Samsung Galaxy A80 made its debut in Europe on July 1st, and on that very day it arrived on our test table. It inaugurates yet another type of selfie camera, a unit that combines a sliding mechanism with a rotating one. That is, neither Xiaomi Mi Mix 3 nor ZenFone 6, but at the same time... related to them. It has a recommended price of 3,199 lei and we take it out of the box below.
This is the first smartphone with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 processor that we are contacting, this CPU being the most powerful in the midrange area at the moment. The terminal is found on Phantom Black, Angel Gold and Ghost White. We have the Phantom Black variant, which gives me the feeling of Bentley or Mayback somehow... The first impression is that the phone is very heavy, massive, justified by the weight of 220 grams. Some people still like this approach, because it gives extra security to the device.
In the box we find the charger with fast charge, the metal SIM key, the USB Type-C to USB Type-C cable, the headphones and the manual. The headphones are made of plastic with a soft rubber tip and more premium than a Galaxy A50, but not as premium as an S10. The phone is made of glass and metal, measures 9.3 mm in the waist and sits quite comfortably in the hand, with a good grip.
The camera mechanism stays in place when you use the main camera, but when you convert it to a selfie camera, first a sliding portion of about 1 centimeter rises and then that "eye" with 3 sensors rotates towards you. A smooth movement I would say, with a robotic arm sound of C3PO from Star Wars. I wouldn't say it's slower or faster than the ZenFone 6 or OnePlus 7 Pro, but it's about there.
In front of the phone sits a 6.7-inch Super AMOLED screen, with a resolution of 2400 x 1080 pixels and an atypical aspect ratio of 20:9. It's an immersive screen, with very narrow edges and a bit of a chin. On board we have the Snapdragon 730 processor and 8 GB of RAM, 128 GB of storage and attention, we don't have a microSD slot. We don't have an audio jack by the way, so suddenly I'm curious to see what connector the headphones have.
Samsung Galaxy A80 comes with a 3700 mAh battery, with fast charging at 25W and up to 9V. It is a dual SIM phone with support for LTE Category 11, WiFi a/b/g/n, GPS, Bluetooth 5.0 and with a USB Type-C port in the lower area. For security we have a fingerprint reader integrated into the screen. And we finally got to the camera, a triple setup that sounds familiar.
Starting from left to right, we start with a 3D depth sensor, followed by the 48-megapixel main camera. We are talking about the eternal Sony IMX586 sensor, which we have already put to work on ASUS ZenFone 6, OnePlus 7 Pro and Honor 20 Pro. This time it only has F/2.0 aperture. The third camera is the ultra wide, 8 megapixels with F/2.2 aperture and 123 degree capture angle.
We also have an LED flash and I noticed an extra mechanism there, which seems to be a laser range finder. The camera puts to the test Live Focus/Bokeh, 4K filming and a kind of Live Focus for filming, which will be unique to test. We also have Pro mode, AR Emoji, and Samsung promotes this smartphone as a good one for making live broadcasts, for young people. The phone runs Android 9.0 Pie with One UI on top, bundled with Night Mode, Always on Display, Bixby and more convenient one-handed navigation.
Galaxy A80 seems to me a geeky and nerdy phone, with a motor that sounds like sci-fi movies and behaves like a robot arm. The price is commensurate with the novelty and we will find out in the coming days how the powerful midrange CPU is doing and to what extent this slide + rotary mechanism competes with classic pop up or rotary cameras.
Samsung Galaxy A80, updated prices: