After Samsung announced the Galaxy A9 about a month ago, not much else was said about the device, or when it was actually coming to the Chinese market like it was supposed to. Until now – Samsung have just made the phone available for purchase in the country, and anyone willing to get it can do so for the price of around $490. According to most opinions, this is quite the acceptable price point considering everything the device has to offer, however it is not known if buyers from other countries will get to enjoy the same offer. As of now, the status of the international launch of the device is not yet known.
We don’t even known which countries are going to get the phone at the moment, and Samsung aren’t exactly being very open about the situation either. There are rumors that the phone might cost a bit more for international buyers, while it was also somewhat confirmed that it’s coming to the US at some point due to it passing FCC certification. Of course, just because the device was successfully certified by the Commission doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be launched in the country, but it’s the best indication we have right now.
What does the phone bring for this price tag? It’s a relatively large device, with a 6-inch display and a Full HD resolution, although whether it will be enough for everyone is up for debate. It’s becoming more and more standard to pack phones of this physical size with larger resolutions nowadays, and some have expressed disappointment at Samsung’s choice of display, but that’s the situation. Plus, there are of course some benefits to not having the maximum possible resolution on the device, such as better battery life and possibly better responsiveness with some specific Android applications.
The trend of using eight cores in a smartphone is becoming more and more popular nowadays, and Samsung are of course following suit with this device too – there are two quad-core processors inside, one used for low-intensity applications such as general OS use, and the other for resource-hungry apps like games, which are additionally augmented by an Adreno 510 graphics processor. All in all, it sounds like the phone should be able to handle pretty much anything the user throws at it with great performance, although it’s not the most powerful Android device we’ve seen on the market so far. Other than the eight CPU cores, the phone also comes with 3 GB of RAM and internal storage that can be expanded with a microSD card.
Other specifications of the phone are more or less standard and in line with the common trends on the market in that price range, although some are saying that Samsung actually managed to make a very good offer with this phone and it beats the competition by a significant margin in this price bracket. Of course, there is still the question of whether we’ll be able to get this phone outside of China at the same price.
The situation is still unknown in this regard, and we expect that it might be a while before Samsung actually say anything about international availability. Knowing the company, they are most likely carefully analyzing their performance on the Chinese market right now, and are going to take some time to properly collect data before they know exactly what the merits of this phone are. If it performs well enough, we expect that they will get the ball rolling for other countries as well.