As great as the Samsung Galaxy S7 edge is, it does cost a lot of money. Thankfully though, Samsung has updated its budget A-series for the more cash-strapped discerning smartphone shopper.
As with previous A-series phones, there will be a low-cost and low-powered Galaxy A3, a mid-weight Galaxy A5 and finally a new A7, the most powerful of the bunch.
Of the three handsets, only the A3 doesn’t have support for LTE Cat6, or as its more commonly known, LTE Advanced. The upshot of this is that download speeds have clocked in at 300Mbps on some LTE Advanced networks, and as they continue to roll out across SA you too could enjoy super fast download speeds.
The batteries across the range have also been given a sizeable increase. The Galaxy A3 now has a 2 300mAh instead of a 1 900mAh, while the A5 and the A7 have been upgrade to 2 900mAh and 3 300mAh batteries respectively.
Over and above that, not much has changed, although the camera has been bumped up from previous versions with a slight bump to aperture size (F1.9 vs. F2.2)
The full specifications of each handset can be seen in the table below.
You might notice as well that the CPU has been given a bit of a boost in all three of the handsets which in the case of the A5 and A7 means there’s an octa-core rather than a quad-core CPU, and both are running at a slightly higher speed. We also quite like the 3GB of RAM in the A7 though the 1.5GB in the A3 might cause problems.
In regards to pricing, that, as well as when you will be able to purchase these new handsets is yet to be finalised but as always, when we know, we’ll let you know.
What we will say is that these handsets seem very promising, especially given how much we’ve been enjoying modestly-priced handsets like the Redmi Note 2 and the Hisense KO. Bundle this with the superb engineering we saw in the Galaxy S7 edge, and we might just have a trio of great smartphones from Samsung that won’t break the bank.
Update 05/05
As promised, the pricing for the A series has come through and you can find the recommended retail price for each handset below.
- Samsung Galaxy A3 –
R4 999.00R5 999.00 - Samsung Galaxy A5 –
R6 999.00R7 999.00 - Samsung Galaxy A7 –
R8 999.00R9 999.00
Unfortunately these handsets aren’t as cheap as we were hoping, but they are cheaper than the Galaxy S7 which is good news for all the Samsung fans out there that simply don’t want to spend R16 000 on a smartphone.
The Galaxy A3, A5 and A7 are available from retailers right now.
Update #2 05/05
Previous pricing shared with us from Samsung for its Galaxy A3, Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A7 was incorrect. Pricing has now been amended to reflect the correct recommended retail price.
[Source & Image – Samsung]
