Samsung Galaxy A56 5G Review

Introduction

Samsung’s Galaxy A56 5G is here to take on an increasingly competitive mid-range market – but can it really stand out in 2025?

The Samsung Galaxy A56 5G offers several key upgrades, including a thinner design, larger screen, faster charging, and, of course, a faster processor. 

However, it’s also more expensive. At an increased £499/$499 compared to its £439 predecessor, Samsung has its work cut out to tempt consumers this year, especially with more competition than ever in the mid-range space.

Can it justify its higher price tag and compete with the best mid-range phone choices around?? I’ve spent the past week with the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G to find out. 

Design

• Similar design with a thinner build
• Premium look and feel
• IP67 dust and water resistance

Put the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G next to last year’s Galaxy A55 5G and you might struggle to tell the difference – at a glance, anyway. But while this year’s mid-ranger sports the same overall look as its predecessor, there are a handful of meaningful changes that make it a little more tempting.

The most noticeable change is the slimmer design, which drops from 8.2mm to just 7.4mm – an impressive feat for a phone with a fairly large 6.7-inch screen and a 5000mAh battery. That’s immediately noticeable upon picking it up, especially coming from the 9.35mm-thick Xiaomi 15 Ultra. 

That feeling is further elevated by returning elements like a combination of glass on the front and rear and a sturdy, cool aluminium frame. Many mid-rangers stick with the plastic alternative to save on manufacturing costs, and it makes the A56 5G feel more premium than its £499 price tag suggests as a result. 

Simply put, this is as close to the flagship feel as you’ll get at the price point, and remains one of the key selling points of this year’s mid-range Galaxy. 

It’s also available in fun shades – Awesome Graphite, Awesome Light Gray, Awesome Olive and Awesome Pink – alongside the regular black and white options for those that want a more understated look. This is one of the key benefits compared to the flagships, the latter of which tend to opt for more subtle colours and finishes. 

With glass on both the front and rear, durability is more important than competing mid-rangers, so Samsung has once again decided to utilise the premium Gorilla Glass Victus+ on both. It’ll also survive the wind and rain with IP67 dust and water resistance. 

It’s not the IP68 we’ve begun seeing creep into the mid-range market, but unless you plan on dunking your phone in water, it shouldn’t make much of a difference in day-to-day use. 

See the comparison of the Samsung Galaxy A56 vs A36.

Screen

• Larger 6.7-inch AMOLED display
• Slimline bezels
• 120Hz refresh rate

The Samsung Galaxy A56 has a 6.7-inch AMOLED screen, which makes it closer in size to the Galaxy S25 Plus than the Galaxy S25. It’s also 0.1 inches bigger than last year’s Galaxy A55, though this isn’t down to expanding the overall footprint of the device. 

Instead, Samsung slimmed down the bezels to make extra room, and given that the A55 already had fairly slim bezels compared to the Google Pixel 8a, the even slimmer bezels here are impressive.

Now, don’t get me wrong, we’re not in ultra-slim-bezel territory here. It still has thicker black bars than the top-end Galaxy S25 Ultra, iPhone 16 Pro Max and even the similarly priced OnePlus Nord 4, but it does massively add to the premium look compared to the Google Pixel 9a.

Size and bezels aside, it’s an AMOLED panel through and through. The famed deep blacks and vibrant colours present and accounted for, making watching movies and playing games an absolute joy. It is a little oversaturated for my eyes out of the box, but you can tweak the colour profile pretty easily in the Settings app. 

The 120Hz refresh rate, though not LTPO like the flagships, provides a nice smoothness to proceedings, making scrolling, opening apps, and practically everything else feel faster and more responsive. 

Brightness has also been boosted this year, with a 1900 nit peak brightness when watching HDR content, while it’ll also hit a boosted 1200 nits in high-brightness mode when outdoors.

That meant I had no real complaint about using the phone, even on an uncharacteristically sunny April day in London – though I do wish Samsung would bring its impressive anti-reflective screen covering from the S25 Ultra to the rest of its smartphones. That’d truly make the A56 5G stand out from the crowd. 

Cameras

• 50MP main, 12MP ultrawide and 5MP macro cameras
• Solid daytime performance
• Purple tinge to low-light shots

The Galaxy A56 5G once again features an OIS-enabled 50MP f/1.8 primary camera, a 12MP ultrawide, and a 5MP macro, with no discernible changes to the underlying hardware. The latter is a particular disappointment, given its niche focus and the price increase from this year’s model. 

A more helpful lens, like a telephoto, would’ve been a nice upgrade here, especially when some of the best camera phones at this price, like the Nothing Phone 3a and 3a Pro, offer telephoto and periscope zoom tech respectively.

Where performance is concerned, expect similar results to the Galaxy A55 5G – surprising, I know. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the Galaxy A55 had a solid primary camera and it’s very much the same this year, with the 50MP snapper binning to 12MP to combine pixels to boost overall detail and light.

The result is photos packed with light and detail in most scenarios. Samsung’s signature vibrancy is present and accounted for, especially apparent in the blues of the sky and greens of grass, but it does make photos pop. There are filters you can use to change the overall look of images if this isn’t quite to your liking, but the vibrant shots do look good on the phone’s AMOLED panel.

The lack of a dedicated zoom lens means the A56 relies solely on digital zoom, though Samsung’s implementation isn’t the worst I’ve seen. Shots at the 2x and even 4x mark are passable, offering little if any digital artefacting, though it’s much more apparent when you push it to the 10x mark. In this scenario, the Nothing Phone 3a Pro will better serve your needs. 

