10 things you must know about Samsung Galaxy A8

To begin with, the Galaxy A8 is Samsung’s slimmest smartphone yet...

It seems the bug to be the slimmest smartphone has hit most mobile phone manufacturers. Samsung too has now brought out the Galaxy A8, its all-metal design smartphone. The beautifully crafted Galaxy A8 is the slimmest smartphone that Samsung has produced so far. The phone looks sturdy and features the latest Android OS and several cutting edge technologies that make it an unbeatable competitor in the smartphone space.

However, there is no news about how Samsung is going to price the Galaxy A8 in India or when it will make it availability for the Indian market.

Design

Galaxy A8 has an all-metal casing and very small bezels to give it a bigger look than its specs indicate. It measures 158mm x 76.8mm x 5.9mm. It has metallic casing with rather thin vertical bezels. The back panel of the A8 is smooth and houses a speaker, a camera and an LED flash at the top centre of the device. The volume button is on the right side and the 3.5mm audio jack is on the top.

Display

Samsung is known for making dazzling displays and Galaxy A8 is not an exception. It sports a 5.7-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that supports 1080 x 1920 pixels resolution and 16M colours giving it a pixel density of 386ppi and a screen to body ratio of 73.8 per cent. To protect the screen from scratches and other physical damages, the A8 uses Corning Gorilla Glass 4 layer. The pictures displayed on the screen are pretty sharp and the touchscreen is very responsive.

Camera

Samsung Galaxy A8 is provided with two capable cameras. The primary camera with a 16MP autofocus sensor along with LED flash is placed at the rear and. This camera comes with several inbuilt features, like geo-tagging, digital zoom, voice activation, timer, touch focus, HDR, panorama and face detection. It can take a still picture in 5312 x 2988 pixels resolutions or shoot a video at 1080p @30fps.

The presence of flash allows it to take brilliant photographs even in low light. For conducting video conference over Skype or taking quality selfies, the smartphone is provided with a powerful 5MP snapper at the front. This secondary camera can also shoot videos at 1080p @30fps. 

Processor

The next generation Samsung Galaxy A8 is blessed with a powerful combination of an octa-core (1.5GHz quad-core Cortex-A53 & 1.0GHz quad-core Cortex-A53) Qualcomm MSM8939 Snapdragon 615 processor combined with Adreno 405 GPU.

Operating system and UI

The Galaxy A8 comes out of the box with the most recent Android 5.0.2 Lollipop OS with the latest TouchWiz UI built over its top. The UI from Samsung will allow the user to change ‘screen grid’ into 4 x 4, 4 x 5, or 5 x 5 grid options, thereby changing the size of the layout on the display. The new TouchWiz UI also allows you to drop the file folder graphic and instead give you a square of icons. That means you can see nine tiny icons, rather than just six as you could before. Even the system icons across the top could be tweaked.

However, the biggest change you are likely to notice is the adoption of 3D parallax effect for the apps tray that adds depth and makes something static look more dynamic. The high pixel count will allow the image to remain sharp even under direct sunlight.

Connectivity

The Galaxy A8 features dual SIM (Micro SIM + Micro SIM) and dual stand by mode and is packed with a multitude of connectivity features that will allow you to stay in touch with the world through various channels. These connectivity options are, CDMA (800 MHz), GSM (850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz), UMTS (800, 850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz), FDD LTE [1800 (band 3), 2100 (band 1) MHz], TDD LTE [1900 (band 39), 2300 (band 40), 2500 (band 41), 2600 (band 38) MHz]. In addition, it also has Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Hotspot, Bluetooth v4.0 with A2DP, EDR, LE, Ethernet, HDMI slot, NFC, USB High speed 2.0 and Micro USB support, BEIDOU, GPS and A-GPS.

Sensors

For better user experience, the next generation Samsung Galaxy A8 comes with a few sensors, which include accelerometer, proximity, compass, fingerprint sensor, Sony IMX240 and Samsung ISOCELL camera sensor and light sensor.

Memory

The new Samsung Galaxy A8 will be available in 16/32GB variants. You can also improve its storage space by adding up to 128GB of external memory through micro SD card. 2GB of DDR3 RAM ensures faster operations.

Battery

To make the Galaxy A8 run for a long period, it is packed with a powerful 3050mAh Li-ion polymer battery with 304 hours of standby time.

Other features

This trendy looking smartphone in metal casing also has several additional features that make it a formidable player. These features include voice dialing, voice commands, coice recording, photo and video editor, FM radio with RDS recording, HTML 5 browser and highly capable audio and video player that supports several formats.