The most popular phones in Samsung’s smartphone portfolio aren’t the uncannily thin Folds or the pen-touting Ultras; they are the Galaxy A-series phones that make up the bulk of Samsung’s sales and rank among the best-selling phones in the world quarter after quarter. I expect the Samsung Galaxy A37 to replace its A36 predecessor in short order.
The A-series of phones isn’t aiming at feature-chasing power users who feel the need to upgrade every year or two, though. Instead, the series aims to provide a reliable device you’ll be happy keeping for a few extra years, an affordable phone that looks a heck of a lot closer to its premium flagship siblings while making a few reasonable spec sacrifices under the hood.
While none of the changes between the new A37 and 2025’s A36 are earth-shattering, even the most modest of iterative updates allows the A37 to remain a worthwhile value, despite a $50 price increase.
The A37’s cameras are largely unchanged outside a slight boost to the Nightography mode. Galaxy AI mostly consists of existing features (like Circle to Search) or is about a year behind the Pixel counterpart (Object Eraser and Suggested Edits). Still, it’s hard to go wrong with a big screen bright enough to (mostly) read outside, 45W fast charging, and six years of promised system and security updates.
Samsung Galaxy A37
In everyday performance, the Samsung Galaxy A37 handles most apps and even light gaming admirably, but it’s easy to hit the system limits during heavy-duty multitasking and particularly intense photography sessions. The upgrades this year are minimal aside from improved nighttime photography and Object Eraser, but this shiny Samsung remains one of the better buys under $500, thanks to One UI’s long support life and a host of niche settings.
Design
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Not only does the Galaxy A37 look nigh-on identical to the slightly more powerful Galaxy A57, it’s identical to the rest of this year’s and last year’s A-series: a vertical camera bar — branded the Ambient Island by Samsung during the Galaxy S26 series launch — in the top left corner of the backplate, power button under the volume rocker on the right side of the frame, bottom-mounted SIM tray, and screen bezels just asymmetrical enough to bug you if and when you notice them around the edges of the case you will be putting on this phone.
Why am I so confident you’ll be using a case? Because like every phone with a vertical, non-centered camera bar, the Galaxy A37 will teeter-totter if you try to use it flat on a table. If that isn’t enough, the Gorilla Glass Victus+ covering the back of this phone felt and looked like an inoculated petri dish after less than three days of full use. Before looking at the spec sheet, I didn’t even think it was glass; I just thought it was plastic with a cheap, glossy finish.
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However, Samsung touts the glossy mirror finish as a key design feature ‘that’s made to be shown off’, but it falls victim to the same slippery curse as dozens of previous Galaxy phones. When it’s clean, the phone turns into a bar of soap the second your hands are sweaty. Then, after a couple of days, dead skin cells and grease from your hands turn it into a smudgy mess. Most manufacturers left glossy and mirror-finish phones behind for frosted, brushed, or matte finishes with grippier textures and cleaner aesthetics, and it’s an utter shame we can’t see that with one of Samsung’s most popular models. But all a minor concern if you’re putting a case on anyway, in all fairness.
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The ‘ceramic glaze’ on the plastic frame, thankfully, is not slippery, and the brushed matte finish won’t show every fingerprint or micro-scratch the way a mirror-finish frame does. I appreciate how it slightly bumps out around the buttons to help you feel how far up or down your grip is when you’re grabbing it blind, especially since the front and back of this phone are identical Victus+ glass.
That smooth front glass made the 6.7-inch touchscreen on the A37 a breeze to scroll, stream, and drag my puzzle pieces into place, and it got plenty bright for indoor use. Outdoors is a bit trickier: most of the time, the screen was bright enough to read effortlessly, but when the phone heated up after a photo safari around Disney’s Animal Kingdom or while playing Pokémon Go, the screen dimmed and became difficult to read in direct sunlight (as shown in the photo below). This throttling is a safety measure to prevent burn-in on the AMOLED panel, and it doesn’t take long for things to cool back down and brighten back up once you reach the shade. However, this could be a dealbreaker for those who work outdoors.
