Budget smartphones nowadays have a bit of freshness to them. Say, the Realme C55 (Review) — with its faux dynamic island, would be a perfect example of the same. Moreover, other manufacturers offer AMOLED displays, fast charging capabilities, flashy designs, and more. While these OEMs are trying to lure new audiences, primarily youngsters — Samsung has plans of its own.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G
Rs 14,990What Is Good?
- Decent display quality and speakers
- Exceptional battery life
- Great performance
- Good primary and selfie camera output
What Is Bad?
- Dated design
- No charger in the box
- Base variant is slightly pricey
The Galaxy ‘M’ series from the South Korean company was always considered an ideal choice for parents, partially because of its impressive battery life. This is true for their most recent offering, the Galaxy M14. It brings along a couple of upgrades over the previous generation and gets the basics right with a starting price of Rs 14,990.
However, is getting the basics right more than enough in this competitive market? More importantly, should you consider buying the Samsung Galaxy M14? Find out in our review.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Pricing and availability in India
The Galaxy M14 comes in two storage variants. The 4GB RAM and 128GB storage variant is available at Rs 14,990. The higher model has 6GB RAM and 128GB storage at Rs 16,490. The phone is available on Amazon as well as Samsung’s own website.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Design and build quality
Samsung has started streamlining the design language of its phones across tiers. For instance, the Galaxy A54 (Review), A34, and even A14 feature the same individual camera ring deco as the S23 series – for a ‘premium’ appeal.
The Galaxy M14, however, does not go above and beyond with its design approach and comes with an all-plastic build. The curved edges at the side make it easier to hold in one hand. It’s available in three hues: Icy Silver, Smoky Teal, and Berry Blue. Finally, we have the Berry Blue, which looks rather muted.
If you prefer something more lively, go for the Smoky Teal colourway. Because it’s not ashamed of being a bit thicker and heavier than its counterparts, tipping the scales at 206 grams can also pack a chunky battery. Thankfully, the bulk is evenly distributed.
The glossy back panel collects a fair amount of smudges, but it’s nothing concerning. The camera module at the rear does not protrude at all, and it doesn’t have a single sharp edge. This makes us a bit nostalgic, as smartphones of the early 2010s had this vibe. However, the design is truly functional, as it also eliminates unnecessary wobbles when kept on flat surfaces, something we haven’t said in a long time.
For some reason, we have been clumsy with this phone, and it has luckily survived some pretty nasty falls.
In terms of ports and grillers, the right side of the phone hosts the volume rocker and power button, which doubles up as a fingerprint sensor, and it works well. The bottom frame holds in place a speaker grille, a USB Type-C port, a primary microphone, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. A SIM tray rests on the left side, while the top portion has a secondary microphone for noise cancellation.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Display and audio
An upgrade from last year’s Galaxy M13 is the display — this is not to do with resolution but with faster refresh rate, as this feature has also trickled down to budget smartphones. The Galaxy M14 sports a 6.6-inch LCD display with a resolution of 2408×1080 pixels. The panel refreshes at 90Hz with an option to switch back to 60Hz. The display showcases crisp and detailed content, and the touch response was also good.
Watching content on the display was a pleasant experience as the colours produced were rich and vibrant. Sadly, you do not get any presets in the settings to tweak in case you would prefer a more natural tone of colours. The device has support for Widevine L1, so watching movies and TV shows on Netflix at 1080p was also possible.
Since we did not have official numbers for brightness, we put the display under a LUX meter which managed to capture 419 nits of peak brightness on the panel. With that being said, we did not face any issues while using the device outdoors in broad daylight.
While we don’t have any major complaints with the display quality, the outdated water-drop notch and ugly thick bezels at the bottom take us back to 2017. In fact, Samsung themselves have implemented a toggle which lets you hide the camera cutout. This is obviously done to save costs, but a more modern approach would’ve helped with the overall look of the device.
The Realme C55 is a much lower-priced device with a better screen-to-body ratio. But the Galaxy M14 trumps almost every other smartphone in this segment with Corning Gorilla Glass 5 protection. Despite this, we noticed a lot of scratches on the display and bezel area.
As for the audio department, the Galaxy M14 comes with a mono speaker setup. The lonesome speaker is surprisingly loud but can be easily muffled while watching movies. Moreover, it’s much clearer and more detailed than the Realme C55.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Performance and software
The Galaxy M14 is powered by Samsung’s in-house Exynos 1330 SoC, based on the 5nm fabrication process. This means Samsung’s 14 brothers (Galaxy A14 and M14) use the same chipset. The phone is available in 4GB RAM and 128GB storage and 6GB RAM, and 128GB storage variants.
