Samsung Galaxy A56 review

One UI 7.0 on top of Android 15

The Galaxy A56 comes with the latest One UI 7.0 software based on Android 15, and it's one of the midrangers with the longest software support in the industry. Samsung promises 6 generational OS upgrades and up to 6 years of security patches.

Here's our One UI 7 review in mobile view format - watch it on your phone:

You should also check out the Galaxy S25's software section to get familiar with One UI 7.0.

Of course, the video above is based on the S25 series and not all features are available on the Galaxy A56 due to hardware limitations. Most of these are AI-related. That's not to say there are no AI-powered features.

The most notable one is perhaps the AI Select, a feature built on the Smart Select functionality from the previous One UI generations. The AI can now analyze the screen's content in more detail and offer actions based on it. It can grab any text appearing in a photo, make a photo clipping, create GIFs from Instagram reels or make wallpaper using a photo you have open on the screen.

One UI 7

Google's Circle to Search is also at hand, if you want to search more information online for any object you see on the screen.

One UI 7

Read aloud is supported only when using Samsung's default web browser.

Samsung's native Gallery app also offers the Object eraser, which however is not as excellent as the one in the Galaxy S25 series.

Benchmark performance

The device runs on a brand new Exynos 1580 chipset, bringing a solid upgrade compared to last year's Exynos 1480. It's built on a new node with upgraded ARMv9 CPU cores and twice the GPU capabilities, at least on paper.

The CPU is octa-core with 1x2.9 GHz Cortex-A720 & 3x2.6 GHz Cortex-A720 & 4x1.9 GHz Cortex-A520 clusters. The GPU is based on AMD's RDNA 3 architecture with two Work Group Processors, which is twice the GPU hardware from last year. The GPU is called Xclipse 540.

The memory configurations start from 8GB/128GB and go up to 12GB/256GB. In all tiers, you'd be getting UFS 3.1 storage.

Now off to the benchmarks.

The Exynos 1580 appears to be considerably more powerful than the Exynos 1480 in the Galaxy A55 - by around 17% in the CPU scenarios, by almost 11% in the mixed scenario (AnTuTU 10), and by 30% in the GPU-heavy workloads like 3DMark Wild Life Extreme. These are notable generational gains.

However, while the A56 seems to utilize the chipset's capabilities very well, it falls behind some similarly priced competition. Take the Xiaomi 14T and the OnePlus Nord 4, for example. They both consistently outperform Samsung's midranger with their Dimensity 8300 and Snapdragon 7+ Gen 3 SoCs, respectively.

Sustained performance

Sustained performance is excellent as the handset shows excellent performance retention in both stress scenarios. In the CPU stress test, the Exynos 1580 floated between 80 and 100% of its maximum theoretical performance.

CPU and GPU stress tests

The GPU stress test returned an even better score - over 99% GPU stability throughout the test.