Samsung Galaxy A36 5G vs Galaxy A16 5G: Twice the price, double the phone?

Intro

The Galaxy A36 5G is coming next year, likely in March 2025, to join the ranks of Samsung’s mid-ranger lineup. Samsung is likely eyeing a small design change, a change of chipset suppliers, and finally, great value. 

How will it compare against the Galaxy A16 5G, which was announced without much fanfare just a couple of weeks ago? 

As the naming nomenclature would suggest, the Galaxy A36 will likely end up being a better device than the Galaxy 

Design and Size

The upcoming Galaxy A36 5G is pretty certainly keeping the same and now signature design language that Samsung has comfortably adopted in the past few years. Thus, the Galaxy A36 will look mostly identical to the Galaxy A35, Galaxy A16, and pretty much any relatively new Galaxy. 

The same is generally true of the Galaxy A16 is well: it’s mostly the same phone, barring the notch and the likely thicker bezels around. 

We expect the Galaxy A36 to be made of plastic and adopt flat frames and display, like the Galaxy A16. There’s a punch-hole at the front of the Galaxy A36, facilitating the selfie camera, while the Galaxy A16 brings us years back with a retro-looking V-shaped notch. 

The Galaxy A36 will be much thinner than its predecessor and measure around 7.4mm, making it a relatively compact affair. How would this compare to the Galaxy A16? The latter is 7.9mm, a smidgen thicker, but won’t be such of a difference. The Galaxy A16 will be 2mm taller, but otherwise, both phones are expected to be similar in width––77.9mm, so the ergonomics will be mostly similar.

The most considerable change between generations will be at the back, where Samsung will use a unified camera island with all three camera lenses at the rear. Such a camera strip will stick out among the rest of Samsung’s phones, which are all employing separate camera lenses. 

The Key Island design feature, which houses the power and volume keys on the right-side of the device, is present on the Galaxy A16 5G, and will most certainly make it to the Galaxy A36 5G as well. 

In terms of biometrics, the Galaxy A16 has a capacitive fingerprint scanner embedded in the power button. We expect the Galaxy A36 to boast an ultrasonic in-display fingerprint scanner.  

Display Differences

We expect that the Galaxy A36 will come with a 6.64-inch Super AMOLED screen, a slight increase over the Galaxy A35’s 6.6-inch display. It will feature dynamic refresh rate, but there’s no way of telling if it will adopt the Galaxy A35’s 60-120Hz refresh rate screen or adopt a smoother 10-120Hz one. Our money is on the former, as it makes a bit more sense considering we’re dealing with a mid-ranger.

In comparison, the Galaxy A16 5G is slightly less impressive. Sure, it has a 6.7-inch screen, so a moderately larger screen, but it won’t be as smooth, seeing that it maxes out at 90hz screen refresh rate. Does this worsen the experience? Well, no at all, given the affordable nature of the phone. 

We actually quite liked the Galaxy A16 display, as stated in our review. It delivers beautiful colors and relatively high brightness for a super-affordable device, reaching 733 nits of peak brightness as per our tests. We hope that the Galaxy A36 will not only match that brightness, but also beat it. 

Performance and Software

Well, the Galaxy A36 has a pretty low bar to overcome. 

We are uncertain what chipset the Galaxy A36 will use, it could be either the 5nm Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 or the 5nm Snapdragon 7s Gen 2 chipset. This will mark another major chipset change after Samsung went through MediaTek and its own Exynos chips with the past Galaxy A3x phones. 

There will likely be versions between 6GB and 8GB of RAM on the Galaxy A36 5G, in combinations with either 128GB and 256GB versions. Meanwhile, the Galaxy A16 comes with some 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, which is at the sanitary minimum and surely adds up to the unimpressive performance. 

Both phones have microSD cards. 

We expect to see either four or six years of software support for the Galaxy A36. The Galaxy A35 only got four years of software support promise, so we expect the same or better for the upcoming phone. 

Interestingly, the Galaxy A16 5G scores six years of software support, which is surprising for such an affordable phone. 

Camera

The Galaxy A36 will likely come with a 50MP main camera, possibly an 8MP ultrawide, and sadly, a 5MP macro camera, so mostly an unchanged camera setup in comparison with the Galaxy A35. Not a pretty impressive camera setup, but it did the job well on the A35 and will likely do good on the A36, too. 

At the same time, we get a 50MP main camera, a 5MP ultrawide, and finally, a 2MP macro camera. In contrast with its predecessor, the Galaxy A16 delivers a cooler color temperature, which isn’t great, but still, images look okay-ish.

Battery Life and Charging

We expect a 5,000mAh or slightly smaller battery on the Galaxy A36 5G due to space constraints. What battery life this one would deliver will largely depend on the chipset that will be used. 

The Galaxy A16 5G also comes with a 5,000mAh battery, but the unimpressive and not very efficient chip makes it achieve okayish battery life and will easily last you a day. 

Charging-wise, we expect the Galaxy A36 to score 25W wired charging, just as much as the Galaxy A16. The latter charges fully from 0 to 100% in around an hour and 42 minutes, so we can expect similar results. No wireless charging on either phone. 

Specs Comparison

Summary

By all means, it appears that the Galaxy A36 5G will surely be the better phone, not only because it sits higher in the hierarchy, but because Samsung could put better hardware inside, which will surely ameliorate the user experience.

However, the price difference could be major. 

The Galaxy A16 5G is a $200 phone, an entry-level affordable price if we’ve ever seen one. The Galaxy A36 5G, on the other hand, will likely be a $400 phone. 

Does this mean it will be twice the phone? Remains to be seen once the Galaxy A36 5G launches.