Samsung Galaxy A36 Review: A truly mid mid-range phone

The Samsung Galaxy A36 is a decent option in the mid-range space, but it suffers from having too few real upgrade changes from its immediate predecessor.

Score: 2.5/5

In this review

Galaxy A36 Specifications
Galaxy A36 Design
Galaxy A36 Camera
Galaxy A36 Performance
Galaxy A36 Battery
Galaxy A36 Conclusion

	Buy The Samsung Galaxy A36!	Buy On Amazon

Samsung’s Pitch for the Galaxy A36 – and accompanying Galaxy A56 and Galaxy A26 phones – is that they deserve the suffix “awesome” for their mix of mid-range pricing but high-end features.
Last year’s middle child in the Galaxy A series, the Samsung Galaxy A35, was one of my favourite phones of the year, a really solid contender.

As such, my hopes for the Galaxy A36 were equally high; could Samsung again deliver great-mid range value… even maybe “awesome” value?

Spoiler: Not quite. The Galaxy A36 is still a very good mid-range phone, but it doesn’t improve on its predecessor by anywhere near as much as I would have liked in performance, camera or battery life terms.

As one of the only mid-range phones that you can buy that will see six years of Android OS upgrades and six years of security updates, there’s still a very good reason to consider it if you’re after a mid-range smartphone – but I wish Samsung had done a little more to make it truly special the way the Galaxy A35 is.

Ethical disclosure: The Galaxy A36 used in this review was a sample model loaned to me for a two week period by Samsung Australia, and returned to them afterwards. This gets it reviewed, nothing more; Samsung has no editorial oversight over my work in any way. You probably know that already, but I do feel that ethical disclosure is important. Now, on with the review.

Design

The Samsung Galaxy A36 is built around a 6.7 inch 1080×2340 pixel 120Hz capable Super AMOLED display, slightly larger than the Galaxy A35 that it’s replacing in Samsung’s lineup. The design changes that Samsung has made are relatively subtle in most respects, with some improvements – and one notable downgrade.

At the back, the triple camera lens module switches from individual camera rings to an elongated pill arrangement with all three lenses arranged vertically. This is one of your classic phones that will never quite sit flat on a desk, though dropping it into a case could likely help with that.

I’ll always advocate for cases as a smart investment in protecting your phone, though Samsung has put some thought into that with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus+ covering the front and back of the phone. No, I didn’t whack it with a hammer to see how many blows it would take to crack it; those kinds of online tests are far too often just destruction porn for the sake of it.

The primary display is also, at least at a specification level much brighter than the Galaxy A35, which topped out at 500 nits; the Galaxy A36 hits up to 1,200 nits of brightness. I do lack the precise lab equipment to test that and didn’t have a Galaxy A35 to hand for direct visual comparison, but it’s certainly a nice bright screen that works well even in direct sunlight.

The screen upgrades are a very nice touch for what is otherwise a plastic framed phone compared to what the Galaxy A35 offered, but there is one catch in the Galaxy A36 in a comparative sense.

The model loaned to me was dual Nano SIM+eSIM capable, but the microSD card capability found in the Galaxy A35 has been lost along the way. Samsung’s contention here is that few people were using microSD cards. That makes me wonder how they know that, precisely, but it’s ultimately a less flexible approach if you do find your phone filling up with apps or your own content. With eSIM on board, I’d very much rather lose one physical SIM card slot in favour of more storage, but that’s not the approach Samsung has taken here.

In Australia, the Samsung Galaxy A36 is available in two different colours; either Awesome Lavender or Awesome Black; it’s the former that Samsung Australia loaned me for this review.

That appears to be exactly half of the colours Samsung actually makes the Galaxy A36 in, with other markets offering up White and Lime variants, though they’re presumably Awesome White and Awesome Lime in marketing terms. I do understand why we get limited choices in a smaller commercial market, but it’s still less fun to have fewer colours to choose from!

In the mid-range price sector proper water resistance is still something of a rarity, so it’s a big feather in the Galaxy A36’s cap that it’s properly IP67 rated, though again, the Galaxy A35 was also capable that way.

