According to a newly-discovered benchmark listing, Samsung seems to be developing a new smartphone powered by the Android Go platform. The handset identified by the model number SM-J260G carries only 1GB of RAM, according to Geekbench, and this characteristic certainly fits the bill for an Android Go device. Given the model number, the unit might be a part of the Galaxy J2 series which happens to include the newly-introduced Galaxy J2 Pro (2018), but unlike this aforementioned model which is powered by Nougat, the SM-J260G runs Android 8.1 Oreo out of the box, lending further credibility to the idea that this might be an Android Go smartphone.
Additionally, the motherboard detected by Geekbench is labeled as ‘universal7570_go’ which further hints at the adoption of the Android Go operating system given the suffix, as well as the nature of the system on chip, which is likely an Exynos 7570 chipset built in-house using a 14nm LPP process by Samsung’s silicon division. It features four ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores clocked at 1.4GHz along with a Mali-T720 MP1 (one core) graphics chip, and supports Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n connectivity along with LTE Cat.4 and Bluetooth 4.2. No other hardware details were revealed by the benchmarking tool, however, the device was able to score around 620 points in the single-core benchmark, and roughly 1,745 points in the multi-core test.
Assuming that the SM-J260G will be an Android Go smartphone, it will likely become the OEM’s first to adopt this platform unless Samsung has other surprises up its sleeve. Android Go was released by Google late last year following the release of the Oreo update and was designed specifically for low-end smartphones equipped with 1GB of RAM or less, which are generally more popular in emerging countries partly due to the low prices associated with them. The lightweight platform is designed to reduce data consumption and battery usage, and be less resource-intensive in general compared to the fully-fledged Android OS counterpart. Having said that, the device will likely have a display with a sub-HD resolution of 960 x 540 or lower as it’s unlikely to surpass the Galaxy J2 Pro (2018) in terms of hardware, a user-removable battery, and expandable storage to compensate for the presumably low amount of on-board memory. Availability is unknown but more details are likely to emerge in the coming weeks.