Samsung Galaxy A56 review: Great battery life, but comes short in performance and software experience
Samsung's A series of smartphones has been one of its best-performing series for a while now. The mid to premium price range of smartphones has seen a lot of action in the past few months including from the likes of OnePlus, iQoo, Motorola besides Samsung. Priced at Rs. 41,999 for the 256GB model and Rs. 44,999 for the 512GB model, let's see how well Samsung Galaxy A56 performs:
The device has curved corners and flat back and front with Gorilla Glass 2, with metallic frames around sides. There's a glossy finish at the back that doesn't require too many wipes frequently.
The 6.7-inch display at the front has thinner bezel with the bottom being thicker than the others. The triple-camera system at the back is now aligned in a "Linear Floating Camera Module" as per Samsung instead of having separate circular cutouts for each camera. The protruding oval ring does have a slight gap from the rest of the back that might require a bit of dust wipe every now and then. On the right, you get volume buttons and power/lock key, which are placed on a slightly protruding cutout above the rest of the flat side frame. The phone is also slimmer than the predecessor, measuring 7.4mm in thickness. IP67 dust and water-resistant, you can get it in three colours – Awesome Olive (the one I tried and prefer, too), Awesome Lightgray and Awesome Graphite.
Sporting a 6.7-inch full HD+ (1080x2340) AMOLED display which supports upto 120Hz refresh rates, this sufficiently bright display can handle HDT10 display quite well. I prefer the display to be used in natural mode under settings while the vivid mode has more pop on colours, as expected.
Talking about its camera performance, you get a 50MP (f/1.8) main camera, a 12MP (f/2.2) ultrawide camera, and a 5MP(f/2.4) macro camera. The phone takes sharp and well-stitched shots in daylight. There's decent dynamic range though in low light it tends to oversharpen and produce rather noisy photos many times. The front-facing 12MP (f/2.2) camera doesn't disappoint for taking selfie shots in good to medium lighting conditions; it can also shoot 30FPS videos from 4k to 720p.
The phone is powered by the Exynos 1580 chipset (up to 2.9Ghz octa-core processor, Xclipse 540 GPU) alongside 12GB (or 8GB) LPDDR5 RAM and 256GB (also comes in 128GB base model) UFS3.1 internal storage. Running on One UI 7 based on Android 15 with the January security patch, Samsung promises six years of OS updates and security patches, which is pretty good. This isn't the smoothest Samsung device I have used in a while nor is the best-performing smartphone around 40k today. It can handle day-to-day tasks, messaging, scrolling inside social media apps and watching and navigating YouTube just fine, but it does stutter every once in a while jumping between one app to another. It can handle high-resolution video playback well, though. There's 'Iron Shield' and some pre-loaded apps out of the box that I had disabled or uninstalled. It has several AI-related features such as ‘Circle to Search’ and AI object removal – while both work well, there’s no summarisation feature inside the Samsung internet browser for webpages.
For gaming, it can handle something like Wuthering Waves at medium settings but not higher settings without showing its limit. The phone barely showed any heating during my usage, which was nice. The optical fingerprint scanner can take a fraction of a second extra to unlock than the ultrasonic fingerprint scanner, which is otherwise okay.
The Galaxy A56's 5,000mAh battery lasted me a day quite comfortably even with 2 SIM cards in use (also supports eSiM). Call audio quality was top-notch and so was the WiFi performance.
Wrapping it up, the Galaxy A56 has a nice display and a great battery life with decent design but, comes up short when it comes to performance and experience compared to peers from OnePlus and iQoo, and even Samsung's own Galaxy S24 FE for those who prefer One UI.
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