Samsung Galaxy A36 5G Review
Imagine being able to repair your phone at home without having to bring it to a service center. Sounds great, right? It would make your phone last a lot longer since you can just DIY everything at home should something break.
Well, that’s what HMD wants to offer users with its smartphones. If you’re not familiar, HMD is the company currently producing Nokia phones, and today, we’re looking at the HMD Crest 5G – a budget smartphone that wants to make a name for itself in the local market.
To give you an idea, this phone retails for under PHP 8,000USD 140INR 12,018EUR 129CNY 1,012, making it relatively affordable for most. However, this segment is also one of the most competitive given the massive number of smartphones available.
Will it be able to stand out in this segment with its repairability feature?
Table of Contents
Starting with the design, there’s nothing about the HMD Crest that really stands out. The design of the phone adopts a minimalist styling with the HMD logo at the center of the back panel.
Instead, your eyes will focus on the large blacked-out camera island that houses the dual rear camera system and the LED flash. Nothing too fancy here, but it does work especially with this Midnight Blue color. I like that HMD added some metallic flakes to give it some color when light hits it.
Overall, the design might be too simple for some, but for us here at YugaTech, we like it. Simple is best, after all.
As for the materials, the frame and the back panel are made out of hard plastic. However, it doesn’t feel like the usual cheap materials found on budget smartphones. Instead, the phone feels solid, and doesn’t feel like it would break by just bending it.
The dimensions are similar to most budget phones, with a 6.67-inch screen. It is rather thin though, measuring just 8.4mm, but it is a bit heavy weighing 205 grams. It also has IP52 protection for dust and water resistance.
For buttons, the volume rocker and the power button are on the right side, while at the bottom you’ll find the 3.5mm audio port, the USB-C port, and the mono loudspeaker. On the left side, there’s the dual-sim card slot which comes with a dedicated microSD card slot.
So overall,the design of the HMD Crest 5G is very simple right? Well, there’s a good reason for that. According to the brand, this phone is designed to be repairable. You don’t even need to bring it to the shop since they want you to fix it yourself. In fact, they advertise it on their website.
So if something breaks on this phone, like the back panel or even the USB-C port, you can just repair it yourself. It’s perfect if you’re someone who likes to DIY stuff. Just make sure you don’t turn the DIY session into a Destroy It Yourself session.
As much as we would want to replace things, thankfully, everything on our unit still works perfectly well. But we were able to open it up to show you how easy it is to work with. You will still need a specialized set of screw drivers though and very gentle hands.
Moving on to the display, and for a budget phone, the HMD Crest comes with an OLED panel. Yes you heard that right. As mentioned earlier, the screen measures 6.67 inches, but instead of an IPS LCD, this one uses an OLED panel with Full HD+ resolution.
From our eyes, it’s not the best OLED panel out there. I mean, this is still a sub-PHP 8,000 phone after all, but at least you get the vivid colors and deep blacks. There’s no Dolby Vision or even support for HDR10+, but at least it’s not an IPS LCD. It also has relatively thick borders all around, but at least no teardrop notch.
While you do get an OLED panel on the HMD Crest, the only downside is that the refresh rate isn’t that high – only 90Hz max. Despite that though, it still feels smooth when you’re just browsing through the menu.
It’s a similar story when you’re watching movies, but of course, you do have to set your expectations. As for gaming, it’s smooth but there are occasions when the framerate drops, but that might have something to do with the chipset, which we’ll talk about later on.
As for the brightness, there’s no official data from HMD, but from our eyes it’s not the brightest. Although it is adequate for our use, even when it’s really sunny outside. As for the speaker, it is loud, but that’s about it.
The placement of the speaker grille also makes it quite easy to block with your finger when watching videos or playing games. But of course, you can always just plug in your favorite pair of earphones using the 3.5mm audio port.
So it’s not a perfect display, but nonetheless it’s nice to find a phone in this price point with an OLED display already.
As for the cameras, you get a dual rear camera highlighted by a 50MP main and followed by the ever familiar 2MP depth sensor. No OIS, EIS, or any other feature to help stabilize the image. Interestingly, the front camera is quite powerful for something of this price. It also gets a 50MP sensor for the front to take selfies with.
Initially, we didn’t have high hopes for the camera of this phone. It’s a very basic setup you will typically find on phones of this price point. But surprisingly, it captures great images when you’re shooting during the day or in well-lit environments. I mean, just check out some of the images we were able to capture below.
The colors aren’t too vivid or saturated as compared to more high-end phones, but they look natural. More importantly, the photo is sharp, and you do get good contrast out of the box. While there is AI HDR mode, it looks over-edited in my eyes. Personally, I’d leave it as is to get the best images possible.
As I expected, though, there is a very noticeable drop in quality when you start losing light. In low light, the images are decent at best, and there is a lot of grain. But honestly, don’t expect too much.
Not to mention, you need very steady hands to even capture anything without the image looking like a blur. It also has some focus breathing issues too, which is already noticeable during the day but is more prominent at night. While there is Super Night mode, it does help a bit. The downside is that everything just becomes smoothed out, losing clarity and sharpness in the process.