Camera

2024’s Galaxy A35 came with a triple rear lens array comprising a 50MP f/1.8 primary wide sensor, 8MP ultra-wide sensor and 5MP macro sensor with a 13MP front-facing selfie camera housed in a holepunch style notch.

2025’s Galaxy A36 comes with a triple rear lens array comprising a 50MP f/1.8 primary wide sensor, 8MP ultra-wide sensor and 5MP macro sensor with a 12MP front-facing selfie camera housed in a holepunch style notch.

Which means at a purely technical level there’s a slight downgrade on the selfie camera between the two models, though this is somewhat mitigated by the fact that they can capture 10-bit HDR information for video and stills photography. As per Samsung, that makes them better cameras for everyday users.

Not having a Galaxy A35 to hand to do direct head-to-head testing, I had to instead go off my own notes from my prior reviews of that phone while testing out the Galaxy A36 during my review period. Ultimately, the cameras on the Galaxy A36 are decent within this price space, but they’re still not particularly special, or for that matter all that fast.

As an example, take this decent enough selfie photo:

Look at the handsome young man! No, wait, he’s standing behind me. 

That was taken using Portrait mode, because lots of people do like the slightly flattering effect it gives, and while the shot itself took just fine, the phone took some time to actually render the background that way before it was actually ready to view.

If you’re only taking single shots you probably wouldn’t notice that, but if you’re snapping away a lot in a shorter timeframe, you almost certainly will.

Telephoto is absent on the Galaxy A36, with just a digital crop zoom that tops out at 10x. That’s a wise enough decision, based on how it fares even up to that distance. To test that out, I headed to what’s fast become my common zoom test target, a fountain at a nearby shopping centre:

Ultrawide is fine if you wanted that perspective.

Wide too works well, presenting a slightly brighter shot than the ultrawide lens as you might expect.

There’s more than enough detail to make the 2x crop work.

And even at 4x it’s fair, though some detail is starting to become lost

10x is not great, and you’d only use it if you had to.

Samsung rather clearly delineates between the features that its premium phones (and even high-mid to low-premium offerings like the Galaxy S25 FE) get in the camera space, and that does leave the Galaxy A36 with not too much to crow about, but also, to be fair, relatively few problems for a phone in this price space.

It’s maybe slightly better than the Galaxy A35 in this respect, though for many everyday consumers those differences might be too subtle to spot.

Galaxy A36 Sample Photos

The macro lens can deliver pleasing shots… with a little work.

Many Samsung phones tend to post-process with over saturation of colours; the A36 (mostly) avoids this.

Portrait mode is AI-driven, but it does work better than a lot of budget phones in delivering a decent sense of shot depth.

Regular daylight shots should work well on any phone — as they do here.

And here.

Best to let sleeping Ents lie (though note the slight loss of detail in the darker areas of the tree.)

Lower light areas do start to show noise pretty quickly — the A56 is meant to be better for this kind of detail.

Performance

Samsung built the Galaxy A35 around one of its own Exynos 1380 chipsets, and it’s gone down the Exynos route for both the Galaxy A56 and Galaxy A26 respectively… but not the Galaxy A36.

Rip open a Galaxy A36 and you’re kissing your warranty goodbye, but what you’d find instead is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor, backed up with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. As already mentioned, there’s no capacity for microSD expansion on the Galaxy A36 at all.

The general story for Qualcomm processors in the same price range as Exynos ones that I’ve observed over the years is that the Qualcomms tend to outpace the Exynos systems in straight line performance, but often at the cost of battery life, simply because they’re doing more work and burning more power as a result.

As such, I was keen to see how the Galaxy A36 would compare against the Galaxy A35, but of course that’s only part of the picture. At its $549 price point, you can get a lot of alternate phone options, so I’ve included benchmark results here for phones that sit within a similar price bracket at the time of writing this review for comparative purposes.

Here’s how the Galaxy A36 compares using Geekbench 6’s CPU test:

While that’s within the range of performance I’d expect out of a phone at this kind of price, there’s just no ignoring the fact that it’s performing at the same kind of level as the Galaxy A35, a phone that – if you can find one – can be had for less money right now, while its contemporary, the Galaxy A55, outclasses the Galaxy A36 in CPU performance terms.

