Samsung Galaxy A56 review: The best mid-range Samsung phone

The smartphone release calendar is slowly turning over from flagship season to the age of the mid-ranger and we’re starting with the Samsung Galaxy A56. This is the successor to one of my favourite mid-range phones from last year – the Samsung Galaxy A55 – and the debut of Samsung’s new software support policy for its mid-rangers, extending OS and security updates from four years to six years. 

Like the brand’s flagship S25 series, however, the improvements to software are paired with a notable lack of hardware upgrades. There’s a new chipset and a slightly larger display, but, for the most part, the Galaxy A56 is cannily similar to its predecessor. 

With competitive mid-range handsets on the horizon from Nothing, Apple and Google, Samsung is taking quite the risk by resting on its laurels.

Samsung Galaxy A56 review: What you need to know

The Galaxy A56 is Samsung’s high-end mid-range phone, running on the new 2.9GHz Exynos 1580 chipset, paired with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of onboard storage. The battery is a fairly standard 5,000mAh, but charging has been bumped up from 25W to 45W for this generation.

The AMOLED display is marginally bigger than the Galaxy A55’s panel (6.7in compared to 6.6in) but is otherwise the same, with a 2,340 x 1,080 resolution and a dynamic refresh rate up to 120Hz. 

There’s a new 12-megapixel selfie camera in a hole-punch notch at the top of the display, while over on the rear, the three lenses are organised into a vertical “traffic light” style housing. The cameras are the same 50-megapixel main, 12-megapixel ultrawide and 5-megapixel macro as the previous generation.

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Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Price and competition

Technically speaking, the Samsung Galaxy A56 is only £10 more than its predecessor, with the sole 256GB model priced at £499. However, last year’s Galaxy A55 also offered a 128GB variant for £439, so the starting price is higher here.

The biggest challenger in this price range is the Google Pixel 8a, with the 128GB model costing the same £499 as the Galaxy A56 and the 256GB priced at £559. The Pixel 8a beats the Galaxy A56’s software support, with updates for seven years, and has some of our favourite cameras around this price.

And then there’s the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro. I’ve not reviewed this at the time of writing but it looks very competitive: it’s cheaper than the Galaxy A56, at £449, and it includes a 3x periscope telephoto camera, which is rare for a mid-range phone.

Finally, Apple just released the iPhone 16e, which starts at £599 for the 128GB model and goes up to a 512GB variant for a hefty £899.

Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Design and key features

One of my criticisms of the Galaxy A55 was that it felt a little chunky in the hand. The Galaxy A56 is marginally taller and wider than the A55, measuring 162 x 77mm, but the skinnier depth (7.4mm compared to 8.2mm) makes it feel less bulky overall. It’s also lost a fair bit of weight, dropping from last year’s 213g down to a more manageable 198g.

Despite being lighter, the Galaxy A56 is just as robust as its predecessor, with a sturdy aluminium frame, an IP67 dust and water resistance rating and layers of Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on the front and rear. 

There are four new colours to choose from this year: both the light grey colourway and the graphite style reviewed here are fairly understated, but you can add a splash of colour with the olive and pink models. 

The rim around the rear camera housing is matched to your colour of choice, but the matte glass between the lenses is black no matter what. This looks fine on my graphite model but it makes the camera housing look a little tacked on with the other models – I’d have preferred to see Samsung employ a colour-specific two-tone camera housing, like Apple did with the iPhone 16.

The 12-megapixel selfie camera offers an efficient face unlock and the under-display fingerprint sensor was swift and accurate during my testing. It’s not all positive on the features front, however, as Samsung has dropped the microSD card slot for this generation. Expandable storage is cropping up on fewer phones these days but it’s a shame to see Samsung drop a feature that helped the Galaxy A55 stand out.

The Samsung Galaxy A56 runs Android 15 out of the box, with the One UI 7 launcher layered on top. I don’t get on with this OS as well as the cleaner UI offered by Google’s Pixel phones, but Samsung has done a lot of work to neaten it up over the past few generations. I still don’t love the non-alphabetical app drawer or the lack of Google Wallet as standard but it’s otherwise easy enough to get to grips with.

Better still, Samsung has improved its software support pledge to six years for both OS updates and security patches. That’s still not quite as good as the Google Pixel 8a – which offers seven years of updates – but given that the latter launched last year with Android 14, it does mean that the Galaxy A56 will end support at the same time as the Pixel 8a.

