Samsung Galaxy C8 Preview

Samsung, the largest manufacturer of consumer electronics isn’t really an uncommon name. In fact, you are never really too far from a Samsung device of sorts that may come in any way, shape or form. Samsung has such a massive spread that it is hard to fathom their conglomerate’s scale on the global scale. Even other giant electronic manufacturers rely on the North Korean giant for electronic supplies and manufacturing.

Samsung has a huge grip in the consumer smartphone market. They are the second most popular smartphone brand after Apple. However unlike Apple, Samsung makes smartphones for all price brackets and market segments. With that said, Samsung will soon be revealing a new mid-range device called the Samsung Galaxy C8 which will be competing with the likes of One Plus and Xiaomi. So, let’s have an analysis of the specs of the device and how it stacks up with the competition.

Design and Display:

The Samsung Galaxy C8 has a very familiar look to the rest of its range. The Samsung Galaxy C8 has the hardware button for the home toggle which also doubles up as the fingerprint sensor. It is good design decision because a front home button is much easier to access and use. The front also has two touch sensitive backlit buttons for the back and the task manager. The device is curved around the sides to make it look similar to the higher end Samsung devices. At the back it has a very plain design with the dual cameras and LED flash sitting at the centre of the device. The device has a nice metal construction which gives it a premium feel and look.

The display is one of the stronger aspects of the Galaxy C8 as it uses Samsung’s own Super AMOLED panel for its display. The 5.5 inch display boasts of a full HD 1080x1920 resolution with a pixel density of 401 which is excellent. The Super AMOLED panel is one of the best displays in the market currently and has nice rich saturated colours and infinite blacks courtesy of Samsung’s AMOLED technology that turns off black pixels, thereby saving battery. The bezels on the device are also kept in check as the device has a very good screen to body ratio of almost 74%. This makes the device very compact.

Performance:

The Samsung Galaxy C8 surprisingly uses a mediate chipset to power the device instead of the usual Snapdragon or even their in-house Exynos chips. This is probably a cost cutting measure as those chips are built on newer manufacturing processes and are more refined. But still the MediatekHelio P20 that this device uses is no slouch by any means. It is an octa core chip consisting of ARM’s A53 cores clocked at a colossal 2.3GHz on all eight cores. This amounts to some very decent benchmark scores and smooth multi-tasking operations for the device. However, this chip is a bit notorious for hogging battery and isn’t very efficient as compared to Snapdragon’s. Graphics are handled by the Mali T880 MP2 GPU which is a dual core unit running at 900 MHz. Also coupled with the device is 3GB of RAM which is less judging by its asking price. And there are better equipped devices for the same sort of money.

Software:

The Galaxy C8 will be running Android 7.1.1 Nougat alongside with their TouchWiz UI for the skin. Touchwiz has definitely come a long way and now it is not only leaner but is also more customisable and has less bloat. There is no official word as to whether the device will receive an update to Android Oreo as it hasn’t launched in the market yet. The software has some pretty nifty additions such as touch to wake and facial recognition to open the device. The software also has gesture support so you can assign certain gestures to perform a range of applications.

Camera and Storage:

Samsung seems to have hopped into the dual camera train like the rest of the industry and the C8 is no different. It almost seems like the C8 is meant for photography enthusiasts judging by the camera setup. The rear of the device houses dual 13MP + 5MP cameras with a very wide aperture rating of f1.7. Although it is unclear at this point if the Samsung C8 will have optical stabilisation for the cameras but it’ll definitely be a nice feature to have. Samsung is well known for implementing good sensors and lenses for its cameras and with the C8, it’ll pretty much follow tradition. It also has a single LED flash at the rear and comes with image enhancement features like ISO adjustments, Exposure Control, HDR and face detection.

The front of the device houses a giant 16MP camera for selfies and accompanying the camera is another LED flash at the front. It almost feels like Samsung were targeting the selfie enthusiast market with the phone but nonetheless, a front flash is always a good thing to have.

As for the storage well the C8 will be available with a choice of 32 or 64GBG variants with additional support for Micro SD cards up to 256GB’s via the hybrid sim slot.

Battery and connectivity:

The Samsung Galaxy C8 will ship with a 3000mAh Li-Ion battery which is a bit of a worry because the Samsung essentially uses a power hungry chip and it powers a Full HD display. Plus I doubt that it will feature support for quick charging since this is mostly a Snapdragon and Exynos feature. So the mileage will vastly vary according to the usage.

As for connectivity, the C8 supports Indian 4G LTE, 3G and 2G bands along with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth V4.2 and GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS support.

Verdict:

The Samsung Galaxy C8 is an interesting device launched at a very competitive price point. The device is very cleverly positioned to compete with Chinese smartphone brands and it has more brand value as compared to them. Also there are signs of cost cutting on the device but it isn’t a deal breaker and they do have very nice cameras. The Samsung Galaxy C8 price in India is expected to be around Rs.23990 which is very competitive and makes it for a compelling buy for anyone looking to buy a smartphone at that price bracket.