57 so much more expensive than the 256GB model? While Samsung hasn’t confirmed it outright, I’d expect that it all comes down to the rapidly increasing cost of components, particularly storage and RAM. 

Since the price of RAM skyrocketed in the second half of 2025, driven mainly by AI data centres hoovering up as much RAM as possible, reports and leaks have suggested that mobile manufacturers would essentially pass that cost on to consumers. And that’s what’s starting to happen. It’s not the first phone we’ve seen with a notable price jump compared to its 2025 equivalent – though the other example is, once again, from Samsung. 

The Samsung Galaxy S26 has jumped to £879, an £80 increase on last year’s Galaxy S25, while the S26 Plus comes in at £1099, a £100 difference compared to the S25 Plus – and with very few upgrades to speak of. The only model that didn’t really see much of a price hike was the already-premium Galaxy S26 Ultra, which costs a similar £1,279 to last year’s S25 Ultra.

Samsung knows that the S26 Ultra would no doubt be the most popular in the range, so making it more expensive wasn’t really an option. Instead, the less popular models would cover much of that hit, especially for the larger storage options. The 512GB Galaxy S26, for example, costs £1049 – £170 more. 

It’s pretty much the same story here: Samsung has tried its best to keep the entry-level 256GB A57 model as affordable as possible and is trying to recoup additional cash from the 512GB/12GB model to offset any potential losses.

That makes sense for Samsung, but honestly, it makes zero sense for consumers to opt for it at such an inflated price – especially when more capable phones are available at the same price.