This $95 Android phone has features my $1,000 flagship still doesn't — and I can't explain why

The Samsung Galaxy A06 is not a good phone.

I want to be clear about that upfront, because this article could easily be mistaken for one of those budget phone vindication pieces — and it isn't. The screen is HD+ at 60Hz, the MediaTek Helio G85 chip is slow, and the camera produces the kind of images you'd describe as "fine, for the price." It launched in August 2024 for around $95, and it shows.

So, you might wonder where this article is going. It's that the A06 packs in a whole load of features folks are crying out for on much more expensive smartphones in 2026: a headphone jack, removable storage, an FM radio, and so on.

All this on a phone that costs less than my headphones, and all the features that are notably absent on my smartphone that costs around 16x more — all for seemingly less.

It has a 3.5mm headphone jack

The features my flagship smartphone "couldn't fit"

Apple dropped the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in 2016. Google rapidly followed with the Pixel 2. Then, Samsung finally followed suit in 2021 with the Galaxy S21, and from the major smartphone manufacturers, the 3.5mm jack was effectively dead.

Justifications for removing the headphone jack are always the same: Slimmer designs, better water resistance, and making space for other components. In fairness to manufacturers, some of this is true, as removing the headphone jack does make it easier to give smartphones a higher water-resistance rating.

In many ways, though, the A06 is a testament to how slim a phone really needs to be versus the loss of features. The Galaxy A06 is 8mm thick, has a plastic frame, and still has a headphone jack. It manages this while also keeping its dimensions perfectly reasonable. So the engineering constraint argument has always been a bit thin.

It gets even thinner when you look at the thickness of other flagship smartphones.

Noticing any problems with the thickness argument? Me too.

There's a dedicated microSD slot

An actual single, not-shared slot

Expandable storage is another super-handy feature slowly pushed out of our smartphones, yet it is alive and kicking on the Samsung Galaxy A06.

On most phones, expandable storage has been depreciated. It's not a feature manufacturers offer because in most markets (especially Western markets), cloud storage subscriptions are de rigeur and often tied into the device itself.

Cloud storage is mostly cheap and convenient. That is up until the moment you're on a plane, in a tunnel, or in rural Cornwall, where 4G and 5G signals are more of a suggestion than a promise. A microSD card lets you carry your music, your photos, your offline maps, and your downloaded videos without touching your monthly data allowance.

Some smartphones actually technically still support microSD cards, but typically via the SIM slot. You may find that what looks like a dual-SIM tray is actually a single SIM and microSD tray, or it has an option for both. But overall, most smartphone manufacturers dropped expandable storage support long ago.

Cloud storage usage in Western markets is one of the primary reasons behind this change, but water resistance is another big reason behind this change. But if you really want to grab your tin-foil hat, it's all so that Google and Apple can upsell you more cloud storage instead of buying a 10 dollar microSD that does the job.

It still has a proper FM radio

The rarest flagship feature of them all

I loved FM radio on my old phones. It meant that I could tune into a whole host of music and chat shows on the go, and never required a data connection, subscription, or even phone signal.

That's because FM radio still works even when your 4G or 5G doesn't. It also takes up basically zero space on the smartphone motherboard and doesn't affect any other hardware, which makes it one of those features I just don't understand why they were removed.

Well, I do know why: manufacturers decided that as we stream everything now, we don't need access to an FM radio anymore. It's true to an extent, as most folks have at least one or two subscriptions on their devices, and perhaps local music, too. But for those times you're in a pinch, an FM radio was a really useful extra feature.

Four years of updates for a $95 phone

It took years of pushing to get more than this

Samsung is committed to two major Android OS upgrades and four years of security updates on the Galaxy A06. Given this is a budget-focused smartphone, that's still pretty good going, and shows a strong shift from the years-of-neglect treatment budget phones used to receive.

Now, Samsung has long since upgraded its flagship support to seven years, and we're thankful for it. But it really wasn't too long ago that four years of security updates on a sub-$100 would have been unfathomable, with "you get what you pay for" used against anyone who dared suggest a little more would be nice.

It also matters for the people who buy phones like this. Budget phones disproportionately go to people who aren't upgrading every two years, who are buying for a family member, or who need a cheap backup device. Leaving those users exposed to unpatched security vulnerabilities after eighteen months was always a problem, and four years is much better for security and the environment.

Why don't flagships have these features anymore?

As I've said, the Galaxy A06 isn't stealing sales from the S26 or a Pixel 10. They're not close in terms of specs and features. It's more that Samsung has found a way to happily include these features that many folks lament losing on their $1,000+ smartphones.

At the core of feature-loss is water resistance. The ports that have been removed are often stripped away because, simply, fewer ports make it easier to keep device internals dry. But wait, what's that you hear? It's the A06 5G model with an IP54 water resistance rating, pushing that theory out of the window, too.

At the end of the day, it's manufacturers telling us that we don't want these features when we very much do, and we regular folks have very little recourse in the conversation — unless you drop the flagships for good!