Sprint announced on Friday that the 2016 edition of the Samsung Galaxy J3 smartphone will now be available for purchase at a price of $179.99 (plus taxes) on both its prepaid brands – Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA. While the device has gone on sale with immediate effect at Virgin, Boost’s retail outlets as well as some third-party retailers will start selling the device from Monday, January 18th. Sprint also says that the smartphone will be available online Tuesday, January 19th onwards. The carrier claims that the handset delivers “value, performance and convenience”. The Galaxy J series is Samsung’s latest lineup of entry to mid-range smartphones that the company is expected to put up for sale as prepaid handsets in markets around the world.
As per the listing on Sprint’s website, the Samsung Galaxy J3 features a 5-inch Super AMOLED display with a 720p HD resolution. The phone comes with 16 GB of internal storage, but there’s no mention of the amount of available RAM. The handset is powered by a quad-core CPU that’s clocked at a frequency of 1.2 GHz. While the press release from Sprint doesn’t specify the exact SoC that’s under the hood, the version meant for China comes with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 chipset. A device with model number SM-J3109 was certified by the FCC for sale in the US back in November, but it cannot be ascertained at this stage if the version being launched by Sprint is the same as that one. As for the rest of the hardware, there’s a 5-megapixel primary camera on the Sprint-bound Galaxy J3 (2016), while a 2-megapixel front-facing shooter is poised to take care of the selfie duties.
The press release also points out that the phone comes with an ‘Easy Mode’ that has an easy-to-use GUI, and helps “first-time smartphone owners who are not familiar with new phone features”. The handset is also 4G-enabled, and comes with support for enhanced LTE, along with the obligatory legacy 3G support. The latest entrant into the prepaid market in the US also carries a 2,600 mAh battery, which should be decent enough to get through a day of moderate usage with the HD Super AMOLED screen. Although Sprint doesn’t specify the version of Android running on the Galaxy J3, the China Telecom version launched back in November, comes with Android 5.1.1 Lollipop pre-installed, with Samsung’s new lightweight TouchWiz running on top.