When Huawei released the Huawei P20 Pro earlier this year, much was made of the fact it boasts a three-camera set-up. But now Samsung has one-upped Huawei with a new smartphone with four rear lenses - and it’s not even a flagship phone.
The new Samsung A9 is part of Samsung’s A range, it’s mid-range smartphones, meaning the pricing is pretty affordable. The A9 will will cost £549 when it goes on sale, putting it on a competitive level with OnePlus.
The four cameras include an 8-megapixel, 120-degree ultra wide angle lens, a 10-megapixel telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom, a main lens that comes in at 24-megapixels and a 5-megapixel depth camera with live focus. (This is the part of the camera that gives you that bokeh effect in portrait mode.)
Samsung says its aware customers purchase smartphones based on their photographic capabilities, and therefore wants to make sure each gets the best device for their budget.
“We’re not restricting our innovation and development just to the flagship range,” Kate Beaumont, Samsung’s director of product, services and commercial strategy, told the Standard. “We’re starting to bring technology and experiences right through the range of devices.”
But might four cameras be a tiny bit excessive?
“Phones used to be about voice, then messaging, and now it’s about communicating through photos,” says Beaumont.
What else is new on the Samsung A9?
Set to launch in November, as well as the flashy cameras, the A9 has a 6.38-inch display, comes with Qualcomm’s 660 processor and a 3,800mAh battery - a bigger battery than the new Google Pixel 3 phone.
It will ship in three colours - black, blue, and bubblegum pink - and as it's aimed at the Instagram generation, will boast a whopping 128GB of storage too.
And that is not all the A9 has to offer. Beaumont says other high-end features from the flagship range include Samsung Pay and Samsung Health - because with the A9 it's not just about hardware upgrades, but also, software upgrades.
Many might ask why Samsung are releasing more devices - devices at a lower price point, no less - when it only launched the new Note 9 two months ago. Turns out, the mid-range smartphone market is really growing, up 46 per cent year-on-year, thanks to the growth of companies like OnePlus and Huawei’s Lite range.
In view of which, Samsung has expanded its A series and J series from four devices in 2017 to a total of seven this year.
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“It’s important to give people more choice,” says Beaumont. "It's also an interesting part of the market dynamic - if they have that choice, then we need to make sure that the devices we're creating have the right feature sets to win the hearts and minds.”
The Samsung A9 may not have the all the pizzazz of the Galaxy S9 or the Note 9, but it's a good example of smartphone innovation, demonstrating how you don’t always need to spend £1,000+ on a new phone to get the best features.
