Samsung Galaxy A56 Hands-On: iPhone 16e Key Rival

Just last week, we were treated to a new iPhone. It’s got the latest A18 chip and Apple Intelligence, but it also starts at £600 for a single-rear-camera-toting phone with a 60Hz display, in 2025.

Just a week later and I’m holding what will soon be Samsung’s hottest new mid-range entry, the Galaxy A56, and it’s making me question how just off-base Apple’s latest mobile proposition is.

For starters, the A56 clocks in at £100 less than the base price of the iPhone 16e, despite toting twice the internal storage (256GB), but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

It would appear that Samsung’s AI efforts aren’t as hardware-dependant as Apple’s either, with Galaxy AI features trickling down from the flagship Galaxy S25 series, despite the A56 not rocking a flagship-class chipset.

The phone instead sports what the company is calling ‘Awesome AI’ which, as part of its new One UI 7.0 user experience, includes new brand-exclusives like Now Brief and AI Select; alongside the latest update of Google’s Circle-to-Search experience and, of course, Google Gemini comes preloaded on the phone too.

With this new A-series entry, Samsung is also raising the bar among Android’s best mid-range phones, by promising six years of OS and security updates.

While Apple doesn’t make any update promises upfront when it launches new iPhones, previous entries in the series have received between five to seven years of support. As such, it’s fair to assume that the A56 comes with just as much staying power, from a software standpoint.

While the new mid-range 4nm Exynos 1580 chipset likely won’t keep pace with the 16e’s top-shelf Apple A18 silicon, it still marks a welcome jump in promised performance for the Galaxy A-series itself.

Samsung claims it delivers a 12% improvement in NPU performance (needed for AI tasks), a 16% uptick in GPU performance (ideal for gaming) and 18% better CPU performance, compared to the Exynos 1480 found in last year’s Galaxy A55.

Despite a generationally slimmed down design (7.4mm down to 8.2mm, while the 16e measures 7.8mm thick), as well as giving the phone a premium feel and finish in person, the A56’s brushed metal frame also conceals a new vapour chamber that’s 45% larger than the one found inside the A55.

This spells good things for sustained performance; something we’ll definitely be testing side by side with alternatives, including the 16e, come review time.

Both phones sport 12MP selfie snappers (albeit with the A56’s being far less obtrusive compared to the Face ID notch arrangement on the iPhone), but it’s the rear camera system where the Galaxy has the edge.

I have no doubt that the 48MP Fusion camera on the 16e – with its 2x lossless sensor-crop zoom – will perform admirably, but there’s only so much you can do with a single rear camera.

The A56 features a refreshed linear triple camera array, led by a 50MP sensor that captures in 12MP by default, but now allows full 50MP capture if you prefer; while a larger sensor (with larger 1µm pixels) has also been tuned for better HDR video capture (topping out at 4K/30fps to the iPhone’s admittedly superior 4K/60fps cap).

Add to that a secondary 12MP ultrawide and a dedicated 5MP macro sensor, as well as AI-enhanced semantic separation and tools like Best Take – making sure everyone’s looking at the camera and smiling – and there’s just a lot more to the A56’s shooting experience, from a versatility standpoint.

Perhaps the one of the most egregious shortcomings in the 16e’s makeup, in spite of its price point, relates to its display. Although now OLED (unlike the entries in the SE line before it), the phone’s 6.1-inch panel still clocks in at a pedestrian 60Hz.

The Galaxy A5 line has boasted OLED visuals and ProMotion-like 120Hz fluidity for years at this point. The 6.7-inch panel on the A56 clocks in with a significantly brighter display too, promising an HBM (high brightness mode) maximum of 1200nits, paired with a 1900-nit peak for HDR content.

Compare that to the 16e’s 800-nit panel-wide brightness ceiling, and 1200nits maximum and I know which display I’d rather gaze at in bright sunlight.

Samsung has perfected the A-Series formula, based on my initial encounter with the Galaxy A56, and while mid-range performance holds it back from competing with Apple’s devices on all fronts, in almost every other area, it’s one of the most compelling rivals to the 16e to launch this year.

While storage and RAM may vary by market, in the UK, the Galaxy A56 comes with 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage and 8GB of LPDDR5X RAM, which costs £499 and goes on sale on 19 March. You can pre-order it now from Samsung.