The 50MP front camera captures decent selfies. The skin color is nice, and you get decent bokeh too. But just like the rear camera, there is a noticeable drop in quality when you lose light.
As for the video, it’s decent at best. The cameras are only capable of recording at a maximum of 1080P@30FPS, and again, there is no stabilization except for your hands. There’s nothing to write home about the video quality since the output is similar to the photos – decent during the day, not great at night.
Just check out the sample videos below.
Just like its minimalist design, the OS of the HMD Crest 5G is quite simple too. It runs on Android 14, and there doesn’t seem to be any skin on top. Yes, it runs on the stock Android 14 out of the box, which users may or may not like. Interestingly, some of the app logos are blacked out, which adds a nice touch.
What I like about it is that there are no bloatware apps. You get the full suite of Google Apps along with HMD’s My Device, and that’s it. This makes the experience very streamlined and straightforward. No gimmicks or whatnot.
However, the downside is that you don’t get the customizability you would normally find on Android devices like that of Samsung and OPPO. There are also no AI features either. And I do wish they added a separate gallery app instead of relying on Google Photos. But hey, the HMD brand name is relatively new, and they might improve on this in the future to have their own identity.
Now, we move on to the chipset, and it’s arguably the one thing that concerned us about the HMD Crest. Powering the HMD Crest is a Unisoc T760 chipset, and our review unit comes with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of internal storage. You can also virtually expand RAM by another 8GB for a total of 16GB.
Yes, this phone uses a Unisoc chipset, meaning performance is quite limited, especially when it comes to gaming. Fortunately, for everyday use, we did not encounter any issues with the phone. It could easily load Chrome, YouTube, and other apps, even if you left multiple apps running in the background.
But of course, the big question is this: Can it at least play some games? Well, thankfully it can, but you shouldn’t expect too much. I initially played Blue Archive on this phone, which is a very light game to run. However, you do get the occasional frame rate drops when a lot of things are happening on the screen.
As for heavier games, Genshin Impact did run on this phone, but I did have to adjust the graphics to low just so it ran more smoothly. It’s not the most enjoyable gameplay either, and I honestly would not recommend playing it for extended periods of time.
Instead, it’s best for light gaming at most, such as Mobile Legends. However, the 90Hz refresh rate might be a downer for some users. Also, the phone did heat up a bit while playing games, but it did not really affect gameplay.
Considering how the phone performed in real world use, we didn’t expect the benchmarks to be high either. And you can check them out below.
Antutu V10 – 468381
3DMark Wild Life – 1630
PCMark Work 3.0 – 11350
Geekbench 6
Single Core – 739
Multi Core – 2358
OpenCL – 1716
Vulkan – 1707
As for the battery, the HMD Crest uses a standard 5,000 mAh battery pack, which is pretty much standard for phones at this price point. After using it for an entire day to shoot photos, videos, and even play games, the phone still had around 40 percent battery life remaining. I assume it’s because the Unisoc chip isn’t exactly the most power-hungry.
The battery benchmark tells a similar story. Using PC Mark’s Battery Test, we were able to record 14 hours and 30 minutes of run time, which is a great score all things considered. For reference, the test was done on airplane mode, zero volume, and brightness at 50 percent.
When you eventually need to recharge the phone, it doesn’t have the fastest charging speeds either. It has a maximum 33W charging speed, which is decent given that it has a relatively long battery life.
As for connectivity, you have the basics – 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, and GPS. Yes, 5G for phone at this price, which is great considering most phones in this price point are still limited to 4G LTE.
Overall, there’s not much to say about the HMD Crest 5G. It’s a decent-budget smartphone with a nice OLED display, a decent chipset, and even 5G connectivity. I mean, you can’t really complain either since this phone only retails for PHP 7,999USD 140INR 12,017EUR 129CNY 1,012 for this specific 8+256GB variant.
Best of all, you have the ability to fix it yourself should something break in the future. It’s a niche feature that not everyone will benefit from. However, if you want to try and dip your toes into the world of repairing smartphones, then the HMD Crest 5G would be a great choice. I mean, it is very affordable, after all.
But what do you think of the HMD Crest 5G? Is it a phone you would consider buying given how easy it is to repair by yourself? More importantly, do you think it could go up against other more popular brands in the same segment?
What we liked:
Easy to disassemble and repair
OLED display
5G Connectivity
What we didn’t like:
Cameras could be better
Heating issues when playing games
Performance could be better
HMD Crest specs:
6.67-inch FHD+ (2400 x 1080) OLED display
UNISOC T760 (6nm)
Mali-G57 GPU
8GB RAM
256GB storage
microSD card support
50MP main camera
2MP depth
LED flash
50MP front camera
3.5mm audio port
Mono loudspeaker
Dual nano-SIM
5G, 4G LTE
Wi-Fi 5 (dual-band)
Bluetooth 5.0
GPS
USB Type-C
Android 14
Fingerprint sensor (side-mounted)
Face unlock
HMD Gen 1 repairability
5000mAh battery
33W charging (wired)
IP52 rating
163.86 x 76.42 x 8.41 mm (dimensions)
205 grams (weight)
Midnight Blue
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