The Galaxy A series isn’t as well known as the other phones, but the Korean giant has released a number of models, including the Galaxy Alpha, Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5, Galaxy A7, and Galaxy A8. Apparently, Samsung believes there is still a market for the A series, because the company officially unveiled the rumored Galaxy A9.
Updated on 12-23-2015 by Williams Pelegrin: Added official information from Samsung about the Galaxy A9.
With a 6-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 resolution display, the Galaxy A9 is easily one of Samsung’s biggest smartphones currently available. Under the hood lies an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, which used to be the Snapdragon 620 before Qualcomm weirdly decided to rename it. Regardless, the chipset is paired with 3GB of RAM, the same amount of memory found in the Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.
Elsewhere, the Galaxy A9 packs a 13-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel camera on the front, which should make selfie lovers everywhere quite happy. In addition, the large 4,000mAh battery should keep the lights on all day long.
As previously mentioned, the Galaxy A series is Samsung’s line of smartphones that finally introduced premium materials like metal. The Galaxy A9 evolves on that achievement by featuring an all-aluminum build, a welcome departure from the front and rear glass panels found on Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones if you’re not fond of your phone being smothered by fingerprints.
Much like the Galaxy A5 and A7 before it, the Galaxy A9 packs support for Samsung Pay. As such, the handset also adds a fingerprint scanner that doubles as the home button, a security feature initially implemented in Samsung’s flagship smartphones.
Finally, and most disappointingly, the Galaxy A9 will ship with Android 5.1 Lollipop installed. It could be a matter of Samsung still tweaking TouchWiz to play nice with Android 6.0 Marshmallow, but it’s still less than ideal to have an Android smartphone announced this late into 2015 and not come with Google’s latest version of its mobile operating system in tow.
Samsung did not reveal pricing or availability information, though we suspect that, much like the previously-announced Galaxy A smartphones, the Galaxy A9 will initially be available in China sometime in the near future.
Next page: All the previous rumors about the Samsung Galaxy A9
