Smartphones have been stuck in a design rut for the best part of a decade but in the past few years, Chinese phone makers have been getting more attention for their experiments. Maybe it's Nineties nostalgia, or identikit iPhone fatigue, but with Samsung joining in, not to mention the folding phones due to go on sale in a matter of weeks and months, smartphone designers are finally having fun again.
DJ Koh, CEO of Samsung's mobile division, announced the A series at an event in Bangkok, Thailand with a satellite event in Milan. Not for the first time in 2019, the cameras were the focus of the news with the A80's slider setup allowing for a full-screen design with no notches or punch holes.
Staying on message, Koh said he thinks we are in "a new era of live" with 24/7 video streaming at the centre. Sounds slightly overwhelming to us.
The mid-range Galaxy A80 has a big 6.7-inch 1080 x 2400 Super AMOLED display, with very slim bezels and no notch. There's also an in-display fingerprint sensor and the screen functions as a speaker for calls, similar to what we saw on the Huawei P30 Pro. To mimic the high end, there's a glass and metal build and it's 9.3mm thick. In use, though, it feels large in the hand, unsurprisingly quite chunky and nowhere near as sleek as the Galaxy S10 range.
It's a triple-lens camera system - 48MP f/2.0 main, 3D depth and 8MP, f/2.2 ultra-wide - that not only automatically slides up but also rotates for selfies.
Here's how it works. When you hit the 'switch cameras' button in the app, the top rear section auto slides up and the oval-shaped camera module rotates. It's quite noisy, but it sounds reassuringly mechanical, and, if you're anything like us, it's the kind of thing you immediately want to do 15 times in a row.
Again, Samsung is far from first here - we've seen pop-up cameras before, Oppo's been at it for years and most recently on the likes of the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 - but this is a mainstream mid-range Samsung. Phones really are getting crazy again.
Samsung says the 3D depth camera can support live focus in video, plus there's Super Steady video support - Samsung's software stabilisation tends to be very good.
To round out the specs, there's a 3,700mAh battery, with 25W fast charging, Android 9.0 Pie, 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (with no microSD). Also on board is Samsung's voice assistant Bixby (both button activated and hands-free) and a Dolby Atmos boost for audio. The Galaxy A80 will go on sale on May 29 and it comes in black, white and gold - we don't have an official price from Samsung yet but last year's Galaxy A9 sells for around £400.
Our current best smartphone under £500 is last year's OnePlus 6T. So how does the Samsung Galaxy A80 stack up to what you can get from OnePlus? Quite well, actually. The A80 has a bigger screen, no notch and both One UI and OxygenOS are equally inoffensive.
It will no doubt best the OnePlus's 16MP cameras when it comes to phone photography, too, though like the 6T, Samsung seems to have missed waterproofing off the spec sheet. The only problem? Samsung may be a year behind - OnePlus's next phone, expected to be the OnePlus 7, is due to launch in May.
Samsung also announced the cheaper Galaxy A70. It has a Super AMOLED display with a small notch for the front-facing camera. Again, there's a triple camera setup with a 32MP main camera, a f/2.2 depth sensor and a wide-angle camera.
There's a big 4,500mAh battery, which can also be topped up using 25W fast charging. It goes on sale on April 26 with black, blue, white and coral colours. All the new A series phones come with Samsung's refreshed One UI.
Display: 6.7-inch FHD+ (1080×2400) Super AMOLED
Camera: Main: 48MP, F2.0, Ultra Wide: 8MP, F2.2 (123°), 3D Depth
Body: 165.2 x 76.5 x 9.3 mm
Memory: 8 GB RAM / 128 GB Internal Storage
Battery: 3,700mAh
Ru Bhikha, uSwitch.com mobiles expert, believes that these new models could help Samsung counter its smartphone sales slump. “Samsung has attempted to push boundaries so far this year, with the Galaxy Fold and Samsung Galaxy S10 5G," Bhikha says. “However, despite the impressive tech included with these handsets, the steep price tags have not convinced huge numbers of consumers to part with their cash as the industry continues to struggle with smartphone apathy." Clearly, Samsung hopes the new Galaxy A range may be the antidote.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
