Not fast

Review: Samsung Galaxy A17 - Affordable phone with top screen and longevity

Samsung Galaxy A17 is certainly not fast, but the screen is excellent for the price.

Published 9 December 2025 - 16:27

Why make a new mobile? It might sound like a rather silly question, but developing a new mobile phone is associated with certain costs, and especially now when most mobile phones come in product families so that each phone has a direct predecessor, there needs to be a reason not just to continue selling the predecessor that justifies the update. The most common is that the mobile has been made faster with a new chipset with faster processors, perhaps a better screen, better cameras, or more memory. If nothing else, last year's model will become cheaper when a new one comes out, and there must reasonably be a reason for customers to choose the new one over the old one.

I have no idea why Samsung chose to make the Galaxy A17.

Sure, it's absolutely interesting with mobile phones for under 3000 kronor, and perhaps extra interesting with one from Samsung, whether you want to stick to the user interface you're used to, have other Samsung gadgets in an ecosystem, or just like the brand. After all, Samsung is the second largest mobile manufacturer in the Swedish market.

All the same

But Samsung already has the Galaxy A16, which the Galaxy A17 is a direct successor to. So what's new this time? Well... Nothing? Not very little, but really nothing. The screen specifications, the chipset, the cameras, the battery, everything has the same specifications as in the predecessor. There are small differences, but they can hardly be called news, but are rather other choices that hardly in themselves explain a new mobile model, I will get to them.

But if we start with performance, the Samsung Galaxy A17 is sold in two variants with or without 5g (we are testing with). Both come with 4 GB of RAM, 128 or 256 GB of storage, and the Exynos 1330 chipset. Just like the Samsung Galaxy A16 from last year.

Exynos 1330 is not fast in our performance tests, particularly the graphics performance stands out in a negative way. At the same time, we have tested other phones with similar performance that have had a completely okay user experience. In practical use, it looks different. Samsung's One UI interface and its background services are probably more demanding than many other Android manufacturers' systems, and it shows. This is the slowest mobile I have tested in a long time. It's rare to press something on the screen and it takes less than a second before something happens. When I double-tap the home button to wake the camera, it takes just over 5 seconds before I can take a picture (which in turn takes a second). Sometimes when I start an app, realise I've chosen the wrong app and go back to choose the right app, the phone becomes so unresponsive that I put it aside for a while waiting for it to recover. I become curious about how it will handle games with slightly heavier graphics, but it turns out that the games I try simply aren't supported by the mobile and therefore can't be installed.

The mobile works best when it is dedicated to a single task completely without multitasking. The games that can be installed feel fast, probably because the game mode throttles background processes, and watching streamed video is also not a problem.

Cameras that struggle

The cameras also have identical specifications to the predecessor. A main camera with 50 megapixels with a rather small 1/2.76-inch sensor, a wide-angle camera with 5 megapixels with a 1/5.0-inch sensor, and a 2-megapixel macro camera. Optical image stabilisation may have been added to the camera since the Galaxy A16. If that is the case, it does not save the image result. In good outdoor light, the camera performs reasonably well with fine sharpness, but somewhat dull colour reproduction. It is enough to go indoors for the images to start becoming a bit blurry, and photography in the dark or with zoom is out of the question. The wide-angle camera is even worse. It provides relatively low-resolution images that still cannot be displayed in full resolution. The macro camera is essentially pointless.

But the screen is good. It is 6.7 inches in size and of the AMOLED type, which is becoming a bit more common in this price range but is far from a given. It has full HD resolution and is admittedly not as bright as the screens in top models, but this is mostly noticeable in direct sunlight, and it only has a 90 Hz refresh rate instead of 120 Hz, but still feels smooth. The screen is protected by the hard screen glass Gorilla Glass Victus.

All this also applies to the screen on the Galaxy A16.

The design is at least different, with a different camera island, and the Galaxy A17 is a bit thinner and lighter, it feels quite nimble for its size. The 0.4 mm in thickness and 8 grams in weight are the clearest differences between the Samsung Galaxy A17 and A16.

Six system updates

Samsung Galaxy A17 comes with Android 15 and One UI 7 (not Android 16 and One UI 8 which the top models have already received). Galaxy A16 was sold with Android 14 but has been updated to Android 15 so the system is the same in the two phones. Both are promised six generations of system updates and six years of security updates, but here of course the older phone has used up one generation and has five years left. There is nothing in the hardware that limits the Galaxy A16 to a shorter update period, it is as I have noted identical, it is just a choice from Samsung's side.

One UI 7 of course provides access to Samsung's ecosystem such as the payment function Samsung Wallet, the password service Samsung Pass and the health app Samsung Health. However, the performance is limited so that you get no more advanced AI functions than Google's Circle to Search and Gemini.

Samsung Galaxy A17 is a phone with clear limitations, but also strengths that still make it interesting in its price range. But Samsung could have saved some money and instead released a Galaxy A16 New Edition in new colours and with an updated system version. It would have been pretty much the same thing.

Questions and answers

Does the phone have space for a memory card? Yes, one of the sim card slots can also be used for a memory card.

Does it have a fingerprint reader? Yes, it's located on the side of the phone. It sometimes struggles to recognise my finger, or it's just the phone's slow response that's causing issues.

How is the speaker? The phone has a mono speaker with not particularly good sound for either films or speaker calls.

An alternative

There are many good alternatives in this price range, such as the Nothing CMF Phone 2 Pro and Motorola Moto G56, but if it has to be a Samsung, the obvious alternative is the previous model Galaxy A16. It's practically the same mobile that can now be obtained cheaper.

Camera example

In sunlight, the pictures are really good, in almost all other lighting conditions less good.

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