Even as Samsung continues to suffer from the fallout of the Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, the company has not looked to slow down the pace of its budget smartphone launches one bit. That being the case, the company launched a bunch of mid-range handsets in the Indian and Chinese markets over the past couple of weeks. The range includes the Galaxy On8, the Galaxy J5 Prime and the Galaxy J7 Prime in India and the 2016 editions of the Galaxy On5 and the Galaxy On7 in China. All of these devices are positioned in the same segment of the market, with price-tags ranging from around $220 for the Galaxy J5 Prime on the lower end to around $280 for the Galaxy J7 Prime at the higher end. The Galaxy On8 has an asking price of about $240.
Launching numerous models with little or no product differentiation under the pretext of offering more choices to customers has been a successful strategy for Samsung in many regions, but hasn’t paid the company any dividends in the world’s largest smartphone market, China. Now, in a continued push to make its affordable devices more lucrative to buyers in emerging markets, the company has brought a couple of new software elements from the ill-fated phablet to the two aforementioned Galaxy J-series devices, which already holds the curious distinction of being the first Samsung mid-rangers to come with Notification LEDs. Samsung Notes and Samsung Cloud, which were first seen on the now-discontinued Galaxy Note 7 as part of the all-new Grace UX and has since been rolled out to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge, now make an appearance on the two mid-range devices as pre-installed software.
Samsung Notes combines a number of different note-taking features into a single piece of software, making it more user-friendly than Samsung’s earlier implementations of these features. Of course, the company had announced back in August that it would bring the app to some other devices in the near future, so it isn’t entirely out of the blue, but it’s still nice that features hitherto restricted to Samsung’s flagship smartphones, have now been rolled out to a couple of lower-priced devices. Even though these developments are a definite positive for Samsung buyers, it is worth remembering that Grace UX, in its entirety, has still not been implemented on the two Galaxy J-series handsets.