With so many smartphone competitors in the market, Samsung has had to work harder to gain the customer’s attention. The Galaxy S9 and Note 9 devices truly pushed the boundaries with attractive designs and trending features. But, those were flagship phones, their mid-range offerings still needed to prove a lot. That’s where the Samsung Galaxy A9 (2018) makes its debut.
This is the world’s first smartphone with a quad camera setup at the back. Yes, you read that right. The biggest highlight of the Galaxy A9 is the cameras. It looks like Samsung has targeted young adults, photography enthusiasts and Instagram their domain. Let’s check if the 4-array cameras on the Galaxy A9 steals the show.
Design and Build
The Samsung Galaxy A9 is a good looking phone. It partly follows the trend by including a large screen, gradient back, but no notch. The phone has rounded edges with a bezel at the top and bottom. This can be exciting news for those who aren’t very fond of notches. The Galaxy A9 is available in three colour variants –Bubblegum Pink, Caviar Black and the one we tested, Lemonade Blue. The Caviar Black variant is less flamboyant with one colour and no vertical gradient. We noticed that the back of the phone easily collects fingerprints.
The phone has a large 6.3-inch screen, which is slightly larger and wider than the Galaxy S8 Plus. Most large screen phones are precarious to use with one hand and the Galaxy A9 is no exception. Also, the smooth edges are slippery and so needs to use the phone with care. There is no getting away from the fact of getting a good phone case. On the back are four camera lenses mounted one above the other and a LED flash below it. The square-shaped fingerprint sensor is carved right next to the camera lenses. Your index finger can reach to it easily if you have large hands.
On the left flip side is a Bixby button; the power button and volume rocker are on the right. The top has one microphone and a SIM tray with two nano and a dedicated microSD card slot that supports up to 512 GB of storage. The bottom of the Galaxy A9 is little busy with a headphone jack, USB Type-C, microphone and a single down firing speaker grill.
Features
The Samsung Galaxy A9 features a large 6.3-inch edge-to-edge super AMOLED display with a FHD+ resolution (2220 x 1080 pixels). Samsung calls it as the Infinity Display. The AMOLED screen means you see content with good contrast levels and colours. Also, it allows for Always On Display, which lets you view necessary notifications, calendar alerts and other information without even turning on the entire screen.
The most highlighting feature of the A9 is the quad-camera setup. These four cameras are meant for handling everything from low-light, zoom, portrait to wide-angle shoots, that too with great quality. At the top is an 8MP ultra-wide camera with an aperture f/2.4. This lens can help capture a 120 degree of view in a single frame. The second is the 10MP f/2.4 telephoto zoom, which support a 2X optical zoom for close-ups. Below it is the main 24MP f/1.7 low-light camera for clicking clear photos even in dark light. The last is the 5MP depth camera meant to handle focusing on objects and adding depth-of-field and bokeh effects. The front-facing, selfie camera is rated at 24MP.
In terms of hardware, the Galaxy A9 is all set to deliver a powerful performance with its 2.2GHz octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 Processor coupled with either 6GB or 8GB of RAM. This is sufficient for multi-tasking and faster switching between different tasks. The phone runs on Android 8.0 Oreo, layered with the Samsung Experience UI. It is sad not to see the latest version of Android. To get through all day and night, the Galaxy A9 is powered with 3,800 mAh battery, supporting fast charging technology for topping up the battery when needed.
For security, Samsung Galaxy A9 supports both fingerprint and face recognition, besides traditional PIN and password unlock. All important connectivity includes NFC, Wi-Fi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5.0 for faster connectivity.
Performance
After spending some time with the Samsung Galaxy A9, we could tell the performance wasn’t very extra-ordinary. It just felt like Samsung focussed its efforts on the four cameras on the back of the A9. We put the A9 through several benchmarks. The combination of hardware was able to score a decent AnTuTu score of 139,361, whereas the Geekbench score was no surprise when compared to the similar specification phones. The A9 scored 1,459 in the single core test and 5,443 in the multi-core test. We also threw in some more graphics tests such as the 3D Mark Sling Shot Extreme. This phone got pretty average OpenGL score of 1,341 and 1,061 in the Vulkan test.
The four cameras on the Samsung A9 were our next area of focus. We clicked lots of photos with different modes and on different settings. The Camera app on the A9 looks a little cluttered at first. Everything from camera modes, settings, filters are all listed on the interface, making it appear complicated.
There are three icons just above the camera settings, which lets you select between wide-angle, main camera and the telephoto camera. In addition, you also get different modes such as Beauty, Auto, AR emojis, Slow-motion, Hyper-lapse and more. The rest of the other modes were Samsung’s Scene Optimizer with 19 different modes such as Food, Portrait, Sky, Mountain and many more. The cameras on the A9 were able to click decent photos with contrasting colours and good amount of details. Although, we found that the focusing was not very quick and accurate. Also, the camera was not able to capture far away objects very clearly. We were able to capture 120 degree wide angle scenes, but the background appeared smudgy. The AI in the camera app also supports Flaw Detection. This feature alerts you if someone in the frame blink eyes or if there is any facial blur or backlighting. The camera on the A9 also lets you create your own emojis, which can be used on social media.
We also got some selfies clicked with the 24MP front camera. It offered good details in full HD resolution shots. We found that the camera added a slight yellow tint when clicking in dark. Samsung could have undertaken some of these fine changes to make the quad-camera really something extraordinary.
The interface of the A9 is a little sluggish, especially when switching between a heavy gaming app to other. We tried playing PUBG, this phone by default sets the quality to medium. When we tried setting it to high settings, we saw a drastic drop in frame rates. Overall, the experience was not that great. The sound quality on the Samsung Galaxy A9 was not exciting either. We think it should be to do with only one down firing speaker. It wasn’t very loud, not very clear either.
Verdict
It’s after a long time that Samsung tried something really innovative, by launching a device with a quad-camera set-up. The Samsung Galaxy A9 is powered with a mid-level specification. We felt this phone could break several benchmarks, but through our time with it, we found it to be pretty average. The camera is fun, if you are a social media addict and want to upload lots of photos, but doesn’t care too much about finer details. But, if you are an everyday gaming user, this phone may not impress you much.
The phone has a large screen, which is good for watching videos, movies and browsing. Also, with a starting price of Rs. 36,990*, the Samsung Galaxy A9 has to still go through tough competition with so many offerings around.