On a GPU performance level, the Galaxy A36 does acquit itself a little better, in line with what I’d expect in a year-to-year improvement sense. Here’s how it compares using 3Dmark’s benchmarks:

What this boils down to for actual app usage is… very much a mid-range phone as I’d expect. Most Android apps tend to lean towards this kind of performance level, so you won’t see too much lag on the Galaxy A36 if my own anecdotal app testing is any guide, but it’s not something that never happened to me during my review period.

Samsung has for some time now absolutely led the market in terms of offering higher levels of upgrades of anyone not called Google for its handsets, and this is something they’ve expanded on for this year’s Galaxy A series phones.

The Galaxy A36 will get six years of Android OS upgrades and six years of security updates, which is honestly probably the service life of the phone entirely for most people. It’s a model I wish everyone in the mid-range would adopt, and a huge feather in Samsung’s cap.

Of course, it’s 2025, and you simpluy can’t have a tech product without some level of AI on board. You might expect that this would be under Samsung’s “Galaxy AI” branding, but it turns out that this feature set is only for premium Galaxy phones. Instead the Galaxy A series gets what Samsung calls “Awesome” AI.

Which I guess means that “Awesome” things are smaller in scope than “Galaxies”… but I digress.
The set of AI features on the Galaxy A36 are pretty limited – the most awesome of Awesome AI features are only found on the Galaxy A56, and you can read my full review of that phone here – with Google’s Circle To Search onboard, as well as AI-led object erasing in photos.

I’m very much on the record as saying that a lot of AI features pitched at consumers have promised heavily but delivered poorly so far, so having a limited subset of features isn’t so much of a drama to me. If it does matter to you, it’s worth noting that the Galaxy A56 also gets the Best Face features from Galaxy AI as well as improved AI-led low light shooting, or in Samsung-speak, “Nightography”.

Battery

The Samsung Galaxy A36 offers up a 5,000mAh sealed battery beneath its frame, very much on par with what you’d expect out of nearly every non-folding Android phone right now.

As always, battery life is highly conditional; someone who games on their phone non-stop will run it flat far faster than someone who simply has a phone in their pocket for taking phone calls, though both usages are perfectly fine uses for a smartphone. No judgement here.

To give some level of comparative picture then, I turn to my standard YouTube battery test to see how the Samsung Galaxy A36 compares to its similarly priced competition at this point in time:

That 95% figure isn’t bad; typically I find that for most uses a phone that can keep 90% or more of its power over that first hour will typically last out a working day with few issues, but again there’s just no denying that other phones at this price point do a little more – at least for the first hour, unfortunately I don’t have data for the second or third hour for those handsets as I switched to a three hour test late last year.

The model I’ve tested of the Samsung Galaxy A36 was loaned to me by Samsung Australia, and it’s literally just the phone – not even a box! – but if you buy one at retail you won’t end up with much more than I did in power terms, with just a USB cable in the box. If you don’t have a charger, you’ll have to budget for one.

One nice step up here for the Galaxy A35 is that it supports wired charging at up to 45W, which isn’t terribly common in the lower levels of mid-range phone pricing.

Samsung Galaxy A36: Alex’s Verdict

The Galaxy A36’s best feature isn’t really hardware. It’s software, and specifically the promise that it’ll be supported in both a security and new OS upgrade sense through to early in the next decade. There’s nobody else at this price point doing that right now, plain and simple.

The issue is that outside that, it’s only lightly building on what made me like the Galaxy A35 so much, and that was a phone that I tested after testing out the Galaxy A55.

I’m yet to test the Galaxy A55’s successor, but it feels likely, given the improvements it has in camera, RAM and storage, that it might be the better buy this year.

I wanted Samsung to do just a little bit more with the Galaxy A36 than they have – and getting rid of the microSD expansion capability certainly wasn’t an upgrade I’d welcome either!

Samsung Galaxy A36: Pricing and availability

The Samsung Galaxy A36 will be available to buy in Australia from the 27th of March 2025 at a cost of $549 outright.

	Buy The Samsung Galaxy A36!	Buy On Amazon

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