Samsung Galaxy A56 review

6.7-inch bright OLED

Most of the Galaxy A56's display specs are the same as last year - 1080 x 2340px resolution, 120Hz refresh rate and HDR10+ support. However, there are notable upgrades, one of which is the bigger screen diagonal, now 6.7" and with thinner bezels so the footprint remains relatively the same.

Another notable upgrade is max brightness. In manual mode, the A56's display is still in the mid-400 nits, but the panel can now shoot up to 1,213 nits in auto mode. That's a noticeable upgrade over the A55 and should provide excellent legibility outdoors even on a bright sunny day.

Refresh rate

Refresh rate control is pretty standard. You have two options - Adaptive and Standard. The latter puts a cap at 60Hz, while Adaptive will try to keep the refresh rate at 120Hz in most scenarios.

However, when showing static images or playing video, the display will dial down to 60Hz.

We tested some Android games proven to run at 120fps and they seem to play nicely with the Galaxy A56. The titles we tried saturated the display's maximum refresh rate at 120fps/120Hz.

Battery life

The Galaxy A56 runs on the same 5,000 mAh battery as last year but gets a slightly more powerful and, thus, potentially more power-hungry Exynos 1580 SoC. The phone also has a bit larger display and the battery endurance results reflect the changes.

The A56 has a slightly lower Active Use Score of 12:08 compared to last year by posting lower gaming and video playback runtimes. The web browsing score goes up a little, though.

In the context of other similarly priced phones, the A56 is just about average. For example, the Xiaomi 14T and the Motorola Edge 50 Pro sit lower than the A56, while the OnePlus Nord 4 and the Nothing Phone (3a) Pro edge out Samsung's offering.

Charging speed

When it comes to charging speed, the Galaxy A56 offers an upgrade - 45W fast charging over Power Delivery with Samsung's PPS. We tested the phone with a 45W Samsung charger and got 1 hour and 13 minutes from 0 to 100%. Surprisingly, that's slower than last year's A55 to get to full, but the A56 is considerably faster at the 15 and 30-minute marks. You get 65% of the charge back in the first 30 minutes.

But compared to the competition, the A56 is behind the curve. There are a handful of alternatives that get close to the 100W mark or even go beyond, like the Motorola Edge 50 Pro and the OnePlus Nord 4.

Keep in mind that you can't reach a 45W charging rate if you are not using an appropriate 5A-rated cable, which is not supplied with the retail package. You need to buy one separately to go with your 45W-rated USB-PD 3.0 PPS charger.

But in case you are not a fan of the fast charging thing, the software gives you a couple of options to preserve 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 A56 features a standard, hybrid stereo speaker setup - one full-fledged speaker at the bottom and one doubles as an earpiece at the top. Naturally, the main loudspeaker is slightly louder.

Speaking of loudness, the device scored -26.2 LUFS, making it a "Good" overall result, but we appreciate the sound quality more. Compared to most similarly priced solutions, the A56 offers deeper and warmer sound with less distorted highs at higher volumes.

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.