Another upgrade over the Galaxy M13 is the 5G capability. The Exynos 1330 is a 5G-enabled chip with support of up to 13 5G bands.
Initially, we had some gripes with the day-to-day usage as we faced multiple stutters throughout the UI. Thankfully, an OTA update helped fix this. Post this, our experience while scrolling through multiple apps and switching between them was smooth. However, there are still residues of these stutters when trying to pull down the notification bar with a lot of messages buzzing in. Hopefully, this can also be solved in the near future. RAM management on the Galaxy M14 was quite good.
The phone passed our usual stress test without many hiccups. So, we put it to the test with some synthetic benchmarks. The Galaxy M14 managed to score 409,807 in AnTuTu tests, which is way more than what the Realme C55 with its Helio G88 could do. Geekbench 6 returned a score of 970 and 2071 in single-core and multi-core scores, respectively.
While the Exynos 1330 throttled to 77 per cent of its performance, it managed to get an overall score of 2519 in 3DMark’s Sling Shot Extreme test. Finally, Apex Legends Mobile ran at 50fps on Normal graphics quality and Very High frame rates without many hiccups, except for landing, where we noticed drops to 13fps.
The Galaxy M14 runs on One UI Core 5.1. This is a lite version of One UI, made for budget phones. The device runs on Android 13 out of the box with two years of major updates and four years of security patches. The software experience was like any other Samsung phone. When switching between apps or just scrolling through the UI, the animation is quite smooth. It also has a bunch of customisation options, but it will need you to enable the colour palette from the settings.
This gives you access to Android 13’s mother lode of wallpaper colours and more. In terms of bloatware, the phone comes with a bunch of Samsung focussed apps such as Wallet and more. Besides that, Mumbai’s local train-favourite Candy Crush Saga also made an appearance here. Apps not needed can be uninstalled.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Cameras
The Galaxy M14 has a triple camera setup at the rear with a 50-megapixel primary camera and a duo of 2-megapixel depth and macro cameras. The front houses a 13-megapixel selfie camera. The camera app has a very straightforward UI with a bunch of options to tweak before capturing a shot.
Samsung’s typical colour science can be seen in the output here. We recently visited Rishikesh, and the beautiful scenes here were portrayed well under good lighting conditions. Images had a decent amount of detail and vibrant colours, with a balanced dynamic range.
The post-processing tends to favour greens a bit more, but the overall image is something you’d want to put on the ‘gram without editing much. Skin tones of human subjects were also close to natural but with a very slight hint of a red hue.
Portrait mode photos had a good amount of blur, and you can set the level before capturing a shot. Edge detection was decent, but the low-resolution photo lacks details. The same can be said about the macro camera.
The front camera’s output was fairly good, with close-to-natural skin tones and details. The portrait also works well here but sometimes tends to miss a few hair strands. Night images are average. Images need an ample amount of artificial light for a decent output. In most cases, the post-processing is not able to deal with bright sources of light, so these look overblown.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Battery life and charging
The Galaxy M14, like its predecessors, has exceptional battery life. The device packs in a 6,000mAh battery that can easily last two days with moderate usage. We managed to get a screen on time of around seven hours with heavy usage after a full charge, which is quite impressive.
The baffling thing is that Samsung does not bundle a charger inside the box, which is quite disappointing in this price range. Of course, we all know and understand that it’s a move to save the Pandas and the icebergs and to cut down on e-waste, but there’s also the moral dilemma that first-timers will have to shell out more cash in order to buy a charger worth Rs 1,299.
Moreover, the device can only charge at speeds of 25W. As a result, the device takes around an hour and 45 minutes to completely charge from the dead. Comparing this to recent devices, charging speeds are much slower.
Samsung Galaxy M14 5G Review: Verdict
The Galaxy M14 is not an extraordinary phone by any means, but it gets the basics right, and in this price range — that does the deed. But, it’s high time Samsung goes for a more modern look with its ‘M’ series of devices. The outdated notch, thick bezels and curved plastic back make it feel like a smartphone fossil.
However, the display is quite good for content viewing and normal usage. The same can be said for its performance during both gaming and daily usage. Battery life on the Galaxy M14 is exceptional, but the no-charger solution is not the way to go for a smartphone at this price. Photos clicked by the primary and front cameras were more than pleasing and somewhat social media-ready.
As usual, we would suggest skipping the 4GB RAM variant of the device if you plan on using this as a primary device for a long time.
If you are looking for more options in the market, the Realme C55 offers 8GB RAM at a much lower price, with a more modern look at the cost of raw power. Another option, in case you are willing to splurge a bit more, would be the iQOO Z7, which is a well-balanced smartphone.
