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Good value with weaknesses

Review: Samsung Galaxy A36 - A More Affordable Smartphone

Samsung Galaxy A36 is a more affordable mid-range model. In many ways good value but not without limitations.

Elias Nordling
Published

Despite all the talk about the Samsung Galaxy S25, it is the A-series that is Samsung's bestseller. Samsung's mid-range series always gives you a good screen for the price, and often good cameras with decent performance. This year, Samsung launched the Galaxy A26, A36, and A56 simultaneously, and particularly the A36 and A56 are very similar to each other. Since we also tested them in parallel, comparisons are inevitable.

The Galaxy A36 is the cheaper of the two. The two models have almost identical appearance and format. Both have glass backs, but the Galaxy A36 has a plastic frame which is hardly noticeable. They have similar screens and batteries, but cameras and processors differ.

You can also compare it with the predecessor Galaxy A35, which is expected to continue selling for a while at a lower price. Compared to this, the Galaxy A36 has slightly faster performance, a new and brighter screen, and faster fast charging among other things, but the same camera setup. The Samsung Galaxy A36 is also promised six years of system updates, compared to the A35 which is promised four years of updates, one of which is to bring it to the same level as the A36. Several system updates mean that the phone can use important apps like BankID for a longer time before it becomes too old. 

Two versions

Samsung Galaxy A36 is sold in two variants. The one with 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage has a recommended price of 4490 kronor, while the one with 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage is sold for 5290 kronor. We have tested the more expensive variant, and you can probably expect the cheaper one to feel a bit slower with only 6 gigabytes of RAM, which is starting to become unusually low. Even in this faster version, you can feel that the phone is not a top model. The chipset in the phone is a Snapdragon 6 gen 3, which mostly runs well, but you notice if the phone is doing something in the background as the response becomes a bit slower. In our performance tests, the Samsung Galaxy A36 is only slightly faster than its predecessor, the A35, and the performance gap to the A56 is larger than in the previous generation.

There is another significant reason to choose the more expensive variant of the Galaxy A36. Samsung has quietly removed the memory card slot on the Galaxy A36 and A56, so the built-in storage cannot be expanded.

Brilliant screen

The screen is one of the main reasons to choose a mobile in the Galaxy A series, and the Samsung Galaxy A36 is no exception. OLED screen with fast response at 120 Hz is indeed becoming standard in this price range for everyone except Apple, but the screens are still getting brighter. If you have the screen set to automatic brightness, it turns up extra much so that the screen becomes fully readable even in direct sunlight.

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Outpaced in the Camera Department

The camera setup consists of a main camera with 50 megapixels, a wide-angle camera with 8 megapixels, and a macro camera with 5 megapixels. On paper, it's the same camera setup as the Galaxy A56, but it differs in that the main camera has a smaller sensor in the Galaxy A36. The camera setup feels outdated in many ways. Partly because it is unchanged since the previous generation, but also compared to the competition. 

Samsung's A-series used to be a good choice for those who wanted a good camera in a mid-range phone, but Samsung has been very slow in camera development while, for example, Xiaomi has improved, and now it has reached the point where I think the cameras are a weakness in the Galaxy A35. The main camera takes okay pictures in daylight. However, you notice that the pictures from the Galaxy A56 and S25 become sharper and more detailed if you zoom in. There is no telephoto camera, but you can take pictures at two times magnification that are a bit sharper than if you had zoomed in digitally. If the light gets worse, the camera quickly loses sharpness. The wide-angle camera is quite poor, and the macro camera has little value. If a good camera is a priority, the Samsung Galaxy A36 is not the right phone for the price tag.

If it's battery life you're after, however, it might be the right phone. The battery drains quite slowly with normal use, and in our battery test where we play video until the phone dies, the result is excellent. Admittedly, partly because the battery-saving functions significantly reduce the brightness when there's five percent left, but even aside from that, the result is more than satisfactory.

The system in the phone is One UI 7, which is the same as in the Galaxy S25. But not quite. The phone is equipped with what is called Awesome Intelligence, which should be interpreted as meaning you can't count on all the features that Galaxy AI has in the S25 series. For example, we have the floating bubble Now View, which you can use to control the media player from the lock screen, among other things, but not Now Brief, which summarises relevant information for you, making Now Bar less useful. With the digital assistant Gemini, you can give voice commands to Google's apps, but not Samsung's as you can in the S25, so you can, for example, create a note in Keep but not Samsung Notes. Image processing with AI is also limited. You can, for example, remove reflections in glass (although it works very poorly just like on the S25), but you can't draw a sketch and have it rendered by AI. You can remove unwanted objects from images, but unlike in the Galaxy S25, it doesn't simultaneously recognise the object's shadow and therefore doesn't remove that as well.

So, you don't really get access to everything Samsung has to offer in its One UI system, but most of the important things, especially if you're not interested in AI. If you can also live with the camera being just okay for the price, the Galaxy A36 is a good buy, otherwise, you might want to look at the Galaxy A56 instead.

Questions and Answers

Does the Galaxy A36 have always on-display? Yes, but it is off by default so you need to go into the settings to turn it on.

Many pre-installed apps? Yes, from Samsung, Google, and Microsoft. Additionally, Samsung tries to push a lot of bloatware on you during installation, but they can be opted out of.

How is the fingerprint reader? It's located in the screen and isn't very good at recognising my fingers. For some reason, I can only register three fingerprints.

An Alternative

Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro costs about the same, also has a good screen and a better camera setup.

Camera Example

The colours feel natural but the sharpness is not the best when zooming in.

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