The Samsung Galaxy A27 5G comes with a minor design tweak over last year’s Galaxy A26, but, like most electronics, the lower-cost phone is getting more expensive this year — specifically, a $50 price bump over its predecessor.
The $350 Galaxy A27 was announced last week ahead of a July 14 US launch. The most obvious change is that the A27 will feature a smaller punch-hole design for its 12-megapixel selfie camera, rather than a thicker notch. The phone will only be available in black in the US, while other regions will get more fun colors like blue and pink, as Samsung is showing off in its announcement.
On the inside, the Galaxy A27 runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 chip, which might make this phone run fairly well for the price. It’s the same processor used in Motorola’s $500 Moto G Stylus. When I reviewed the Stylus, I found the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 more than capable of handling my everyday tasks, but compared to other $500 phones, it’s underpowered. At $350, it will likely be more competitively priced.
Other features include a 6.7-inch AMOLED display with support for a 120Hz refresh rate, 25-watt wired charging for its 5,000-mAh battery and six years of Android software updates along with security support. The phone has a 50-megapixel wide-angle camera, a 5-megapixel ultrawide camera and a 2-megapixel macro camera.
Affordable phones have been particularly susceptible to price increases amid the ongoing RAM shortage caused by the demand of memory by AI data centers. The shortage, called RAMagedeon, has driven up electronics prices over the past year. Samsung’s $200 Galaxy A17, the company’s lowest-priced phone in the US, keeps its price but most of the Galaxy A lineup and similarly-priced Motorola phones have seen cost increases. To Samsung’s credit, the company provides its cheaper phone lineup with some of the longest software and security support commitments we see in the under-$400 price range, which will be all the more critical for customers who just need a long-lasting phone at a lower price.
