Updated: April 15, 2026
It's been a while since I felt excited about technology. For a good reason, right. Many good reasons. By and large, there's little innovation in the consumer space, both the desktop and the smartphone are mature, finished products, so anything "new" in this domain is likely to be detrimental to the end user, if anything. My Samsung A54 is a great example, a device that gives me grief and occasional glimmer of fleeting hope, and yet, I use it, because suffering is part of the modern IT experience.
Well, I guess it's time for another installment in this saga. Every few months, I feel compelled to tell you about my adventures with the A54. I use it daily, but I don't like it, and I'm not sure I'll ever truly be able to find joy with the device. The early experience sort of sealed the impression for me, and me synapses refuse to change. I mean, to be fair, things had gotten better after a while, but then, they also got worse. Let's see which way the needle points this time. Is the improvement (or worsening) a trend, a fluke, or something else entirely?
The pluses
Let's start with some good things. First, the camera permissions. It no longer requires Nearby Devices to work, so that's a bonus. As you may recall, the app would simply not run if I wouldn't let it prowl me neighborhood, so to speak. It would seem enough people complained for this to be decoupled.
Second, the last couple of patches didn't introduce anything cardinal. No news is good news in the modern software world, in my book. My settings stayed untouched, so that's lovely jubbly. I didn't discover any extras, so my anger levels remained quite contained. Well, sort of.
Enjoying myself ...
You do have to be vigilant, though. Very. With more and more countries introducing medieval morality measures, they might try to sneak in various prudeness filters and such. I was looking at the spam protection in Messages, and I noticed the section about moral purification, which then takes you to the crappy SafetyCore section. Uninstalled a while back, of course, but ... It's something to check, with every update, of course. Yes, I know, I said this is the good things section. Right.
Of course, nudity, public enemy no.1. Miss me with this 1755 morality. No automatic updates, nope.
The minuses
There be a few, I'm afraid. Quick Share. This turdling still comes up whenever you try to share a photo from within Photos. Even when you disabled it, yup, next time, it's back. Furthermore, the Photo app is using AI or similar nonsense on your photos even if you don't have Google Lens installed. I discovered that when I long-pressed on a photo, and it selected the human figure in it, and suggested I make a sticker. What.
One, making stickers should be punishable by at least two weeks worth of hard labor in a cobalt mine. Two, I have no "AI" crap installed, and I don't want to see it any which way. BTW, this is also why you should randomly photograph things that you have zero interest in, as well as bizarre objects and situations. So you snap some nature, then a goat, then a gas mask, then a guava plant, next you take a photo of a scrapped car, and so on. Make those shitty algorithms sweat. Also, I noticed you can avoid this "AI" crap by signing out of your account in Google Photos. No more nonsense.
The battery charge has dropped a lot recently, as I've remarked before. The deterioration continues. Now, even two days seems to be an accomplishment, down from four in the earlier stages of this phone's life. If I use the battery saver (and throttle the CPU to 70%), 2.5 days are possible. But it shouldn't be like this, especially not considering some of my Android not-so-relics manage 7-8 days easily, and occasionally 10+ days.
VPN as a battery extender?
Well, I thought, how about I put the noisy, ad-happy apps behind a VPN that also comes with custom DNS that blocks ads and tracking? Attempted, and, lo and behold, it does help. Every bit counts. I've already mentioned how using Firefox with UBlock Origin as the browser choice does wonders for the battery life. Now, with a VPN in place, I was able to squeeze still more battery time out of this phone. There's less traffic, less CPU being used for nonsense. DuckDuckGo ATP can also do some of this, but it's not an adblocker per se.
Moisture is the essence of wetness
As Zoolander would say. Another semi-novelty. The phone occasionally complains about moisture or dirt in the USB port. I thought this device is supposed to be water-resistant, so why crybaby about a little bit of anything? Moreover, I don't really have a good way of knowing if this is a genuine problem, a contact problem, or an overzealous software erring on the side of caution.
And I guess that would be all.
Conclusion
This is a short, reasonably dry report. But actually, that's good. I am quite fed up with hardware and software these past several months. I have a feeling that there's an exponential drop in quality, across the board, and I'm in no mood for stupid games and random breakages. To have a rather annoying smartphone behave is a blessing. I mean I still dislike the A54, but the inclination to toss it into the bin only comes once in a while, not as frequently as before. Or perhaps the powers that be had worn me down. I'm being assimilated into the Borg without knowing it.
All in all, the Samsung A54 is behaving as I expect a device of its ilk to do. The battery life drop is a concern. Looking at my last two decades of mobile connectivity, most of my phones managed to hold their change reasonably well, and for a long time. I don't know if this is hardware going awonk all too soon, inevitable software bloat, or a combination of the two. Either way, I was hoping for more juice. Well, there you go. My latest report on this smartphone. For a while, I was almost content, but then, things soured once more. To be continued, me hearties.
Cheers.