Bli plusmedlem

Mid-range Price with Long Lifespan

Review: Samsung Galaxy A56 - Competent and Slightly Cheaper Mobile

Good screen and generous promises of updates are some of the advantages in Samsung's mobile that costs less than half of the top models.

Elias Nordling
Published

Samsung's Galaxy A series is in many ways more important than the top models in the S25 series. Globally, they sell better, and it's not surprising since the price tag is between 2500 - 6500 kronor instead of over 10,000 kronor, while you don't really have to give up much compared to the Galaxy S25.

Samsung Galaxy A56 is the most expensive of this year's models in the A series, but still costs just over half or less of what the Galaxy S25 costs, and add to that Samsung is usually generous with lowering the price of their A models during the autumn sale season. It is sold in two variants, either with 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of storage at a recommended price of 5790 kronor, or with 8/256 GB for 6290 kronor. For those upgrading from a previous model in the A series, it's worth noting that Samsung has removed the memory card slot this year, so the specified storage cannot be expanded. If you take a lot of photos and videos, 128 GB might be too little.

We are testing the Galaxy A56 alongside the Galaxy A36, which is a few thousand kronor cheaper. You can read our test of the Samsung Galaxy A36 here. The two phones are very similar to each other, and for the extra money, you get an aluminium frame instead of plastic, a faster phone, and a better camera, while the screen and battery life are roughly the same. Compared to last year's Galaxy A55, which is still being sold and will probably be discounted for a while, the Galaxy A56 is faster, has a better screen, and is a bit more compact in size. It is also promised 6 years of system updates, compared to 4 years for the Galaxy A55, where one year is spent bringing it to the system version that the Galaxy A56 is sold with. The longer a phone receives new system versions, the longer you can use it before it risks losing support for apps like Mobile Bank ID and Swish.

Large

What you don't get in this price range is a small mobile. With a 6.7-inch screen, it's not a mobile you can use with one hand. The sides are angular and a bit sharp with their polished aluminium, and the back is glass, so a case is preferable for both durability and better grip.

The screen is excellent as you would expect from Samsung. The OLED display provides bright colours and deep blacks, 120 Hz refresh rate keeps the screen clear even when you swipe around, and Samsung has also increased the maximum brightness so the screen remains readable even in direct sunlight.

The phone is powered by Samsung's own developed chips (Exynos 1580 for those interested) and while the phone is not as fast as a top model, it is fast enough that you rarely or never feel that the phone seems slow in response.

However, you do notice the mid-range performance in the system. The phone runs Android 15 with the One UI 7 interface, the same as in the new S25 series. But many of the new features linked to artificial intelligence found in the S25 series are missing here. Now Brief, which is supposed to give you a summary of important information based on your usage pattern, is missing, for example. The digital assistant Gemini is available on the phone and you can give voice commands to Google's apps, but not Samsung's apps as you can in the S25, so you can, for example, ask the mobile to send an SMS and dictate it (since Samsung has switched to Google's SMS app), but not create a note in Samsung Notes. AI is also used for photo editing and even that is limited compared to the Galaxy S25. There is a function to remove reflections in glass which works surprisingly poorly and you can remove unwanted objects from pictures but unlike in the Galaxy S25, it does not simultaneously recognise the object's shadow and remove it at the same time. You also cannot draw a sketch and have it rendered by AI. 

Related articles

Clean system with many apps

Otherwise, One UI 7 is a pleasant and clear interface for Android that strives to place the buttons you need to press at the bottom of the screen where you can reach them more easily. Samsung has jumped on the trend of separating notifications and quick shortcuts so that you get one if you swipe down from the top right corner of the screen and the other from the rest of the screen. If you think it was better the way it was before, you can change back to getting both by swiping down.

When I first start the phone, I get an offer to install a lot of apps, mostly games, that I don't want. It's also set up so that some of them are pre-selected without it being visible. It's easy to uninstall them if you happen to be tricked into installing the games, but this kind of unwanted app advertising is something we've previously been spared from in Samsung phones. Samsung is also keen on installing apps otherwise, from Samsung, Google, and even Microsoft, you get pre-installed apps.

On the back of the phone, there are three cameras. A main camera of 50 megapixels, a wide-angle camera of 8 megapixels, and a 5-megapixel macro camera. As soon as you see a macro camera in a phone's specifications, you know they've skimped on the camera setup. In theory, the macro camera allows you to take better close-ups, but the low resolution means it's mostly there so you can say the phone has three cameras. The wide-angle camera also has quite a low resolution, which indicates that it's not the best either. But the main camera, judging by the specifications, has the same sensor as the significantly more expensive Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus (but not the S25 Ultra, which has more advanced cameras). I compare the cameras, and the image result is not quite as good in the A36 as in the S25. The sharpness is a bit worse, and the colours a bit duller; in fact, the cheaper Galaxy A36 has colours that feel more vibrant. The sharpness may be due to the slower processors in the Galaxy A36 not being able to perform as advanced image processing as the Galaxy S25, but the colour reproduction may very well be something that is addressed in upcoming software updates. Apart from this, it is, in any case, a perfectly okay camera with good light sensitivity, which means it can handle even darker environments, but it is noticeable that Samsung has rested on its laurels when it comes to camera development. Today, particularly Xiaomi has better cameras in their phones in this price range. But if it has to be a Samsung, there are still plenty of reasons to choose the Galaxy A56. A reasonable price tag, excellent screen, pleasant system version, and longer system updates than any other phone in the price range, for example.

Questions and Answers

How is the battery life? Really good. In our battery tests, Samsung benefits from dimming the screen significantly when the battery is down to 5 percent, but even if you subtract the perhaps 20 extra minutes this gives, the battery life at maximum brightness is almost 14 hours.

Does the phone have a zoom camera? No, but the high resolution of the main camera is used to take pictures with two times optical zoom, which are sharper than if you zoom digitally.

Can you notice the performance difference between Galaxy A36 and A56? Yes, you can, A36 can sometimes feel a bit slow in a way that I don't experience with A56. The difference is greater than it was between Galaxy A35 and A55 a year ago.

An Alternative

Xiaomi Redmi Note 14 Pro Plus has a better camera at the same price, but a more confusing system and is not promised as many system updates.

Camera Example

I consistently find that the colours in the pictures are a bit pale and dull, but the light sensitivity is good.

android product reviews phone product tests samsung samsung galaxy a56

Latest reviews

Top How-tos

100 latest articles