Chinese consumer electronics manufacturer Elephone is working on a new Android device in the form of the Elephone S9, the company revealed on Friday, in addition to sharing the first three images of the smartphone’s front panel. The display meant for the upcoming device is said to be of the flexible AMOLED variety and feature an aspect ratio of 18:9, i.e. 2:1, Elephone confirmed. This particular image format has already been adopted by a number of major original equipment manufacturers (OEM) over the course of this year, with its first high-profile introduction being at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in March when LG Electronics debuted the LG G6. Elephone itself already experimented with the same aspect ratio and managed to commercialize it with the release of the Elephone S8, a device that will seemingly be directly succeeded by the newly announced product.
The phone maker said that the upcoming handset will feature a “high-end” system-on-chip (SoC) from Qualcomm’s Snapdragon silicon series, indicating a significant departure for the company which traditionally opts for MediaTek-made chipsets. The wording of the firm’s statement on the matter suggests that the Elephone S9 may be powered by the Snapdragon 835, Qualcomm’s only “high-end” SoC released this year which already proved its worth in a number 2017 Android flagships like the Samsung Galaxy S8, HTC U11, Sony Xperia XZ Premium, Xiaomi Mi 6, and the OnePlus 5. This particular silicon ships with the Adreno 540 GPU and eight 64-bit Kyro 280 cores which can be clocked at a maximum operating frequency of 2.45GHz and would make the Elephone S9 a truly high-end offering in terms of raw hardware power if the handset ends up featuring it.
The Chinese smartphone manufacturer also said that the Elephone S9 will be around 50 percent cheaper than the Galaxy S8, presumably referencing the smartphone’s launch price which hovered around the $720 mark in the United States and was roughly $100 higher in Europe. By packing high-end specs into a device priced at approximately $360, Elephone would likely be targeting the value-oriented market segment, thus opting for a similar approach to the one utilized by OnePlus. A price tag of around $360 would also be in line with the Elephone S8 which is an extremely aggressively priced offering that can currently be purchased for less than $240 and may be discounted even further in the coming weeks.
