Samsung is back with a new A-series mid-ranger, the Galaxy A36. And today, a full year later, we now have the Galaxy A37. It's almost the same phone at twice the price. So, what was Samsung thinking? To answer that, we did what we do best. We got to testing, hoping there's more to this than the spec sheets would tell us. So, is the Galaxy A37 worth buying? We're here to answer just that. The Galaxy A37 is a mid-ranger that doesn't make any big strides over its predecessor. The ingress protection has gone up from IP67 to IP68. That means it can handle submersion in deeper water. And the phone also brings small design

refinements in line with the more recent Samsung phones. You will again get Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on the back and the front, and a frame made of plastic. The display of the phone is a 6.7-in OLED with a 1080p resolution and a 120 Hz refresh rate. And the display performs well, even though there are pretty sizable bezels here, as expected for the class. And there's again no official HDR video support. The screen's brightness is good, just as last year's model. We measured up to nearly 1,300 nits in automatic brightness mode, and this went up to over 1,900 nits when lighting up a smaller patch of the screen. For audio, the phone has stereo

speakers, and they seem to be identical to the A36 in both loudness and audio quality. You can listen for yourself with our comparison tool linked below. The Galaxy A37 has an optical under-display fingerprint reader, and it's accurate to unlock the phone, but because of the animation, it doesn't feel that fast. The A37 comes with 128 or 256 gigs of storage on board, and that's not expandable through microSD. The interface of the Galaxy A37 is Samsung's latest One UI 8.5 out of the box. You get many of the same features as you'd get on the flagships.

This includes an improved Bixby assistant, which understands natural language better, and is integrated with the Perplexity AI. But some AI-based are missing, like the enhanced photo assist tool, which uses natural language prompts to edit photos. If you'd like to find out more about One UI 8.5, you can check out our dedicated video. The Galaxy A37 is lined up for plenty of software support to the tune of six major OS updates. The chipset of the Galaxy A37 is an Exynos 1480, and it's nothing new. We already saw it within the Galaxy A55 from a couple of years ago. When going up against modern competition, the Galaxy A37 falls a bit behind in the benchmark scores. It's

faster than the A36, at least, but not by that much. And not only that, in daily use, the Galaxy A37 feels a bit sluggish, with some hiccups and slowdowns here and there. At least the phone doesn't run hot, and in our prolonged stress tests, we didn't see any major throttling. The Galaxy A37 brings the same 5,000 mA battery capacity, and you'd think battery life is just as mediocre as on last year's A36. But despite having the same spec, the A37's battery life tested better than its predecessor overall, earning an overall active use score of almost 14 hours, with the biggest improvement coming from the video runtime. That is commendable, but there are still competitors that can do a lot better.

Nothing has changed about the charging this year. It's rated at 45 W. The charging speed is about the same as we saw in the previous model. We charged to 62% in half an hour, and a full charge took 72 minutes. And there is no wireless charging here. On the back of the Galaxy A37, you'll find a main cam, an ultrawide, and a macro cam. It looks like the same setup as last year. However, looks can be deceiving. The main cam has seen an upgrade and now has a larger sensor. Our best guess is that this is the same main cam you get in the Galaxy A57.

During the day, this main cam captures very good photos for the class. Detail is good, though the sharpening can be a bit much. Dynamic range is great, and the vivid colors are easy to like. The A37 does a fine job with human subjects, too, capturing good facial detail and likable skin tones. As there's no telephoto, zoom is done digitally. At two times, you see a bit of softness, but the results are still not bad. Daylight photos from the ultrawide camera are underwhelming. The field of view could be wider, and the shots come out on the soft side. At least the dynamic range and colors are good.

Macro close-ups taken with a dedicated camera are nothing special, and it's tricky to get a usable shot. You can get an even better result by using the two times zoom from the main camera. Now, for night time photos. The main camera does a good job. The sharpness and detail are pretty great in better-lit scenes, and they're still respectable in darker ones. Dynamic range is excellent, and colors are typically on point, too. Turning on night mode doesn't seem to make much difference in the quality here. The ultrawide cam's low-light shots are soft and grainy. The dynamic range is decent, though.

Selfies from the Galaxy A37's 12-megapixel front-facing cam are quite good in well-lit scenes. The dynamic range is great, and skin tones are looking nice. Stick around to the end to see the selfie video quality. Speaking of video recording, the A37 can record video in 4K at 30 FPS with its main and selfie cameras. The ultrawide is capped at 1080p. The main camera captures very good 4K videos. They have plenty of pop, thanks to their vibrant colors and great contrast, and there's good detail, too.

The ultrawide's 1080p clips are usable, with good overall properties and adequate detail given the resolution. The video stabilization is very good here, though some minor shakiness gets through while walking. And the main camera's low-light clips have good dynamic range and colors, while detail is generally all right. The shadows are somewhat murky, though. So, that's the Galaxy A37. There's a lot to like here on a mid-ranger, like the bright display, the solid build and ingress protection, and Samsung's software and support. But you would get all those things with the A36, too, for half the price. In our testing, we did find that the battery life has improved since last year, and so has the main

camera. And that's something. But still, rivals will get you even better battery life, faster charging, and better chipset performance. Even Samsung's own Galaxy A56 is an upgrade, and at a lower price. In the end, the A37 is a decent choice, but you can find better bang for your buck elsewhere if you shop around. Thanks for watching, guys. If you're interested, here are links to our reviews of the Galaxy A36 and the Galaxy A56. Let us know what you think down below, and I'll see you on the next one.