Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Smooth operator

The Galaxy A55 was Samsung's first truly premium mid-range phone when it came to aspects such as design and performance. It was equipped with a metal frame and Gorilla Glass Victus+, and its Exynos 1480 was Samsung's first mid-range Exynos chip with an AMD-based GPU.

On paper, the Galaxy A56 doesn't look like a big upgrade. But don't let that fool you. The Galaxy A56 is more than the sum of its parts, and in this review, we take a look at what makes this phone tick and what isn't as good as we would have liked.

The Galaxy A56 feels as good as a flagship phone thanks to the use of premium materials. The A56 has Corning's Gorilla Glass Victus+ on the front and back and a flat textured metal frame, same as the Galaxy A55.

Impressively, Samsung has made the A56 0.8mm thinner and 15g lighter than the Galaxy A55 without sacrificing battery capacity and while implementing a larger vapor chamber that does a fabulous job of keeping the phone cool even under long periods of duress.

The one disadvantage of the slimmer body is the noticeable protrusion of the rear camera lenses. Samsung has also replaced the independent camera cutouts with a camera housing similar to the one found on the Fold 6.

Like the Galaxy S25 series, the A56's camera housing has what's best described as a cap on top, which looks pretty neat. It should also offer better protection to the cameras against damage.

Samsung could have skipped making any design changes—why fix what's not broken?—but didn't, and that's commendable. This year, making phones thinner seems to be a particularly important goal for the company in general. Like the A56, all Galaxy S25 models are slimmer than their predecessors, and Samsung will soon be launching a phone that's expected to be just 5.84mm thick.

One design element that has remained the same is the water and dust resistance. The A56 has an IP67 rating, which means it is fully resistant to dust and will not be damaged when immersed in 1m of water for up to 30 minutes.

At 6.7 inches, the Galaxy A56's display is slightly larger than the A55's, but it's still a Super AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels, and HDR10+ support. However, Samsung has increased max brightness by 200 nits.

The A56 display can reach 1200 nits in high brightness mode, and the difference is noticeable. On at least two occasions, I turned the screen on in bed while the lights were off and assumed the brightness slider was set above 50%, only to find that it was set to around 25% and having to lower it to stop my eyes from hurting.

That did make me think that the auto brightness algorithm needs work. The Galaxy A55 had a tendency of setting the brightness too low in indoor settings, and in the process of course correcting, Samsung has gone a little too far in the opposite direction.

That said, the Galaxy A56 offers an excellent viewing experience for every type of content. I just wish Samsung had trimmed the bezels. They are still pretty big, especially at the bottom, and combined with the larger display, they make the A56 slightly taller than the A55.

An optical fingerprint reader sits under the display, and while its accuracy was spot on for me, its detection speed isn't the fastest. For audio, you have a stereo setup that sounds good but could do with a bit more bass and be a little louder.

The Galaxy A56 is equipped with the same three rear cameras as the A55: there's a 50MP primary camera, a 12MP ultrawide camera, and a 5MP macro camera.

The image quality is pretty similar too. The A56 takes excellent daylight photos with a wide dynamic range and fairly spot on color reproduction. Nighttime photos look good as well, at least when the automatic Night mode kicks in.

The ultrawide camera takes photos with quality that's more than passable unless you use it in low-light conditions. The macro camera, however, just shouldn't exist on a phone that's priced like the Galaxy A56. It's fun for a while if you have never used a macro camera on a phone before, but most people will simply stop using it after the first couple of weeks.

A zoom camera really is a must in this day and age – some competing brands do offer that on smartphones in the A56's segment, and one can only assume Samsung is unwilling to use one on the A series from fear of cannibalizing sales of the Galaxy S FE (Fan Edition) smartphones.

Now, while the camera hardware on the back and image quality hasn't changed much, Samsung has done an amazing job of reducing lag in the camera app. I don't think Samsung has ever officially claimed to have reduced camera lag on a mid-range phone, but with the Galaxy A56, it hasn't just made the claim but also delivered results.

The Galaxy A56 has a shooting speed of 240 ms, down from 380 ms on the A55 and 800 ms on the A54 and just 40 ms slower than the Galaxy S24. Switching between the primary and ultrawide cameras is more than twice as fast as before, which Samsung appears to have partly achieved by reducing the length of the lens switching animation. Where the Galaxy A55 needed 980 ms to switch between lenses, the A56 can do it in 430 ms.

The front of the phone is where you will find a much needed hardware upgrade. Gone is the 32MP selfie camera Samsung used on the previous four models. The Galaxy A56 has a 12MP front shooter with a larger sensor, and it works almost as well as the 12MP front camera on the Galaxy S25 series, with slightly higher detail in both daylight and low-light indoor and outdoor selfies compared to the 32MP unit.

Samsung is also pushing what it calls Video HDR as an exciting new feature for both the front and rear cameras. But this appears to be a marketing gimmick. Videos shot on the rear cameras don't seem to have a higher brightness or color reproduction range compared to previous models. And despite what Samsung is claiming, the front camera does not support HDR video at all according to the camera app.

The Galaxy A56 is the closest a mid-range Samsung phone has come to a flagship device as far as performance is concerned. The Exynos 1580 chip powering it has 12%, 17%, and 18% faster NPU, GPU, and CPU performance compared to the A55's Exynos 1480, and those aren't just theoretical figures.

The A56 is the most optimized non-flagship phone from the Korean giant yet. I switched to the Galaxy A56 from the Galaxy S25 Ultra and expected a notable downgrade in UI fluidity and speed, but I was pleasantly surprised.

