Samsung announced that the Chinese version of its
Galaxy A8s mid-range smartphone will be the world's first smartphone to feature a camera hole that is inside the display itself. Before we dive into the phone's details, we should say that it's unclear if this phone will see a release in the United States. Samsung doesn't currently list the Galaxy A8s on it's global product page, and this could be one of those smartphones that just doesn't make it to the North American market.
The Chinese Galaxy A8s measures 6.4" diagonally, whereas the phone's display is slightly smaller at 6.2". The display has an aspect ratio of 19.5:9 and an unknown resolution. This model of the phone also measures 7.4mm thin, which makes it almost a full millimeter thinner than the global version that is 8.3mm.
The most notable feature of this phone, as stated above, is it's unusual camera design. The front camera lens sits in the upper left-hand corner of the phone and the display wraps around it. Samsung refers to this as its Infinity-O display technology. This is an interesting take on the display notch problem everyone is trying to resolve, but it remains to be seen if customers (and pundits) will see this as being a superior solution.
Samsung didn't disclose the specs on the front camera, but there are three cameras on the phone's rear. Going from top to bottom, the first of these is a 10MP sensor with 2x optical zoom. The second camera ringed is the phone's primary camera, and it has a 24MP resolution and an F1.7 lens. The third and final camera has a less impressive 5MP resolution and an F2.2 lens. This camera is designed for taking photos focused on just one thing, everything else will be kept out of focus.
Samsung utilized a
Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 to power the Galaxy A8s, and comes loaded with eight Qualcomm Kyro 360 CPU cores that may be clocked as high as 2.2GHz. The SoC also has an Adreno 616 GPU and a multicore AI Engine that Qualcomm designed to accelerate performance on AI tasks. The Galaxy A8s comes standard with 6GB of RAM, but this is upgradeable to 8GB. All models of the Chinese Galaxy A8s will also come equipped with 128GB of storage.
Samsung will release the
Galaxy A8s in China on December 21.
