After launching the successor Galaxy A8 in China last month, Samsung has now brought it to India and will start selling it from today across all retail and online channels at Rs. 32,500. In the Indian variant, Samsung has left out the Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 SoC and is using its own Exynos 5430 chipset. Rest of the specifications are same as the Chinese Galaxy A8.
Starting with the design, Samsung Galaxy A8 is metal unibody smartphone with premium looks – same as the predecessor Galaxy A7. With the 5.9mm thickness, it is the slimmest Galaxy A series smartphone till date, but not the slimmest smartphone ever made. The Galaxy A8 measures 158×76.8×5.9mm and weighs 151 grams.
One of the big highlight of Galaxy A8 is that the It has a fingerprint sensor on the home button, which wasn’t in the Galaxy A7. In our limited time, we found it to be pretty accurate too.
Upfront, the Samsung Galaxy A8 features a slightly bigger 5.7-inch full-HD (1080×1920 pixels) Super AMOLED display than the Galaxy A7’s 5.5-inch display. It is very nice to look at, but colours appear a bit over-saturated.
Inside, the Galaxy A8 packs an octa-core (1.8GHz quad-core + 1.3GHz quad-core) Exynos 5430 processor coupled with 2GB of RAM. Samsung didn’t give straight answer to why they decided to go with Exynos chipset instead of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 615, but it seems that the Qualcomm SoC’s heating issue is known by the firm and it didn’t want to take chance.
At the back, Galaxy A8 packs a 16-megapixel autofocus rear camera with LED flash and a 5-megapixel front-facing camera. The smartphone runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop with company’s latest TouchWiz UI on top.
The 32GB of built-in storage on A8 is further expandable via microSD card (up to 128GB). The Galaxy A8 features hybrid dual-SIM slots, so you can either use dual-SIM at one time or single-SIM with microSD card. Both the slots are capable of 4G LTE, but if you are using 4G on one SIM then the other will only support 3G/2G. It is backed by non-removable 3050mAh battery.
Above the display, you will find earpiece grill with two sensors – proximity and ambient light sensor, and the 5-megapixel camera. Below the display sits the physical home button that also features fingerprint sensor and two capacitive touch buttons – back and menu.
The left side of Galaxy A8 features volume rocker and dual hybrid SIM slots, while the right edge only features power / lock button. The Micro-USB charging / data port, primary microphone and 3.5mm audio jack sits at the bottom. The top edge only has secondary noise cancellation microphone.
The Galaxy A8 is now available through all retail and online outlets across India. It comes in three colour options – Black, White and Shiny Gold. Though we feel that Samsung Galaxy A8 is nice package, it is still an expensive offering by the company. We will soon bring you detailed review of the device, so stay tuned.