The accompanying 12MP ultrawide produces solid results with a not too dramatic drop in overall quality compared to the main lens, despite the lack of pixel-binning tech. There’s no purple fringing issue you sometimes find with mid-range ultrawide lenses, offering a largely undistorted ultra-wide-angle for those scenic vistas. 

When light levels drop, performance remains respectable with a decent gathering of light in otherwise dimly lit environments, with less lens flare than competing mid-rangers – where the main lens is concerned, anyway. The ultrawide offers much softer, hazier results in comparison, so I’d recommend sticking to that primary sensor for low-light shots. 

It can be pushed to the extreme in dark outdoor conditions, though the longer exposures required introduce quite a bit of blur – even with OIS. Even my best attempts at staying still weren’t quite enough to capture a pin-sharp photo of a daffodil on a recent evening walk. 

I also noticed that low-light photos have a bit of a purple tinge compared to the Google Pixel 9a, with the latter’s comparatively orangey hues closer to what I was actually seeing.  

Samsung Galaxy A56 5G Google Pixel 9a

Performance

• Exynos 1580 power
• Same camera hardware as Galaxy A55 5G
• Some AI smarts, but not Galaxy AI smarts

Samsung might’ve purged its in-house Exynos chipsets from its flagship Galaxy S25 range, but it’s still going strong where the Galaxy A56 5G is concerned. 

The newer Exynos 1580 processor replaces last year’s 1570, with Samsung claiming an 18% boost to CPU speeds, a 17% uptick to GPU speeds and a 12% increase in NPU smarts as a result. Considering last year’s chipset was fine, if not exceptional, the upgraded performance here is welcome. 

The Exynos 1580 obviously isn’t going to compete with the flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy found in the Galaxy S25, but it does hold its own in day-to-day use. In fact, in most tasks, I’d wager the average Joe wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the two phones. 

The whole experience feels snappy and responsive, from opening apps to scrolling through media-heavy timelines. I’ve not had any complaints, and I’ve come to the A56 after reviewing a slew of Snapdragon 8 Elite-enabled flagships. 

That’s true for everything aside from gaming, anyway. Even with a 15% larger vapour chamber to keep the chipset cool, there’s just not the level of graphical grunt here to power those top-end AAA games at both high quality and high textures. 

It’s not impossible to game on, mind; regular 3D titles work just fine, and you can always drop the texture quality down on more demanding games to boost the framerate. But, if all you want to do is game on your phone, I’d recommend looking at the likes of the Poco X7 Pro or Poco F7 Pro for better performance.

Software

• OneUI 7 based on Android 15
• No Galaxy AI features
• Six years of OS upgrades

The Galaxy A56 5G runs the upgraded OneUI 7 based on Android 15 out of the box, despite still not being available for high-end 2024 phones like the Galaxy S24 and Galaxy Z Fold 6 –  at the time of writing, anyway. 

I waxed lyrical about the latest OneUI update in my Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra review if you want to find out more, but it essentially offers a redesigned UI with new icons, animations and more that give it a refreshed look and feel. It feels genuinely different from OneUI 6, and that’s not always a given across major OS upgrades. 

There are even a handful of AI features on offer, including auto-trim AI video editing, AI smarts that replicate the filter of any photo shown to it, and upgraded object eraser functionality.

To be clear, this isn’t full Galaxy AI support, rather a light smattering of AI features powered by the cloud, but it’s still nice to see. The object eraser tech is easily the best of the bunch, providing surprisingly solid results even compared to the likes of the iPhone 16 Pro Max. 

There’s also support for the ever-useful Google Circle to Search, though that has become ubiquitous on Android phones in the past year.

Things should continue to improve over time too, with Samsung committing to six OS upgrades that’ll take the mid-ranger all the way to OneUI 13 based on Android 21. It’s a year off the seven-year promise of the Pixel 9a, but it remains competitive.  

Battery Life

• 5000mAh battery
• All-day battery life
• Boosted 45W charging

Samsung might’ve left the battery untouched this year, but given that the 5000mAh cell matches that of the top-end Galaxy S25 Ultra, it’s not a huge complaint – especially when paired with a less power-hungry processor and lower-res screen than the flagship alternative.

It never struggled to get me through a full day’s use – typically around 16 hours away from the charger, with around 3-4 hours of screen time per day – but I wouldn’t quite describe it as a two-day phone with my level of usage.

I’d get to bed with around 30-35% left in the tank on most days; enough to get me through the night and maybe the morning, but not much longer. However, we’re starting to see mid-rangers with much larger batteries, like the 6000mAh cell found within the Poco X7 Pro, so it’s not the best battery life you’ll get for the money.

But while the battery itself remains untouched, Samsung did decide to upgrade the charging speed of the Galaxy A56, offering the same 45W as the top-end Galaxy S25 Ultra. In fact, that’s faster than the regular flagship Galaxy S25 that caps out at 25W. 

It unsurprisingly delivers improved charge times compared to last year’s Galaxy A55, which took 29 minutes to hit the 50% mark. The Galaxy A56 managed it in 24 minutes, while also achieving a full 100% charge 10 minutes faster than its predecessor at 73 minutes. Oddly, it’s 11 minutes slower than the near-identical S25 Ultra, suggesting some kind of inefficiency in the cheaper phone’s charging system. 

Still, it’s a solid addition and one that you can take advantage of with any high-powered USB-C charger – the same can’t be said for many fast-charging alternatives.  

There isn’t any wireless charging yet again, though I don’t really consider it a great loss considering the budget focus of the phone. If it did have wireless charging, you can bet your bottom dollar that it’d be the slower, less helpful kind. 

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