Samsung Electronics has launched the Galaxy A8 smartphone in India on Monday at an MSRP of Rs. 32,500 (around $515). The phone will be available in three different color options – Black, White and Gold, and will be available in brick and mortar stores as well as online retail outlets. Samsung has also tied up with domestic telecommunications provider Airtel to offer double data for six months to anyone buying the smartphone. The device was announced in China at 3,199 Yuan ($515) for the 16 GB version and 3,499 ($564) for the 32 GB variant towards the end of last month after an endless array of leaks and rumors leading up to the launch. Initial reports seem to indicate that India will get only the 32 GB variant of the device, and there’s no word on the availability of the 16 GB version in the country.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 features a fully metallic built, and features a fingerprint reader which is integrated into the physical home button. There will also be a 16-megapixel ISOCELL camera on the rear of the device, while the selfie-cam on the front will come with a 5-megapixel sensor. The 16-megapixel camera is said to come with 1μm pixels instead of the 1.12μm ones, which has been the standard thus far. The reduced pixel size has reportedly helped Samsung in slimming down the smartphone to 5.9 mm, making it the thinnest smartphone yet from the house of Samsung. The primary camera will have an f/1.9 aperture and will be accompanied by an LED flash. The front-facing camera meanwhile will come will a 120-degree wide-angle lens.
Coming to the rest of the hardware specifications, the phone features a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920 x 1280, resulting in a pixel density of 386 dpi. Globally the device has two versions powered either by Qualcomm’s MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 chipset or by Samsung’s in-house Exynos 5430 SoC. Samsung has launched the Exynos version of the smartphone in India, which comes with an integrated 64-bit octa-core CPU with four Cortex A15 cores clocked at 1.8 GHz, and four Cortex A7 cores clocked at 1.3 GHz. The Exynos 5430 chipset also comes with A Mali-T628MP GPU clocked at 600 MHz. Globally, the handset comes with 2 GB of RAM and 16 or 32 GB of internal storage, depending on the variant. Both versions however, will have microSD card slots to provide additional storage. The phone comes with a 3,050 mAh battery, while Android 5.1 Lollipop will be pre-installed with Samsung’s proprietary TouchWiz interface laid on top. Connectivity options will include both FDD-LTE (B3 1800 MHz) and TDD-LTE (B40 2300) along with dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, microUSB 2.0, Bluetooth 4.1 and NFC.