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If you’re PWM sensitive — or prone to eye strain headaches — the 120Hz refresh rate isn’t high enough to avoid flicker entirely, but Samsung has obtained an Eye Care Certification by SGS for the blue-blocking Eye Comfort Shield, which gets about twice as strong as the Pixel 10 series I compared it to. With this extra-yellow filter enabled, I didn’t experience much strain with the A37, except when I had to turn it off for my review photos. My sensitivity is on the lower end of the spectrum, though, so your mileage may vary.
The fingerprint sensor sits quite low under the screen, meaning it doesn’t overlap the number pad on your lockscreen, though my dainty thumbs had to strain a bit to reach it one-handed. It’s an optical fingerprint sensor, so it’s easy to tell how far off you are if your scan fails, but it can feel blinding when unlocking your phone at 3 a.m. for an insomnia doomscroll.
The Galaxy A37 technically comes in four colors, but you can’t find all of them in one place. If you’re buying at your carrier, the only A37 you get is Awesome Charcoal. At Samsung and most unlocked-phone retailers, you can choose between Awesome Lavender and Awesome Charcoal. We then have two retailer-exclusive colors: Awesome White at Amazon and Awesome Graygreen at Best Buy, which is my personal favorite. Dividing up the colorways across stores feels like an unnecessary absurdity in all honesty.
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The phone comes unlocked in 128GB and 256GB capacities, but the main carriers are only selling the 128GB model. After three weeks of use with 197 downloaded apps and 14GB of offline music, I had 46GB remaining. Gauge your storage needs accordingly because there is no microSD slot hiding in the nano SIM tray. The 256GB model also comes with 8GB of RAM instead of 6GB, a small but very useful upgrade that’s well worth considering if you’re buying this phone without carrier incentives.
On that note: our review unit — and the only storage option sold by carriers and most stores — is the 128GB model with 6GB of RAM, and that is the performance we are judging this phone by.
Performance
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Let’s start with the obvious: the Galaxy A37 runs an Exynos 1480 from 2024 with 6GB of RAM and is not meant for gamers or power-users of any kind. While this is, on paper, a higher-performance chipset than last year’s Snapdragon 6 Gen 3, you can find its limits very quickly, even without gaming. You can game on this phone — and most of my screen time with this phone was Merge Dragons and Pokémon Go — but you’re going to have to fine-tune the quality settings into oblivion and then some.
Whenever I woke my phone back up during a Merge Dragons event, the game hung for about 5-8 seconds on average, and crashed while idle over half a dozen times in a single weekend. Pokémon Go would kick me back to the Niantic load screen almost every time I swapped to another app, even for just a quick Instagram DM reply. There was no GPS drift at least — something the Google Pixel 10a struggled with — but lag in the game itself seemed to pop up consistently after about an hour of continuous raids, leading to several missed throws and escapes.
For reading my webtoons, doomscrolling Threads, or bingeing YouTube, the A37 had me easily covered so long as I was only switching between 2-3 apps at a time. Gemini could be a bit slow at times when processing multimedia tasks like image creation and when deeper into research topics, but it’d only be noticeable next to a flagship. You do feel the processing lag during fast-paced photography sessions — more on that in a moment — and there were a couple of times when the phone got uncomfortably warm in my hand while not in use in 90-degree Florida sunshine, but they were rare and hard to reproduce.
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While most budget phones emphasize multi-day battery life, Samsung completely avoids battery life claims for the Galaxy A37, simply calling the 5,000mAh battery — the same capacity this series has used since 2020’s Galaxy A31 — “long—lasting”. Unlike the 1.5-2 day battery life we see on competitors like the Google Pixel 10a and Moto G Power 2026, the A37’s is strictly in the single-day range. That said, Samsung makes up for it with 45W Power Delivery charging. There’s no wireless charging here, but I’d rather not have it than have 5W or 10W charging that takes forever.
