Samsung, as of Q3 2019, is the world’s largest smartphone maker and commands a healthy 21% of the global smartphone market. What is incredible about this achievement is that the company manages to hold on to this position in spite of the fact that it has a negligible market share in China, currently the world’s biggest smartphone market. There is no denying that Samsung isn’t doing too well in China. In fact, the company recently announced that it had stopped manufacturing phones in China. There were also rumors about the company exiting the China market for good. However, a recent report by our friends at Sammobile seems to indicate that Samsung still has some hopes pinned on China. The report talks about a new handset called the Samsung Galaxy A71 5G that the company could launch as a China exclusive.
Samsung Galaxy A71 5G: What we know
Samsung has already announced that it will bring its 5G enabled premium devices in China. These handsets include the Samsung Galaxy Fold 5G and the Galaxy W20 5G. It is common knowledge, however, that these premium devices would do very little to turn around Samsung’s fortunes in China. For that, the company needs to offer compelling offerings in the budget and mid-range segment. You know, something on the lines of the new M-Series and the refreshed A-Series lineup that they brought to India. In fact, we have indications that Samsung plans to do precisely that in China with a new 5G capable handset for the masses. Sammobile reports that this new budget device from the company will bear the model number SM-A7160 and will be offered with 128GB of storage. Globally, this phone would be known as the Samsung Galaxy A71 and will be known as the SM-A715F. Both these models, according to Sammobile, are currently ‘in the works.’
The Sammobile report also indicates that the Galaxy A71 5G will almost certainly be a toned-down variant of the Galaxy A90 5G, which is already available in China. The A90 currently is not sold in an LTE variant anywhere in the world. In fact, there could also be a possibility that the Galaxy A71 5G would be manufactured exclusively for the Chinese market.
New Exynos 980 chipset to power the Galaxy A71?
Sammobile has also hinted at the possibility of the Galaxy A71 becoming the first smartphone from Samsung to come powered by the new Exynos 980 chipset. This is Samsung’s first mid-range chipset with support for 5G. Currently, the company uses the Snapdragon 855 and Exynos 9825 chipsets for all its 5G smartphones. It was necessary that they had their own 5G capable chip to keep costs down. This is exactly what Samsung intends to do with the Exynos 980 SoC. Interestingly, Samsung would not be the first to use the Exynos 980 chipset since Vivo has already announced that it will launch an Exynos 980 toting device soon.
The Exynos 980 chip will be based on an 8n manufacturing process and will feature an octa-core processor with two Cortex-A77 cores, and six Cortex-A55 cores. Graphics will be handled by the Mali-G76 GPU. Apart from the 5G capable modem, it will also support the new Wi-Fi 6 standard. This is apart from support for HDR10+ video decoding and support for 108MP camera sensors.
