The Galaxy A37 is dependable in all the right ways, if you can find it at the right price

2025’s Galaxy A36 left a sour taste in my mouth. Its stuttery day-to-day performance made it tough to recommend, no matter how many years of software updates Samsung promised. Still, the mid-range A series is where Samsung moves serious volume, so I was genuinely curious (and a little hopeful) to see what Samsung does with its successor.

After spending three weeks with the Galaxy A37, I can tell you that this is another very Samsung, very incremental A series update. But incremental isn’t always a bad thing, and the Galaxy A37 is a far easier phone to recommend than its predecessor, albeit with an asterisk.

Tougher than ever

The biggest hardware upgrade on the Galaxy A37 5G isn’t something you’ll see. Samsung has bumped the phone to an IP68 rating, which is proper flagship-level dust- and water-ingress protection. It won’t change how you use the phone day-to-day, but it’s one less thing to worry about if you drop it in a pool (please don’t) or get caught in a downpour.

The rest of the build is familiar. You get Gorilla Glass Victus Plus on both the front and back, which is great for scratch resistance. The Lavender color on my review unit looks nice, but the A series has been using it for forever now, and I would love to see some fresh color options soon. At least it hides fingerprints and smudges much better than the Charcoal variant would.

The Galaxy A37 hasn’t evolved much physically over its predecessor. It shares the same dimensions and weighs 196 grams. The flat edges and flat back make the phone look clean and modern, and I have no complaints about how it looks sitting on a table. Holding it is a different story. I’ve been waiting for Samsung to return to slightly curved backs, or at least softer edges, because flat slabs this size just don’t sit as comfortably in the palm.

Some of the everyday hardware basics are also a mixed bag. The optical in-display fingerprint scanner is still too slow for my liking, so much so that I eventually gave up and switched to pattern unlock. The stereo speakers get loud enough, but they lack fullness, especially when you crank the volume all the way up.

Lastly, there is no headphone jack or microSD card slot here, and neither is surprising at this point. However, the 128GB base model I tested offers only about 114GB of usable storage out of the box, which might quickly feel like a bottleneck for many folks. On a brighter note, GPS and cellular connectivity held up well during my time in and around Joshua Tree on a recent trip.

Same screen, same story

The display is essentially unchanged from that of the Galaxy A36 5G. It’s still a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED panel with a 120Hz refresh rate, and Samsung quotes the exact same brightness figures as last year: 1,200 nits in high-brightness mode and 1,900 nits at peak. Out in the harsh Joshua Tree sun, it remained readable, though with rival mid-rangers pushing brightness numbers higher every year, I wouldn’t have minded a little extra headroom for direct midday glare. Also, the super glossy panel doesn’t help.

For multimedia watching, the screen does an admirable job. Streaming YouTube videos on the Galaxy A37 is enjoyable thanks to those deep AMOLED blacks and vibrant contrast. The 120Hz high refresh rate is also here to keep animations fluid on paper. In practice, though, everyday use still doesn’t feel quite as buttery smooth as you would expect from a 120Hz panel.

Just enough performance

The good news on performance is that the Galaxy A37 is faster than the Galaxy A36, though barely. The less exciting news is that this two-year-old chip is still a full tier below the performance you get on the Galaxy A57 or the Pixel 10a.

In regular use, the Galaxy A37 is fine. Scrolling, messaging, social media, and switching between apps all feel okay, and it’s nowhere near as frustrating as the Galaxy A36 was. Still, the sluggishness hasn’t completely disappeared.

You can feel the processor working hard to keep up, especially in micro-moments like the extra delay before the keyboard pops up, or the hitch when you flip between the front and rear cameras. The Exynos chip also gets noticeably warm if you push it for 15 to 20 minutes at a stretch.

That thermal and performance ceiling became really obvious during long trips. Using wired Android Auto with the Galaxy A37 wasn’t a great experience. While Google Maps thankfully kept running smoothly on the car’s display without dropping navigation, the phone itself became extra sluggish and felt uncomfortably warm to the touch the entire time it was plugged in.

Typical Samsung software, with a long runway

The Galaxy A37’s software experience is exactly what you’d expect from Samsung. It’s currently running Android 16 with One UI 8.5, which is the most nimble and polished Samsung software yet, though the Galaxy A37’s occasional lag takes away some of the joy. If you’ve used a recent Galaxy phone, the layout will feel familiar. Samsung’s apps, settings, and customization options sit alongside Google’s apps and services.