Moving from hardware to software performance, One UI 8.5 on the Galaxy A37 puts Galaxy AI — Samsung should be ashamed for calling it “Awesome Intelligence” — and Google Gemini front and center during setup. However, after you finish, they fade into the background almost immediately. Suggested edits and Object Eraser in the Gallery app can be useful when they work well, but they tend to miss as much as they hit with my photos. Circle to Search remains a very handy feature, but it’s nothing new; the A36 got it last year.
Samsung’s software style can be a bit of an acquired taste, especially to those coming from an iPhone or a Pixel, but I’ve found the slightly overstuffed toolbox of One UI invaluable because it clings to useful older features that other manufacturers might’ve abandoned and expansive customization options with or without touching the Good Lock ecosystem.
For example, Google Pixel devices do not have a quick settings menu or a main settings menu for sound/vibrate/silent mode; it’s only accessible via the volume rocker. Samsung One UI offers both, as well as Temporary Mute, which turns the sound back on after a preset or custom interval.
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Samsung Modes and Routines offers almost double the premade modes Google does — including a Theater mode that keeps my paired Galaxy Watch 6 from waking up as I gesticulate at the screen — and its Apple-mimicking Routines features more diverse options and more consistent performance than the Google Assistant routines you’d see on Pixel or Motorola phones. This excess of options can be overwhelming at times and, admittedly, clutters the Settings menus, but if ‘better to have it and not need it’ were an Android skin, it would be One UI.
The one aspect of One UI’s old feature hoarding that crosses the boundary from busy-but-useful into chaos theory is the app drawer. By default, One UI Home’s app drawer is a paginated ‘custom sort’ that adds apps in the order that they were installed, with pre-installed apps on the first two pages. This completely manual app drawer lets users customize each page and place their apps where they want, but in practice, it just dumps you directly from the setup guide into a jumbled mess.
It’s easy enough to tap the top-right three-dot menu and swap to alphabetical sort — the vertically scrolling app drawer that we see on almost every other Android phone and third-party launcher — and Samsung can’t change this without facing a mob of users demanding to put their apps back. This is exactly the type of held-over feature that built the non-nerdy half of Samsung die-hards, but it would be nice to see an option for the Alphabetical app drawer at setup, maybe alongside the dark/light theme selection.
As this phone launched with Android 16, Samsung has guaranteed it will receive system updates through Android 22, as well as six years of security updates, making it one of the longest software support cycles among budget phones.
Cameras
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Things haven’t changed much in this department this year, even with a slight main sensor bump and Samsung’s emphasis on improved Nightography mode, but it’s only useful if you can stay perfectly still during the 2-4 second window. Daytime photos with the main camera are mostly vibrant thanks to Samsung’s tendency to oversaturate, but zoom photography only goes to 10x, and the detail drop-off is drastic after 4x. Even 2x zoom photos take a hit on sharpness and detail preservation.
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Tigers Sohni and Conrad expertly highlighted this quality step-off during pre-nap constitutionals around their Disney’s Animal Kingdom enclosures, as well as how well it held up to the A37’s biggest camera competitor, the Google Pixel 10a. The 10a’s 48MP main camera only goes to 8x zoom, so it couldn’t get quite as close in when Conrad napped in a distant gully, but Google’s processing helped dial in the details on the tigers a bit better than Samsung’s, which turned the 5x-10x photos into watercolors.
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One area where the Galaxy A37’s 2x zoom photos — and overall photo quality — did securely triumph over the Pixel 10a was during evening fireworks, but this might owe more to Samsung’s camera app settings than to the hardware itself. While the Pixel has split its brightness and exposure controls into three separate sliders, once you tap on your area of focus, Samsung instead has a single exposure slider you can slide up and down, then lock into place. Samsung still tends to overbrighten night photos, producing grainy areas without a direct light source, but with the exposure slider, it’s easy to yank the exposure down a bit and keep it there until you select a new autofocus target.
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The result is that I spent less time fiddling with brightness and could focus instead on timing my shots to the peak of each colorful explosion, which became a rhythm-game mini-boss of its own. When taking review photos of fireworks, I’m used to seeing the briefest of pauses when I press the shutter — a millisecond review of the shot while the phone processes and saves it — but the Galaxy A37 was more than pausing. The viewfinder loitered in multi-second, stop-motion lag for about half the show as the limited RAM and older processor were quickly overwhelmed by the rapid lighting changes and back-to-back-to-back shots trying to capture as much pyrotechnics as possible.
