Samsung Galaxy A37 reviewed: the looks, not the chops

Not everyone wants to spend upwards of a thousand dollars to get something that looks the part. Samsung’s 5G-capable Galaxy A37 tries a different approach, brining premium looks to a mid-range price point.

You don’t need to do too much search these days to find that mobiles can get really pricey quickly. It’s always been that way — where high-end denotes a higher price point — but it can feel worse than ever, possibly because the cost of living is also equally high.

The good news is there are more mobiles that manage to fetch lower price points, while bundling in relatively decent tech, as well. Competition exists in phones, as mobile makers take up the challenge to bring the best tech to the value part of the market.

The mid-range is where much of this action is, and while it has changed a lot over the past decade, it’s one of the better places to dig up a deal.

Samsung has long offered options in this category, but they’ve never felt anywhere near as premium as what the brand is known for. Glance at any other mobile with the name “Galaxy” and you might think of the high-end, the Galaxy Ultra models belonging to the S25 or this year’s S26 Ultra incarnation.

They’re slick, schmick, and premium tech, and not the sort of place where you can expect to find a lower price point.

That could be what makes the Galaxy A37 so appealing, as Samsung attempts something different: a phone with premium looks and a lower price point. Does it succeed?

Design

Surprisingly thin with a semi-premium look, Samsung’s A37 does something few mid-range phones do on first glance: it manages to impress. It’s a looker, and not in the way we expected.

Built to be slim, the 7.4mm thin A37 manages to be slimmer than its 8.2mm predecessor, but a few grams lighter, too, hitting 196 grams compared to 199g.

There’s a surprisingly premium feature of an aluminium frame around the outside, plus a Gorilla Glass front and what feels like a plastic or light glass back, but it definitely comes across better than most mid-range mobiles priced at or around the $600 mark, which is where this one belongs.

Features

Under the hood, there’s one of Samsung’s own Exynos processors, the Exynos 1480, a chip that’s paired with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage. You won’t find a microSD slot here, so you better be happy with 128GB, but you will find Android 16 waiting for you, as well as a good six years of operating system updates. That’s better than expected, though does mean this year’s Android 17 is one of the updates.

Three cameras can be found at the back, covering a 50 megapixel F1.8 wide, 8 megapixel F2.2 ultra-wide, and a 5 megapixel F2.4 macro, though we suspect most people will use the first two rather than the last one. Support for 4K video is found for the first camera, and a single 12 megapixel selfie camera can be found inside the display, set to F2.2 and capable of 4K video capture, as well.

Connections on the phone are fairly normal for mobiles today, with a single wired port being the USB-C at the bottom, while everything is wireless. That is the way of the world today, and includes support for 4G and 5G, Bluetooth 5.4m 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6, GPS, and Near-Field Communication (NFC) for Google Pay and Samsung Pay.

You will find a fingerprint sensor in the screen and an IP68 water resistance rating. But you won’t find wireless charging here, however, with the 5000mAh battery only working with wired charging.

Display

The other major feature is the screen, offering a 6.7 inch Super AMOLED display running at 120Hz and a resolution of 1080×2340, also known as Full HD+.

It’s a nice enough screen on the eyes, and manages to be fairly bright, but it doesn’t offer the clarity of other Samsung screens.

That being said, the use of AMOLED is nice, and does mean you needn’t spend serious dollar bucks to find some of the solid colour that Samsung’s screen technology offers. This is a good thing, and shows the A37 is borrowing from a familiar template we’ve seen before: phones named with “Galaxy”.

In-use

Samsung’s A37 5G is clearly built from a template inspired by other Samsung Galaxy models, and you can tell from the operating system, as well.

Another phone with the Samsung One UI interface, Android 16 on this phone feels fairly refined, delivering a version close to what Google envisions, but with a few Samsung-y touches on top.

You get Samsung Pass native first, but can switch to Google’s own password manager if you like. You get Samsung Wallet native first, but can switch to Google Pay if you like. It’s the same with the browser and the assistant screen, and all up, it’s a fairly easy device to get your head around.

It’s Android plain and simple, with a little bit of AI thrown in on the feature set, though clearly not quite as much as the S26 Ultra. These are totally different classes of phones, and offer different feature sets and prices.

Performance

They also deliver totally different performances, and once you start using the A37, the biggest problem starts to become easily apparent. Simply put, it’s just not a very fast phone, and it shows easily.

Benchmarks position the Galaxy A37 5G in a clear low-to-mid range sort of way, but while benchmarks can be a little synthetic and difficult to relate to real world experiences (even with Pickr’s personalised benchmark feature), the Galaxy A37 shows that its performance problems are still obvious to a user.

Load an app and the phone can be fine. But there are times where loading an app takes far longer than any phone we’ve reviewed for a seriously long time. At one point, we loaded Google Maps from a link, and not only did the app struggle to load, it basically held a black screen for 15 seconds instead of actually showing anything.

