Galaxy A36 specs hint at a sluggish performer

All of the hype surrounding Samsung’s flagship phones has died down (at least until the Galaxy S25 phones), and it’s time to look at some budget-friendly phones from the Korean giant. The upcoming budget bad boy, the Galaxy A36 5G, just had its specs leaked, and it might come with a pretty dated processor.

Right now, we’re dealing with leaked information, so you’ll want to take it with a grain of salt. The Galaxy A35 came out only a few months ago, so we shouldn’t expect the A36 until sometime next year. There’s a chance that there could be a change before the official launch.

The Galaxy A36 had its specs leaked

One of the most important parts of a smartphone is the chip powering it. The report points to something rather troubling about the chip that Samsung could choose for the Galaxy A36. If the rumors are correct, then this phone could be using the Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 1.

Qualcomm’s Gen 1 chips are a few years old at this point, and we’re talking about the 6-series, which is snuggly in the mid-range chip category. Samsung could be using a two-year-old mid-range SoC to power its 2025 budget phone. That’s a bit of a bummer. There’s no telling how this phone will perform. Samsung’s not going to give the Galaxy A36 a two-year-old version of One UI, so it’s going to be running the latest Samsung software.

Looking at the leaked Geekbench scores, it looks like this phone scored 341 for the single-core score and 1,279 for the multi-core score. Those scores aren’t exactly earth-shattering, but we didn’t expect much. Also, benchmarks aren’t an indicator of the actual real-world performance.

We’re not sure if this is a step down compared to the Galaxy A35’s processor. That phone used the Exynos 1380, which is the same chip that powered the Galaxy Tab S9+ FE. That chip performed rather well, so it’s odd that Samsung didn’t go for that chip this time around.

Other specs include a modest 6GB of RAM and Android 15 out of the box. If that’s true, then we should expect Android 15 (with One UI 7) before the summer of 2025. The Galaxy A35 launched in the summer of this year.