Samsung Galaxy A06 review
Display
There is nothing particularly impressive or interesting about the display of the Galaxy A06. It is as basic as they come nowadays. It is a simple PLS LCD with a basic HD 720 x 1600 pixel resolution. It only has a 60Hz refresh rate. As we said, quite basic.
The panel in question doesn't get particularly bright either. In our testing, we measured a maximum of 564 nits of brightness. That was achieved by simply maxing out the brightness slider. The Galaxy A06 lacks any max auto overburn mode beyond that. At least an ambient light sensor controls the automatic display brightness perfectly competently.
Max display brightness test
White test pattern, 75% fill (nits)
- Manual mode
- Auto mode
Redmi Note 13 4G
Galaxy A15 5G
Poco X5
Realme C55
Xiaomi Poco C65
Galaxy A06
Xiaomi Redmi 12
We measured a minimum brightness of 7 nits at point white, which is not ideal either. The display can't get too dim, either. There is some light bleed in blacks, but not too much. Contrast isn't too bad at around 1484:1.
In terms of more subjective observations, the display on the Galaxy A06 looks pretty bad in person. It is overly reflective and compounds with the rather low maximum brightness. The pixel response rate is pretty bad, too, with plenty of ghosting on screen.
Expectedly, the Galaxy A06 has no HDR support. It has no HDR decoder support either. On a more positive note, the phone does have the highest possible Widevine L1 DRM certification. Not that it is that needed since even without it streaming services like Netflix will serve up HD streams and saturate the phone's display resolution.
Battery life
5,000 mAh batteries have become the standard nowadays, precisely what the Galaxy A06 has.
The phone scored a solid 13:50 hours of Active Use Score in our testing. The Galaxy A06 did particularly well in the voice call section of the testing, for what that's worth.
Charging speed
Unfortunately, we had some trouble with our charging test on the Galaxy A06. We tried testing with two different Samsung 25W chargers and a known-good 65W third-party charger with support for SFC. No matter which charger we chose, our review unit refused to charge at more than 2W.
The odd thing is that the phone recognized the charger since it indicated "Super fast charging", complete with the blue charging ring, but never actually took advantage of the wattage.
We are almost certain we got a defective unit, which should not be your experience. We expect the Galaxy A06 to have charging speeds similar to that of the Galaxy A05s. It should be able to go from dead to about 25% in fifteen minutes, 43% in thirty minutes, and a full charge should take around 1:30 hours.
Speakers - loudness and quality
The Galaxy A06 has a single bottom-firing speaker. That's quite understandable for a budget phone. That being said, other phones in this price bracket, like last year's Galaxy A25 or the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 4G, offer stereo speakers on a budget.
The speaker on the Galaxy A06 isn't particularly impressive either. It produces a decent volume, though it is only enough for a good score in our ranking. Mids come out sounding well enough with clear dialogue, which is great. Highs can easily get distorted especially at higher volume levels, and there is practically no bass.
Samsung has still thrown in some more advanced audio features, like Dolby Atmos and Bluetooth's nifty separate app sound feature.
Use the Playback controls to listen to the phone sample recordings (best use headphones). We measure the average loudness of the speakers in LUFS. A lower absolute value means a louder sound. A look at the frequency response chart will tell you how far off the ideal "0db" flat line is the reproduction of the bass, treble, and mid frequencies. You can add more phones to compare how they differ. The scores and ratings are not comparable with our older loudspeaker test. Learn more about how we test here.
Connectivity
The Galaxy A06 is a dual nano-SIM device. At least our review unit is. The phone does exist in a single-SIM variant in some markets, so check it carefully. You only get LTE connectivity with the Galaxy A06, with no 5G support. There is no eSIM support either.
The Galaxy A06 supports GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO and BDS for location. Local connectivity is covered by dual-band Wi-Fi 5/ac and Bluetooth 5.2 with LE support. There is no NFC, which is kind of unfortunate. The Galaxy A06 has a 3.5mm audio jack, which is great. It also has an FM radio receiver.
The Galaxy A06 has a basic Type-C port backed up by a basic USB 2.0 data connection. That means a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 480 Mbps. There is no video output support or anything fancy, but you do get OTG/USB Host support.
The Galaxy A06 has a pretty sparse set of sensors, but the basics are still covered. There is a stk83xx accelerometer and a stk3a5x light and proximity combo. The proximity sensor seems to be an actual hardware, not a virtual one, which is great to see on such a budget device. There is no magnetometer, no compass, no gyroscope and no barometer.
Reader comments
- telestarcomgsm
- 16 Sep 2024
- IbG
Does not look too bad in terms of the physical design plus having a jack, if only this body and design could be used on an A or M model higher than 10x but not as high as 50x