Other apps coughed and sputtered their way to working, and once loaded, appeared fine.

The general result through extended use showed the Galaxy A37 would take between two and four seconds to load an app, compared to an instant result on other devices. Once loaded, things were usually fine, but the phone certainly had its moments.

Sufficed to say, the Galaxy A37 5G is a mobile you may need to be patient with.

Things are a little better for the mobile side of things, thanks in part to a solid 5G modem. Your mobile coverage and telco will likely be the variable making most of the changes, but in our testing on the Telstra network in Sydney by way of Belong, we found speeds as high as 278Mbps, which is definitely plenty high for most activities.

Camera

Next up are the cameras, which deliver three to work with, but you’re really only going to play with two, if we’re honest.

The 50 megapixel main wide camera and the 8 megapixel ultra-wide option are the two worth talking about, delivering acceptable images in daylight with virtually no low-light performance to talk about.

Yes, you get a flash, and you’ll probably want to use that, because the low light performance isn’t fantastic and tends to be lower or less sharper than other mid-range offerings.

While the three cameras come with a look like the S26 range, the performance is far lower, with softer visual much of the time, a sense of over sharpening, and a feeling that it won’t be replacing a real camera any time soon.

It’ll do the job, sure, but you’re not quite getting Galaxy S-class anything, and we’d argue even mid-range mobiles do a better job altogether.

Battery

At least you know the battery is going to be okay from all of this, thanks in part to a sizeable 5000mAh and the performance issues.

Testing the Galaxy A37 5G as the daily driver delivered a battery life consistent of at least a day and a half, with as much as two days technically possible.

Glancing at the on screen life, there’s between five and six hours of screen time per charge combined with real-world use, which is actually better than expected.

Using Pickr’s Battery Bench testing app, we actually found close to 19 hours was possible with the screen on, which was a better result than anticipated, as well.

The performance wasn’t surprising, but the battery was a welcome one, by comparison.

Value

Samsung’s price for the Galaxy A37 is also better than expected, managing to get a fairly polished phone for just under $600.

Armed with a recommended retail price of $599, Samsung’s A37 offers acceptable value, but we’d definitely suggest looking around. At this point, you’re competing with offerings from Motorola and Oppo, and may even be able to find Google options such as the Pixel 9a and Pixel 10a for near the price, given regular discounts.

We’d argue Samsung could drop the price to $499 to make the handset more compelling, as just above the $500 mark reads as a little too high.

You definitely get a nicer design and build, but the rest of the package certainly leaves something to be desired.

What needs work?

The most glaring problem with the A37 is the performance of Samsung’s Exynos processor and small amount of memory, the combination of which can just leave you with a sour taste in your mouth.

The problem is that the amount of memory is low and the Exynos just doesn’t seem to match up to the other processors we’ve seen in mid-range marvels thus far.

It is technically fine, but when it comes to real-world performance, it just makes the phone feel like a slog. Apps take longer to load, buttons inside apps don’t always respond.

When the phone is fine, you won’t be able to tell much of a difference. But then at times it goes completely pear-shaped and just decides to run like a snail. And snails don’t exactly run quickly.

It’s not incredibly surprising, mind you, especially when you take into account the price: at $599, the Galaxy A37 isn’t an expensive Samsung phone. But the performance shouldn’t be this slow.

In an age where mid-range devices put up solid competition against their high-end siblings, the fact that the A37 can feel punishingly slow at times can be agonising, almost as if you were getting penalised for spending less.

The 128GB maximum storage is another warning sign, as is the omission of wireless charging, but both are features many at this price point are probably going to be fine with.

But the slow downs are just a little difficult to argue for, even at this price.

What we love

While the performance definitely leaves something to be desired and really does demand patience at times, the design does make the A37 5G feel a lot more premium than it has any right to.

Mobiles priced below the $700 mark rarely offer aluminium on the edge, a body slimmer than the flagship, and an IP-rated level of water resistance, and yet Samsung is doing just that here. It’s possibly the major saving grace of the handset.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

The Galaxy A37 5G is without doubt a more interesting handset than you’d expect. Priced low yet pitched as a more premium take on the budget, there are definitely aspects to the phone that will draw you in.

Designed like its big brothers complete with an aluminium frame, arriving with three cameras, and yet somehow priced below $600, it seems like the perfect compromise, at least on paper. It is a lot of what people are asking for in a lower price point.

The problem is once you start using the phone, you can quickly see where the compromises really are: it’s slower than it should be, lags poorly, and the camera doesn’t seem as promising as the design. It’s more of a mixed bag.

Priced a little lower, and the Samsung Galaxy A37 would be a little more acceptable. At $599, however, it’s just a little more than we’re willing to pay. It has the looks, not the chops.