The A56 isn't free of stutters. But when it's running well, it's as smooth, and dare I say fast, as any Galaxy S flagship, including the S25.

Gaming performance is great as well. I also noticed that games like Call of Duty offer higher fidelity graphic and refresh rate options out of the box. Generally, when new Exynos chips make their debut, games like Call of Duty and PUBG take a while to officially add support for anything above low or medium graphics. The Galaxy A56 doesn't have that issue.

Despite all the performance improvements and the slimmer design, the Galaxy A56 actually runs cooler than the Galaxy A55. That's thanks to the larger vapor chamber cooling system – it is comparable in size to the Galaxy S24+ and does a splendid job.

It's only when running stress tests in benchmark apps like 3DMark that the temperature climbs noticeably. In real world usage, the Galaxy A56 handles heat dissipation like a champ.

The Galaxy A56 comes in 8GB+128GB and 12GB+256GB configurations, but it doesn't have a microSD slot, which will rub some prospective customers the wrong way and is another instance of Samsung bringing flagship-like restrictions to mid-range devices.

The Galaxy A56 runs One UI 7 (Android 15) out of the box and is the first phone in the lineup to be promised six years of OS and security updates, up from four and five years respectively for the last couple of models.

Samsung is also heavily touting intelligent software features with the Galaxy A56 (and the A36). But while Samsung is using the Galaxy AI logo in the UI wherever these so-called intelligent features are available, they are either existing features found on previous devices as well or features that aren't as smart as their counterparts on Samsung's flagship phones.

The object eraser for photos and images is the most obvious example of an existing feature being marketed as new, as the Galaxy A55 does as good a job at it as the Galaxy A56. The A56 doesn’t add the ability to move objects around – that is still exclusive to flagship Galaxy smartphones.

One new feature is Best face. When motion photos are enabled in the camera, this feature lets you go through multiple frames and pick the one that you think is right, which is particularly helpful for selfies where someone blinks at the wrong moment. You can manually select the best frame on any Galaxy phone that supports motion photos, but the A56 offers you automatic suggestions to make the process a lot simpler.

The A56 also comes with AI Select, a smarter version of Samsung's old Smart Select feature that lets you capture any part of the screen and get suggestions on what to do with it, like running a Google search or creating GIF files. In the Samsung Internet browser, you get Read aloud, which uses text to speech conversion to read out webpages.

Google’s Circle to Search also comes preloaded, along with Google Gemini. Many of the fancy non-AI One UI 7 features, such as Now Bar and a heavily customizable quick panel, are onboard as well. Overall, the A56 offers a fantastic software experience, just as long as you don't expect any impressive AI shenanigans.

Over the last couple of years, it has become normal for Samsung to mention “up to two days of battery life” on the product pages for both mid-range and flagship smartphones.

For the Galaxy A5x lineup, that claim was first added with the Galaxy A54, but that phone wasn't capable of running for two days on a single charge without extremely light usage. Two-day battery life was easier to achieve on the Galaxy A55, but not consistently.

Is it better on the Galaxy A56? Oh yes. Battery life on this phone is fabulous. Two days on a single charge is a walk in the park for the A56, and the longest it lasted for me was 52 hours with a whopping eight hours of screen on time. That was with the phone having been charged to 97% instead of 100%, and at the 52-hour mark, it still had 4% charge left.

It should come as no surprise then, that even with heavy use, draining the battery on the A56 in a single day is a herculean task. Whether you're on a Wi-Fi connection all day or spending hours outdoors on mobile data, the Galaxy A56 will never leave you stranded or have you scrambling for a charger.

The Galaxy A56 is the first phone in the lineup to support 45W ‘super fast 2.0′ charging, with Samsung claiming the battery can fully charge in 68 minutes and up to 65% with half an hour of charging. But that may only apply when the phone is fully shut down.

The charging speeds were inconsistent in my testing. I tested the speed by initiating charging at 1% with the phone locked and the screen turned off, and not once did I come close to Samsung's official figures.

A full charge required anywhere between 100 to 110 minutes, and 30 minutes of charging would barely take it up to around 40%. The worst part is that the included 3A cable does not support 45W charging, and the phone is choosy even when it comes to cables that can provide all that power.

I don't have Samsung's official 5A cable and tried three third-party ones with the company's official 45W travel adapter, and they were all slow even though the phone reported the maximum charging speed for all three. First-party cables being necessary to get the fastest charging speed should not be a thing unless a company is providing bonkers charging speeds of 100W and above.

The Galaxy A55 made the Galaxy A5x lineup truly exciting again after a few dull years, and with the Galaxy A56, Samsung has made some smart improvements that add up in a big way.

At long last, Samsung has optimized its software to run well on a mid-range device. The Galaxy A56 isn’t free of stutter, but it feels as smooth as the Galaxy S25 in general use most of the time. Lag in the camera app has been drastically reduced, and despite a thinner design, the Galaxy A56 is great at heat dissipation when pushed hard during gaming.

The Galaxy A56 also has unbelievably good battery life, a guarantee of six major Android OS upgrades, a brighter display, an improved selfie camera, and a design that's as premium as and slimmer than its predecessor.

It's not perfect, with the lack of storage expansion and a zoom camera being the most egregious downsides and the upgrade to 45W charging not working as well as it should. But if those limitations don't bother you, the Galaxy A56 is incredibly easy to recommend.