Samsung has been grooming it’s A Series lineup since the start of the year. The finest product of its grooming session seems to be the A80. With a rotating slider camera and a full bezel-less display, the A80 seems to be one of a kind phone and a piece of wondrous innovation.
Competition from Chinese rivals seems to have taken a toll on Samsung. As a result, we seen the arrival of the new M series and the dynamic changes in the price and specifications of the A series as well. The Samsung A80, is a phone which is bound to raise some eye brows.
The stunning new ‘Infinity Display’, the triple camera setup, which pops up and rotates itself, and the top of the line specifications; makes the A80 a rightful flagship quality phone.
Seems like this is what Samsung’s CEO DJ Koh meant, when he said lines between Samsung’s flagships and midrangers will get increasingly blurry.
Design and Display
The heated battle between slider and notch took its final turn, during the late 2018 period. 4 months in 2019 and It seem the slider has won. The slider mechanism allows the A80 to achieve whooping 85.8% screen-to-body ratio. Don’t let the numbers fool you, the bezels are so small that you can even consider the phone fully bezel-less.
At 6.7” inches, the A80 is bigger than the Note 9. The 6.7” inch display is a FHD+ Super AMOLED display (1080×2400 pixels). The quality is what you’d expect form a Samsung AMOLED, accurate color reproduction, perfect black color and good level of contract; overall the viewing experience on the huge display isn’t going to be a disappointment. Although there is no sign of pixelization, however the 393 ppi pixel density is a bit lower than expected.
The whole body of the A80 is made of aluminum frame and warped by ‘3D glass’, both in the front and the back. Available colors being Angel Gold, Ghost White and Phantom Black. Personally, prefer the Ghost White, but a gradient color option would have been nice as well.
Performance and Battery Life
Powered by the newly released Snapdragon 730 SoC, the A80 can run all the apps you can throw at it with grace. The on-board 8GB RAM, makes sure you don’t notice a single bit of delay in your day to day tasks. Scoring a 207082 point on the Antutu Benchmark app, the 730 puts itself right beside the last years top Snapdragon 835 SoC.
But, can it run PUBG at Ultra HD? Yes, it can. And with the 3,700 mAh battery, you’d be more than fine for playing the game for around 3-4 hours without charging it. Even if you run out of juice, the 25W fast charger should be able to bring you back into the race very quickly. One surprising fact about the charger is that, its even faster than the S10+’s 15W charger. Something you wouldn’t expect Samsung to do.
Samsung gave the A80 a better charger, compared to the S10 lineup. However, unlike its elder and more expensive siblings, the A80 does not support wireless charging or the fancy wireless powershare features.
Camera
The rotating slider camera is the main attraction of the A80. Not that it’s the first of its kind, it was Oppo in 2013, who actually came up with the idea. However, Samsung just revived that cool feature. Having the same camera on the back as your front camera just makes things even better. Your selfies will look nearly 2 times better than it used to be; as you’ll be taking most of the pictures with the main camera sensors.
The triple camera setup on the back has the 48MP (f/2.0) Sony IMX586 sensor as its main camera; alongside it is the 8MP (f/2.2) ultrawide camera and ToF (Time-of-Flight) 3D camera for depth sensing. The setup lacks a telephoto lens for better-quality close-up photos, but the high resolution 48MP may provide the option to zoom into images without losing quality. But, one thing I hate about the whole camera section is the aperture of the primary camera. Where most of the OEM’s are going to lower aperture for the main sensors. Samsung’s A80 options out for a larger 2.0 aperture lens; which is bound to suffer in low light conditions.
If you love taking videos, this phone is just the thing for you. Featuring the first ever live focus video option and S10’s ultra-video stabilization, video quality on the phone are just really good.
Price and Availability
With an estimated price tag of 735 USD, the A80 is suppose to cost around 62,132 BDT. You can expect it to hit local stores as soon as late April.
Verdict
After all is said and done, will I be recommending the A80? The answer is no! The phone has great specs and features, there is no denying that. But, for a staggering 62,000 BDT; I’d rather buy a S10e or the Note 9 instead. Along with the price, the lack of SD Card slot and 3.5mm audio jack are also few of the things which makes the A80 a dealbreaker for me.
For more Samsung coverage, check out our previous piece on the Samsung Unpacked event, covering the launches of the new S10 series.