Samsung's next affordable smartphone could be interesting if cheap enough

Phone Arena

17-05-2025

Samsung inundated the Indian market with budget-friendly and mid-range Android smartphones. Although many of these devices will remain exclusively available in India, slightly different variants of the phone usually make it to other countries, but under different names.
It has become a tradition for Samsung to launch a bunch of M series phones in India, which, in many cases, are just reskinned versions of other Galaxy A handsets. An example that comes to mind is the Galaxy M35 and Galaxy A35, which are almost the same device. But there's a reason that we've mentioned the Galaxy M35 in relation to the Indian market. Samsung is preparing to launch a sequel to the Galaxy M35, which is likely to be available via Amazon India.
The folks at Xpertpick recently discovered the Galaxy M36 is already listed on Samsung India's website. Only the model number (SM-M366B/DS) is mentioned on the webpage, so there's no telling whether or not this will be a major upgrade over the Galaxy M35. The only things we know so far about the Galaxy M36 is that it will pack 6 GB RAM and an Exynos 1380 processor. This information appeared for the first time in Geekbench's database, so it's quite accurate.
Samsung Galaxy M36 support page | Screenshot by Xpertpick Besides that, the Galaxy M36 has also received its Bluetooth SIG certification, which is another indication that Samsung might launch it very soon. In fact, since the phone already has its own support page and the predecessor made its debut exactly one year ago, it's possible that the Galaxy M36 will be unveiled this month.
As mentioned earlier, the Galaxy M series phones usually borrow a lot of the Galaxy A series' specs. However, the Galaxy M36 is supposed to pack an Exynos 1380 chipset, while the Galaxy A36 uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 6 Gen 3 processor.
It remains to be seen how the Galaxy A36 will look like and whether or not it will bring meaningful upgrades over the Galaxy A35 (probably not). Now, if the phone is just as cheap as the Galaxy A35, then that will make it more appealing for customers.