Although flagship smartphones have seemingly stopped growing, majority of them having 5 to 5.5-inch screens, a market remains for larger devices, and Samsung is hoping to capture some of it with its newest phablet, the Galaxy A9.
Following in the footsteps of the 5.7-inch Galaxy A8, its predecessor, the A9 is an elegant, slim and large smartphone, with specs that are ever so slightly found in Samsung’s Galaxy S line of devices.
Launched in China by the company on Wednesday, the Samsung Galaxy A9 does have a lot of very important improvements.
Other than the 6-inch, 1080p AMOLED screen, it also features a huge (but non-removable) 4,000mAh battery, which should hopefully prolong the battery life of the phone over the dreaded one-day mark we regularly see in smartphones nowadays.
Other specs include an 8 megapixel selfie cam; a 13 megapixel camera on the back; an octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor; 32GB of storage (expandable with microSD cards up to 128GB in size); and 3GB of RAM.
The Samsung Galaxy A9 runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop – a trend we are observing a lot lately, even though Android 6 has been available since October. Included as well is support for Samsung Pay and a fingerprint scanner.
All of these features are packed into a metal and glass case that’s only 0.29 inches thin, and although that is quite a bit thicker than the Galaxy A8 and its 0.23 inch thin profile, it’s still quite good for such a big phone.
The Galaxy A9 will be available in China later this month; international availability and pricing are yet to be announced.
The Samsung Galaxy A9 joins the recently announced Galaxy A7 and Galaxy A5 (do not confuse them with older models of the same name – Samsung highlights their difference by placing a “2016” next to their names), which are available in China already.
