Samsung Galaxy A36 review

Display

The Galaxy A36 now arrives with a larger 6.7-inch AMOLED screen. It has 1,080 x 2,340 pixels (385ppi) resolution, 120Hz refresh rate support and is protected by a Gorilla Glass Victus+ sheet.

In our standardized display measurements the maximum automatic brightness is 1,233 nits. The maximum manual brightness we captured was 433 nits.

Samsung's official brightness specs for the A36 are 1,200 nights for high brightness mode and 1,900 for peak. The smaller the white patch, the higher the brightness, so the promised 1,900 nits are achievable.

Finally, the minimum brightness with a white patch on-screen is just 1.8 nit, which is excellent.

The Galaxy A36 offers two refresh rate modes - Adaptive and Standard. The latter puts a cap at 60Hz, while Adaptive will try to keep the refresh rate at 120Hz in most scenarios.

Naturally, for static images and video playback, as well as incompatible apps, the Adaptive mode will dial down to 60Hz refresh rate.

The Galaxy A36 does not officially support HDR streaming and apps like Netflix will not serve HDR10 content. YouTube, on the other hand, does offer HDR videos up to 4K.

Battery life

The Galaxy A36 is powered by the same 5,000mAh battery as the A35, among other Galaxy A phones.

The phone scored an Active Use Score of 11:38h, slightly lower than the A56's and the previous A35 model. The Galaxy A36 did well when it came to calls, web browsing and gaming but the streaming time is lower than the mentioned models.

Still, we'd say the battery life is adequate, though not among the best in this class.

Charging speed

The most notable upgrade for the Galaxy A36 has to be the 45W fast charging over Power Delivery with Samsung's PPS. The phone needs a 5A-rated USB cable to reach 45W, so the bundled one (3A) is not enough.

Samsung is selling its 45W chargers with a 5A cable, but if you are going for a third-party adapter, you'd have to also get a suitable cable if you are hoping to reach peak charging speed.

We tested the Galaxy A36 with an original Samsung 45W (T4510) charger and got 1 hour and 14 minutes from 0 to 100%. You get 36% of the charge back in the first 15 minutes, and we captured 60% charge on the 30 min mark.

In case you are not a fan of fast-charging things, the software gives you a couple of options to optimize your charging automatically to preserve the battery health. For instance, you can limit the charging to one of the few preset levels above 80% or disable fast charging altogether.

Speakers

The Galaxy A36 offers the common stereo setup, where there is a dedicated speaker at the bottom and a double-duty earpiece at the top.

The speakers on the Galaxy A36 scored a Good mark on our loudness test. Their sound quality is also good, with solid vocals, deep bass and okay-ish high frequency range.

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.