It's the season for affordable smartphones to work hard on each other. We have Apple, we look forward to Google, and Samsung put its roster into the ring. The Galaxy A series will be refreshed next month. It starts at $400 from the Galaxy A36, followed by the Galaxy A26, and costs $300. The Galaxy A56 starts at $500 and will also be bumpy, although there are no expected release dates yet. All three devices have “awesome smart”, which seems to be Samsung's rebranding of Galaxy AI for its low-cost devices.
The Galaxy A56, A36 and A26 all come with the same size screen, although they each offer different essentials. Each phone has a 6.7-inch super AMOLED display with a refresh rate of 120Hz instead of the standard specifications at that price point, and there is a 5,000 mAh battery to hold it. All phones start with 128GB of storage. Samsung's Exynos 1580 chipset powers the Galaxy A56, which runs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 platform. Only the Galaxy A56 offers 8GB of RAM, while the A36 and A26 are stuck at 6GB. This would be interesting considering that the flagship store adopts more RAM to accommodate AI. Software updates are also locked here; Samsung promises six years of support and Android OS updates.
The camera systems in the A-series are all different, but only a little bit. The Galaxy A56 is considered the “highest” layer of the trio, with a 12-MP Ultrawide camera, a 50-MP main camera, a 5MP macro camera and a 12-MP front camera. The Galaxy A36 starts at $300 and has the same main camera, but calls an 8 MP Ultrawide camera and a 5 MP macro camera. There is also a 12-MP front-facing camera. The cheapest Galaxy A26 is $300, except for the 20MP macro camera and 13MP front-facing camera.
Great intelligence
You might be asking yourself, what exactly is “awesome intelligence”? This is Samsung's attempt to rename AI as a budget lineup. It's a good thing that Samsung proposes a way to distinguish its products from Galaxy AI, because it sounds more “forward-looking” than “awesome.” Awesome Intelligence will let you use key Google Gemini capabilities such as Circle Search, including new features to boot into the Galaxy S25 series to help you recognize songs. It also gives you access to Galaxy AI features such as Object Raser. This is also true in addition to some other key Samsung features, such as the nightclub algorithm in camera applications. It's enough to make you say, “Great!” or something like that.
This is slightly different from Apple and Google, which use the same processor for flagship and low-cost devices to deliver equal software throughout the ecosystem. Samsung chooses places where its manufacturing capabilities remain strong. That's why you'll see a killer screen and a bigger battery on Samsung's budget-friendly phone. Interestingly, how Samsung continues to cut AI capabilities from flagship stores to low-cost subsets, and what it considers awesome intelligence to be “basic”.
