The Samsung Galaxy A36 aims for awesome but lands solidly in mid territory. If you want to get a few years of use out of a reasonably-priced phone, then the Galaxy A36 will serve you well. Even so, those who want more power may want to look elsewhere.
- Bright display
- Nice design
- Six years of security updates
- Mid performance
- Poor for multitasking
- No wireless charging
Samsung’s A-series has always been about delivering solid features at a price that won’t break the bank. Positioned firmly in the middle of its two sibling devices, the Galaxy A36 offers a handful of features that hint at a more premium experience, but it doesn't quite manage to bring everything together as smoothly as you might hope.
Its spec sheet looks great, ticking a lot of boxes for the price. But when you take the Galaxy A36 for a spin, it falls short with the good parts being outweighed by some overall sluggishness. The A36 suffers from middle-child syndrome, not as cheap as the A26 and not as powerful as the A56, without the right balance to stand on its own.
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Display and design
The Samsung Galaxy A36 has a bigger screen at 6.7 inches now, up from 6.6-inches on the previous model. With a 120Hz refresh rate, the Galaxy A36 delivers plenty of color and smooth animations with most games and activities. Although with a brightness of 1,200 nits, it's certainly not the brightest smartphone screen.
Like its sibling device, the A56, the Samsung Galaxy S36 has a slightly new design language. It has a lighter build than last year's A35, and it's also thinner at 7.4mm. The most notable shift in the design is on the back, where the three individual camera lenses are now placed in a camera bar. The camera bar itself isn't very thick, which means the device sits pretty flat on a table or desk without much of the awkwardness you experience with other uncased handsets these days.
Speaking of uncased handsets, the A36 does have a degree of protection with Corning Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on both the front and back and has an IP67 rating for water resistance. I don't usually take to throwing review units around heavy-handedly, but accidents do happen, and I'm proud to report a the A36 stands in good nick after one (or two) hip height drops onto a timber floor.
Available in Awesome Black and Awesome Lavender (our review unit came in the Lavender colorway) the Galaxy A36 looks as good as you'd expect for a mid-tier phone with a plastic frame—but the pearlescent backing on the Awesome Lavender edition does add an extra level of polish (although its very attractive to fingerprints, so you may want to grab a case).
Performance and battery life
The Samsung Galaxy A36 is powered by the Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor. It does the job when it comes to day-to-day tasks, but the device doesn't take long to heat up once you get to playing games like Genshin Impact or Marvel Snap.
The main issue I noticed in terms of performance was when it came to RAM. The Galaxy A36 comes with 6GB of RAM onboard as standard. I first noticed issues with multitasking while checking my messages and playing Balatro. I returned to my game and found my progress through the level I was on completely undone. Even leaving an app to queue some songs on Spotify, at times I would return to my an app or game and lose my place or would need to load things again and sit through loading screens.
Despite these issues with pretty standard tasks, it doesn't disappoint on uptime. The battery life on the Samsung Galaxy A36 is pretty good. With light to medium usage (think standard social media and browsing), its 5,000mAh battery will easily get you through a full day and still have plenty of battery life at the end of the day. However, you will notice more intensive tasks such as gaming, drain the battery quite quickly. In just 10–15 minutes of playtime with Genshin Impact I quickly depleted the battery as much as 5%.
You also won't find wireless charging on this device—though thankfully, the Galaxy A36 does support 45W charging. Frustratingly, you'll need to purchase a charger separately. This can get the
device from 0% back to 100% charge in just over an hour. If you're just using it as a phone with light browsing, it could
easily get you through one and a half days with no trouble.
Cameras
The triple-camera system on the Samsung Galaxy A36 is decent for a mid-range phone. In normal conditions, the Galaxy A36 takes fairly nice photos from your typical cityscapes and foodie pics for Instagram. Photos captured on the Galaxy A36 have a natural look without too much saturation, although they do tend to be less sharp than what's ideal. The main camera is a 50MP wide-lens, and then there's an 8MP ultra-wide lens and 5MP macro lens.
Night shots are pretty clear without too much noise in sufficiently low light conditions. On the front, you'll find a 12MP selfie camera. Overall, although the quality of the images was fine, my main gripe with this camera is that it's quite sluggish. I would fire off a few snaps in quick succession, only to look back through my camera roll later to see it littered with blurry amorphous blobs.
Samsung Galaxy A36 camera samples
Check out these camera samples taken on the Galaxy A36. Click or tap on any photo to see a larger version.
Samsung Galaxy A36—Final thoughts
The Samsung Galaxy A36 is a modest update on its predecessor with its more refined and lighter design. The real value in the Galaxy A36 is its long-lasting OS and security updates, which make it more appealing to those who want a new Samsung device for less.
This mid-ranger is a great value for casual use with a long battery life and decent camera, but don’t expect to get power out of this $400 handset. Once you start doing anything too intensive, the A36 shows its hand as a mid-ranger with the particular pitfalls being memory performance and struggling with multitasking.
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Alex Choros
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