Samsung Galaxy M13 5G review: 5G on a budget

The 5G spectrum auction has just concluded in India and major carriers are gearing up to launch it soon. So, a lot of you might want to invest in a future-ready smartphone without spending a lot of money.

The new Galaxy M13 5G starts at 14,000 Rs and is the most affordable 5G phone from Samsung.

However, offering 5G alone won’t lock the deal in this competitive segment. So how good is the M13 5G in other core areas?

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Design

The M13 5G has a clean look to it, especially from the rear. You won't find a fancy camera island here - just two lenses that sit flush with the back of the handset.

This midnight blue colour with its basic matt finish is soothing to look at but it's also nothing to get excited about.

The fit and finish are quite standard for a phone of this segment. It is completely made out of plastic and is pretty lightweight.

At the front, you get a waterdrop notch and chunky bottom bezel, which isn’t much to complain about keeping the price in mind.

Utility

The M13 is a dual SIM smartphone that also comes with a dedicated slot for a microSD card. It also offers a headphone jack. There is a single bottom-firing speaker on this phone which outputs crisp audio.

It also has a side-mounted fingerprint scanner which is pretty fast to unlock in most scenarios. However, it refuses to work with wet or sweaty fingers.

Also watch: Samsung Galaxy Book2 360 Review

Display

The M13 5G has a 6.5-inch HD+ LCD display with a refresh rate of 90Hz. Most of the time, you won't notice the HD+ resolution while navigating through the phone’s UI but it will become quite prominent while watching videos and playing games.

The display in itself has decent peak brightness and viewing angles by affordable phone standards. The 90Hz refresh rate makes it quite smooth as well.

Performance & Software

The M13 5G is powered by MediaTek’s Dimensity 700 SoC and comes with up to 6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of internal storage. The overall performance of this phone is pretty good and interacting with the UI was mostly seamless.

The Dimensity 700 is also a good SoC for gaming on a budget and the M13 5G would play demanding games without much throttling. For instance, I could play call of duty on medium graphics and a high frame rate.

On the software front, this phone runs on Android 12 with OneUI Core 4 on top. There are pre-installed apps but they can be easily uninstalled.

It is mostly clean software, however, Samsung’s Galaxy Store does spam you with notifications, and unfortunately, you cannot block notifications from this app.

Cameras

The M13 5G has only one functional rear camera since the second module you see here is a depth sensor. The lack of an ultra-wide rear camera is quite unfortunate.

The 50MP main camera of the Galaxy M13 5G appears to be the same as seen on the Galaxy F13 that we reviewed recently.

However, the M13 5G’s camera performance wasn't as good as the F13’s, which is quite strange because the Dimensity 700 is theoretically a better SoC than the F13’s Exynos 850.

The main camera can produce some nice results in daylight but at times struggled to maintain proper exposure.. pics also get grainy when taken under artificial light.

You can end up getting decent images by using tap to focus and adjusting the exposure manually, but that also defeats the purpose of point and shoot.

There is also a dedicated night mode but it doesn't make a significant difference to picture quality.

The front 5MP camera has similar issues as most selfies I took indoors had a lot more noise than I would have liked.

The video performance was actually quite decent for a phone of this segment. There is no stabilisation, but, the videos did have good dynamic range and accurate colour representation.

Battery Life

The M13 5G comes with a 5,000mAh battery and it takes around 2 hours to fully recharge with the bundled 15W charger. Battery life is this phone’s strong point and you can easily extract out around 7 hours of screen on time with medium to heavy usage.

Verdict

The Galaxy M13 5G offers pretty good performance and impressive battery endurance for the price. It also supports 5G which will surely help increase its popularity.

The camera performance should have been better, but the M13 5G is still worthy enough to be on your shortlist.