Samsung's $95 Dollar smartphone is crazy

Samsung sells this smartphone for $95 and replacement screens are just $15 and replacement batteries are $17. Does that sound too good to be true? Yes. Yes, it does. And today we're going to find out what in the world is going on. It's called the Samsung A06 and it's the most ultra budget Android smartphone that Samsung makes. The A series numbering scheme is kind of like an IP rating. The first number between 0 and five indicates how premium it is. Zero is the ultra budget while five is a more premium mid-range. The second number is what year or generation the model is. So this A06 is the least premium of the line while an A56 is the most premium of the A series and that one sits around 400 bucks. The only number that really matters though are the scratches at a level six with deeper grooves at a level seven. This $95 smartphone uses realtempered glass, and we're off to a good start. There is a front-facing 8 megapixel teardrop selfie camera under a super thin earpiece lit. Making our way over to the blue sides of the phone, we find an interesting frame profile and a whole lot of plastic. The plastic power button and plastic volume rocker are on a raised plastic plateau, and the plastic power button doubles as a fingerprint reader. Neither of the plastic buttons are removable though, which is interesting. Must be a feature reserved for the more premium Galaxy series. The top of the A06 has a noise cancelling microphone, and the left side has a whole lot more plastic. And get a look at this. The SIM card tray is cartoonishly long with enough room inside for two SIM cards and a one terabte SD card. Thumbs up for that. Why SD cards are exclusively reserved for budget phones, we'll never know. But there's also no rubber ring for the waterproofing. Probably because the A06 has no official ingress protection rating. We'll have to take a closer look from the insides here in a second. The bottom of our phone has a headphone jack, 25 watt fast charging USBC port, and the singular loudspeaker opening. Basically, if you pay less for your phone, you get more features like a headphone jack and SD card slot. Make it make sense. The back of the Samsung A06 is made from plastic that's kind of got a textured feel to it with a neat little shiny reflective gleam. And it definitely feels like plastic right from the start. One cool little fact I learned a while back is that all the water here on Earth has been recirculating around the globe for the past 4 billion years. Which means if you go to drink water, as you should, there's a statistically high chance that each sip contains molecules that once passed through a dinosaur, which is fun to think about. Dinosaurs are awesome. Where was I? Oh, ah, yes, the cameras. The A06 has two cameras, a 2 megapixel depth camera on the bottom and a 50 megapixel main camera up top with a plastic covered single LED flash off to the side. It's extremely important to note though that the cameras can only record video in 1080p. So, the camera category definitely takes a hit at $95, but it's also just $95, so we can't complain too much. The front screen is a 6.7 in 720p 564nit display that is LCD. That explains a whole lot. LCD displays get the job done, of course, but they cost a fraction of their OLED counterparts. For example, Apple's budget phone, the iPhone 17e, has an OLED screen replacement that cost $229, while this Samsung A06 LCD screen replacement is just 15 bucks. Incredibly cheap. You can tell it's LCD by the way the pixels go black and then mostly recover after the heat is removed. Finally, it's the moment of truth. How strong is a $95 ultra budget Samsung phone? Will the A06 survive? Or is it time for our dinosaur friend to go extinct for a second time? With a bend from the back, I totally thought it was curtains for Mr. A06. It has some hefty flex, and the back panel starts separating from the frame, but surprisingly, it is still alive and intact. Flipping it around to bin from the front, we get some more crazy flexing, but nothing is permanently cracked or deformed. Look at that back panel just rippling away from the phone body. I'm kind of shocked it's still alive to be honest. The $95 Samsung A06 survives my durability test and lives to display another day. Plus, now that the back panel is separated, the tear down just became a whole lot easier. Plastic backed phones are indeed my favorite. With the flexible panel gone, we can dive deep inside the A06 to see what other corners Samsung has cut to bring the price down. I'll use my own custom 32-bit iFixit toolkit. link is down in the description if you want one of your own. I do use mine all the time. There are a total of 10 Phillips head screws on the top and eight Phillips head screws on the bottom. I also noticed that instead of attaching the flash to a ribbon cable near the camera unit, this flash is mounted to the motherboard and just shines straight up through a plastic lens. Kind of cool. And once all those screws are gone, I can pull out the limousine length SIM card tray and the whole back panel and frame rails can come away from the foam body. Although it is still connected through the fingerprint scanning ribbon, the power button itself is still attached to the mainboard. And I can turn off the A06 by pressing that button and unplug in the battery and fingerprint scanner just like little Legos. The 8 megapel front-facing camera pops off next. This does not have OIS. The rear 2 megapixel camera is still attached to the back frame of the phone for some reason. And this also does not have OIS. The main 50 megapixel rear camera is a tiny little guy and also does not have OIS. With a phone this inexpensive, cameras do get super sacrificed. The lower loudspeaker comes out next. This guy has no balls, just two gold contact pads that rest up against the circuit board to get its signal. The lower circuit board has our 25 watt USBC port with no rubber ring. We also have a solderedon headphone jack which does have a rubber enclosure. Aside from that, we also have an old school coin style vibrator motor, a rectangular wide water damage indicator, as well as waterproofing mesh over the loudspeaker opening. The microphone hole also has a membrane of its own, so it's good to know that at least some of the ingress points are protected from ingress. I'll pop off the two extension cables next. And then thankfully, Samsung did add pull tabs on the battery and they actually work. They work well enough that the motherboard flies out, too. My bad. This battery is 5,000 mAh, and replacements can be found online for less than $20. Wild. Taking a closer look at the motherboard, the main chip is a MediaTek Helio G85 processor from 6 years ago, and it's about 30 times less powerful than a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, which this is probably where most of the cost savings come from. The triple stacked SIM card tray parking garage is on the back along with a tiny square of thermal pad for the tiny processor. Since the processor isn't processing a whole lot, it doesn't need very much thermal dissipation. But, you know, sometimes actual dinners are more important than chicken dinners, if you know what I mean. And if you just need a phone for phone calls and basic internets, then this A06 definitely gets the job done. All for 95 bucks. And you can't really argue with that. Plus, the fact that it can be durability tested, completely disassembled and reassembled, and still survive is just frosting on the cake. Nice work, Samsung. Although, it would be nice to let us have some SD card slots back in the more premium devices. Maybe think about it. And if you need a smartphone toolkit for your next project, I'll leave a link down in the description. What budget phone should I test next? And thanks a ton for watching. I'll see you around.