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Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Display

The 6.7in AMOLED display retains the same 2,340 x 1,080 resolution and 120Hz peak refresh rate as its predecessor but it gets a fair bit brighter now. On manual brightness, the display topped out at 462cd/m2, while switching to adaptive brightness and shining a torch on the light sensor pushed it to a fantastic 1,142cd/m2.

Colour accuracy is better than last year, too. The Vivid profile has punchier colours that are better suited to streaming and gaming, but the Natural setting targets sRGB and aims for authenticity. Here, I recorded gamut coverage of 95% with a volume of 97.9% and an average Delta E colour variance score of 1.37. That’s not perfect but it’s much closer to the target value of 1 or under than we saw with the Galaxy A55 (1.82).

Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Performance and battery life

The Exynos 1580 processor is a decent improvement over the previous generation, beating the Exynos 1480-powered Galaxy A55 by 16% in the single-core benchmarks and 12% in the multi-core. It still can’t match the speeds of the Google Pixel 8a, however, which beat the Samsung by 29% and 13%, in the single and multi-core tests, respectively.

And then, of course, Apple’s blisteringly powerful silicon sees the iPhone 16e far surpassing any Android options in this price range.

It’s a similar story in the GFXBench GPU tests: the Galaxy A56 hits a higher framerate than its predecessor but the Pixel 8a puts everything else to shame, with on-screen and off-screen framerates close to twice that of all the other competitors. 

Even still, the Galaxy A56 is a decent enough gaming phone; it played Genshin: Impact on the default graphics settings relatively smoothly, without any notable lagging or stuttering. If you want the best gaming performance for this kind of money, the Pixel is a better choice, but casual gamers will get on fine with the Galaxy A56.

Samsung finally secures advantage over Google in the battery life stakes, with the Galaxy A56 lasting for a fantastic 28hrs 5mins. That’s around four hours longer than both its predecessor and the Google Pixel 8a. 

The 45W charging brought the phone from empty to 50% in 25 minutes, but things slowed down a little from there and it took 1hr 15mins to hit 100%. That’s not much better than the 25W charging on the Galaxy A55 (1hr 20mins) but it is much better than the Pixel 8a’s 18W charging, which took closer to two hours to reach 100%.

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Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Cameras

I was disappointed to see no camera improvements in the Galaxy A55 last year, so it’s even more of a letdown that the Galaxy A56 is once again fitted with that same trio of rear lenses. 

The 50-megapixel (f/1.8) main camera is a decent shooter, in fairness, capturing detailed and naturally coloured shots in good lighting. There are also a handful of new editing features this year, including Best Face – which is essentially Samsung’s version of Google’s Best Take – and a generative fill object eraser.

Night photography is about as good as last year; the artificial brightening is relatively effective but there’s still some noise in the sky and the colours are a little over-saturated.

Detail remains a weak spot of the 8-megapixel (f/2.2) ultrawide camera but otherwise, it’s not a bad shooter, with tone and temperature that are generally in line with the main lens.

The 5-megapixel macro camera really should have been dropped by now. The option for macro is buried in the menu and the resulting images are blurry – it’s just not worth the effort.

The selfie camera has been downgraded from a 32-megapixel sensor to 12-megapixel (f/2.2) but the shots are still decent enough, with natural-looking skin tones and reasonably sharp focus in portrait mode. Interestingly, this lens also supports 10-bit HDR video recording – a feature which is notably absent from the rear cameras.

Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Verdict

It’s a shame that Samsung has dropped the microSD card slot this year but otherwise, the Galaxy A56 is a decent improvement over its predecessor. It’s a nippy performer, battery life is fantastic, the display is brighter and more colour accurate, cameras are solid, albeit mostly unchanged, and the six years of software support is some of the best you can get in this price range.

For any Samsung fans who fancy an affordable Galaxy S25 alternative, the Galaxy A56 is a slam dunk. It easily replaces its predecessor as the brand’s best mid-range offering. It doesn’t unseat the Google Pixel 8a as the best in its price range, however. The latter is still faster, better for gaming, has a more accurate display and superior cameras. More to the point, the Pixel 9a is arriving very soon – I’d wait and see how that reviews before committing to the Samsung Galaxy A56.