The Galaxy A37 also gets a useful selection of AI features. Gemini serves as the default smart assistant, while Circle to Search lets you look things up on screen without leaving the app. Samsung Browser can read selected webpage text aloud, and Voice Recorder can transcribe recordings. In Gallery, Object Eraser removes unwanted objects, but in my experience, the results were always kind of wonky and rarely usable, as if the phone is using some older AI model.

You don’t get the full Galaxy AI suite found on Samsung’s flagships. Compared with the S26 series, the A series lacks tools like Audio Eraser, Now Brief, Note Assist, Interpreter, and more.

The Galaxy A37 5G will get six OS upgrades and six years of security updates, including One UI 9, which has already started rolling out to the A series in some regions. Last year, I questioned whether anyone would want to keep the sluggish Galaxy A36 around that long. With the slightly faster chip, the A37 makes a much better case for sticking around, though I’m still not confident you’ll be happy with its performance by the end of the 2020s (yeah, it’s happening soon).

As for the battery, the 5,000mAh cell is enough for a full day of use, even for heavy users. In my experience, I could easily get five hours of screen-on time with mixed use, and I suspect most of you won’t be hunting for a charger before bedtime.

When you do need to charge it, the Galaxy A37’s support for 45W wired charging comes in clutch. With a supported PPS charger, it takes about 70 minutes to go from empty to full. With a regular 25W charger, the phone can hit 100% in about an hour and 30 minutes. Once again, though, there’s no wireless charging.

A strong main sensor carrying the team

While the camera setup seems unchanged from the Galaxy A36, Samsung upgraded the Galaxy A37’s 50MP main camera with a larger 1/1.56-inch sensor, the same size used in the Galaxy A57. In practice, it takes genuinely good photos. Samsung’s image processing brings out vibrant colors, sharp textures, and pleasing contrast without going overboard. It also captures human subjects well, though I did notice the phone takes an extra beat to lock focus in Portrait mode, sometimes leaving the subjects out of focus.

The 12MP selfie camera and the 8MP ultrawide are passable in bright daylight, but details are often noisy, and image quality falls apart quickly in tricky lighting. And the 5MP macro camera, as usual, is filler that you can safely ignore. The main camera, however, does manage to hold its own even in low-light conditions. However, my biggest complaint about the A37’s camera experience is the general sluggishness, which is evident in the time it takes to launch the camera or switch lenses.

On the video side, both the main rear camera and the front camera can record 4K at 30fps, and barring really low-light conditions, I was mostly happy with the video quality from both. The ultrawide camera can take decent 1080p videos in well-lit scenarios, but that’s about it.

Samsung Galaxy A37 5G review verdict: Should you buy it?

The Galaxy A37 ($449.99 at Amazon) is another incremental Samsung upgrade, and it makes for a pretty boring spec sheet. But look at it as a complete phone, and it gets a lot right: the design feels sturdy, the IP68 rating is welcome, the display is punchy, the battery lasts a full day, and the main camera takes good photos. Performance is decent for everyday use, charging is fast, and Samsung is promising six years of updates. There’s no obvious dealbreaker here.

However, how strongly I can recommend the Galaxy A37 depends entirely on its price, which has been a moving target. The base 128GB model launched at $449, dropped to $349 during the recent Amazon Prime Day sale, and has since crept up to $489 on the Samsung website as part of a wider A series price hike. You can still find third-party listings on Amazon under $400. At $349 to $400, the Galaxy A37 is an easy recommendation and a great value for casual users.

Once the price creeps closer to $500, though, its dated chip and occasional sluggishness become harder to overlook, and I start wondering whether the phone will still feel like a good buy two years from now. Not to forget that you’ll be stuck with less than 120GB of storage and no way to expand. I wouldn’t even consider buying its 256GB model, because it is simply too expensive for the performance the Exynos 1480 delivers.

If you’re shopping with a ~$500 budget, stretching your budget to the Galaxy A57 ($549.99 at Amazon) makes more sense for its lighter 179g frame, higher-tier Exynos 1680 chip, better 12MP ultrawide camera, and 8GB of base RAM against the Galaxy A37’s 6GB. Though this, too, was hit with the A series price hike, bumping it to $599 MSRP.

If you’re open to stepping outside Samsung’s ecosystem, the easiest recommendation is the Google Pixel 10a ($499 at Amazon), or even a discounted Pixel 9a ($499 at Amazon). Both will offer significantly faster performance, the Pixel camera experience, and Google’s best AI features at price points that are extremely competitive.

All said and done, the Galaxy A37 is a capable all-rounder, especially for someone coming from an A series phone that’s a few years old. It may not feel like a huge upgrade, but it covers the basics well. I’d just wait for the right price, and I wish Samsung would bring a little more innovation to the A-series.