Instead of tapping the shutter as often as possible during each volley, I had to time my shots as closely as possible, as I’d be lucky to get more than one shot off during the 3-8 seconds between each boom and fizzle. Mode-swapping suffered, too, missing the finale in the lurch between photo and video. Fireworks are a strenuous test for a camera, but it shows the same struggle you’ll find during a blindingly lit stage concert or the strobing lights of a club.
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So, for fireworks, the A37 gets a nice win, but for capturing human forms and faces, Samsung’s left out one of the best features for group photos in years. Best Take on modern Pixels (aka Best Face on recent Samsung phones) selects the best expression from each person in a multi-frame photo capture and stitches them into one ‘perfect’ shot with AI. This was a godsend on the Pixel 10a, especially for selfies, and the 12MP front shooter on the A37 could’ve really, really benefited from some extra processing, as the feature didn’t make the cut. You can find it on the slightly pricier Galaxy A57, though.
In bright daylight, selfies are no problem and quality is perfectly passable for personal or professional video calls, but both at night and inside a restaurant, it was magnitudes harder to get a selfie that was both in focus and had good expressions on both subjects, especially with my weak arm.
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Another A57-only upgrade was the 12MP ultrawide camera, so we’re stuck with the same 8MP sensor as the last two generations on this A37, meaning photos are noticeably dimmer and less vibrant. It’s here if you need it, but you’ll probably want to stick with the main 50MB sensor whenever possible.
Also dimmer and worth avoiding is the 5MP macro camera. Despite trying multiple objects of varying size, I was unable to produce a single macro photo that was properly in focus. Samsung even makes it easy to forget a third camera exists, as Macro mode is hidden in the More submenu of the camera mode carousel. Proper macro photography — especially more flexible telephoto macro — remains the province of premium phones, but if it matters on your sub-$500 phone, the ‘I’ll enable Macro mode when I feel like it’ Pixel 10a offers less control but better quality than the Samsung Galaxy A37.
For the price segment the A37 sits in, the photos are better than most — at least for the phones we get here in the US — and if the processing speeds weren’t so hampered by the chipset it’s running on, it would be worth recommending, but shutterbugs should look to either the Pixel 10a or the Galaxy A57, which features an upgraded ultrawide alongside the newer processor and 8GB of RAM.
Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy A37?
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When viewed next to its big brother, the Galaxy A57, the Samsung Galaxy A37 comes out well for the $100+ you save. Yes, the A57 has 8GB of RAM standard instead of 6GB and a 2026 processor instead of a 2024 model, but neither is particularly well-suited for gaming or heavier productivity apps, and the difference in photo quality isn’t quite enough to justify the price difference for most of us.
In a vacuum, the A37 can justify itself, but once we start looking at the other phones in and around this price range, it faces some steep competition from the $499 (often $449) Google Pixel 10a. First and foremost, performance is significantly better on the Pixel 10a; I watched apps hang and games crash semi-regularly on the A37, but the only time I ran into noticeable performance issues on the Pixel 10a was swapping between the camera, Pokémon Go, and Instagram in the Florida heat. The Pixel 10a’s cameras — or perhaps the AI-processing behind it — also came out ahead on detail and consistency — especially on macro photography — even if it has a slightly shorter zoom range and its lighting controls can get in the way during some night activities.
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However, the Galaxy A37 has a significantly larger screen, much stronger night light, and a wider array of settings and customization options. If you’re not a fan of the ‘simplicity’ of Pixel software, this phone can go the distance so long as you’re not a hardcore gamer or an always-multitasking power user. If you are, you’ll want to look for a one or two-year-old flagship during sales.
It’s not the perfect budget phone — I don’t know if we’ve seen one of those since the Google Pixel 5a — but Samsung’s polished the Galaxy A37 as best it could and produced a phone you can rely on for years to come. So long as it doesn’t slip out of your hand, that is.
