8.0 Score
The real competition in the smartphone market happens in the mid-tier segment, with brands including features that were once deemed premium to cater to a wider mass market. Last year’s Galaxy A55 5G was a hit-and-miss for me, especially the inferior performance, which made the phone a little lacklustre. But it seems like Samsung has upped the ante this year, and after our time with it, you are going to be happy because it is pretty good. Let us share more in this Samsung Galaxy A56 5G Review.
Samsung Galaxy A56 5G Review
What’s New?
New 45W Charging Speed (Heck Yes!)
I am happy that the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G, gets a much faster charging speed for 2025. While the 25W is pretty decent from the get-go, amping up to 45W is better as you get better speeds, and still retain the battery health in the long run. What’s funny is that the A56 has a much faster charging speed than the tiny S25 which is capped at 25W. We charged the A56 5G from 10% to 100% and it took about 1 hour-ish. This means, charging from 0% should take slightly over an hour at around 1 hour 15 minutes.
In order for you to charge at 45W, you must require a good USB-C cable and a USB-C adapter that supports it. For one, you could purchase one from Samsung officially, which should do the trick. But when you have better adapters out there, like the SHARGE 67W Retro or ASUS 65W GaN Charger which offers better returns for your money, I’d say get those chargers – which could potentially replace your multiple chargers for just one.
The Processor (and it’s really good)
Samsung is using the Exynos 1580 in their Galaxy A56 5G, whereas the A36 uses Snapdragon instead. But hold your horses, because this 1580 is a pretty good processor which caught me off guard. Last year’s Exynos 1480 wasn’t my favourite because the occasional glitches I encountered while gaming were something I can remember even today.
But that isn’t the case with the Exynos 1580. Skip this part if it’s too technical. For one, it’s made on Samsung’s 4th Gen EUV FinFET Process and it’s built on a newer node with ARMv9 CPU cores (vs ARMv8 on the 1480). The Xclipse 540 GPU you are seeing here still uses AMD RDNA3 Architecture, however, it has 2 work group processors (vs 1 on the 1480). Samsung split the 8-CPU cores into prime, big and small – you have one prime clocked at 2.9GHz, three big clocked at 2.6GHz and four small closed at 1.95GHz.
In layman, Samsung has improved the CPU cores by re-arranging the cores with three different clock speeds and with the new Xclipse 540, which has twice the work group processor for a better graphics experience. Nice on paper, what about in real life – it is really good.
Benchmark scores aren’t exciting of course, you see minor points improvements – but in real-life situations, I never thought I could play Wuthering Waves and Honkai Star Rail at Very High settings with very minor stutters which only happens after a certain duration due to heat. Knock the performance down to High or Medium, this phone plays these games like wonders with amazing performance maintained over an hour. This is what I want to see in mid-tier smartphones.
With OneUI 7 out of the box, you don’t get all the goodness a flagship gets, but the UI still has some nice tricks up its sleeves for you to customize, and everything feels very snappy and nice.
What’s Improved?
Design and Build
I can’t help but do this comparison, although the S series is a premium flagship smartphone – but, the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G feels surprisingly premium and nice in the hand and the design is a whole lot more thoughtful than you’d expect. The slightly protruded buttons look kind of nice and the brushed sides with curved rails feel much better to hold. When you rub your fingers on the brushed rails, you can feel the ridges but it’s better than the S25 finish – which is a shame. The phone is slightly lighter at 198g (vs 213g on A55) and 7.4mm thin (vs 8.2mm).
Slightly bigger and Better Display
You might not feel the display increase as it is just .1” bigger than the A55 – but the new 6.7” display is now 200 nits brighter than the A55 which is important. The 1200nit peak brightness is going to help you use your phone under bright sunny conditions a little more easily. I do hope to see the anti-reflective coating here, hopefully, one day. Watching movies and shows on this display is going to be very entertaining as most mid-tier smartphones these days have the best AMOLED displays you can find. The resolution is at FHD+, which is okay.
Camera Software
While we may not get the Galaxy Advanced Intelligence experience from the flagships, Samsung has given us a few camera-centric intelligence features that give you a nice experience to shoot with. You get access to Object Eraser, Best Face, Edit Suggestions, Custom Filters and Auto Trim. These are the only camera “intelligent” features found in the new Galaxy A56 5G. Do the work as they are intended?
Why yes – my favourite is still Custom Filters where you can capture a colour profile from an image you love and start shooting photos. The other features like Best Face, Edit Suggestions, Object Eraser and Auto Trim – we have seen them on the S25 Ultra, and it work identical. However, at the time of writing, we couldn’t get the Object Eraser and Edit Suggestions to work at all – which is a minor glitch which hopefully gets fixed soon.
What’s the Same or Okay?
Camera Hardware
Expect no changes in the camera department – where we still have the same 12MP ultra-wide shooter and 50MP primary shooter. There’s a third camera, the depth sensor, which is still useless in my opinion. As for the other two functional cameras, they are pretty good to shoot with – and this time around, the ISP does improve the colours and sharpness of the image – and that applies to both front and rear cameras. I did enjoy shooting photos with this camera and you are not going to be disappointed.
However there are some things to take note of: it doesn’t have a telephoto, so they have locked the zoom to 10x – which is genius because that’s the usable range, you must enable Motion Photo for Best Face (which also takes up more space than your usual photos) and the video records in H.264 but if you want HEVC, you can do it as well.
Battery Capacity and Life
Under the hood, you get the same 5000mAh battery from last year, but with the new processor which gives better performance and efficiency – you are looking at a good battery life – under a mixed usage of 6 hours + of screen on time, we ended the day with at least 45% battery left, which makes this phone a perfectly capable device for a 1 and a half day phone. You could get two days if you are an extremely light user. The standby mode was pretty good too, we had about 17 hours + of screen off time.
Gaming can affect the battery life but one of the best flagship features is here: you can now use your charger to power up the phone and bypass the charging entirely – which protects the battery life. Better yet, the scalability you get in the Game Centre is useful too.
What’s Missing?
SD Card Slot
With the lack of an SD Card slot, it’s important that you pick the right storage configuration that matches your personal preference. Here in Malaysia, you have the option to get 8GB RAM with 128GB storage, priced at RM 1999 and 12GB RAM with 256GB storage, priced at RM 2199. Now, if your goal is to just use it for light use cases such as social media, store your messaging data and such, the 128GB might be enough.
But if you are planning to use more than that, such as for gaming, because data from games take up a lot of storage – Honkai Star Rail and Wuthering Waves took about 50GB storage – which is a lot. And on top of the photos and videos you take, share on your messages, and the list goes on – then opting in for the 256GB makes more sense.
But it’s a shame that they removed the SD card which comes in handy, especially when you use the phone for 4-5 years, considering that’s how long Samsung is promising updates for the phone.
Conclusion
With improved processor performance, the Samsung Galaxy A56 5G brings a finer experience to their mid-tier smartphone lineup.
Combined with the incremental improvements and hardware that’s been retained from its previous generation which now gives a better experience, thanks to the new processor – it is a pretty capable smartphone for a lot of users who are willing to shell out RM 2000 for the 12GB RAM with 256GB Storage variant – which is what we reviewed here.
There’s a good chance you will see this phone priced at RM 1999 or lower, and that’s a good price to pay – if you ask me, as opposed to the RM 2199 suggested retail price.
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