Samsung's Galaxy A9 Has A 6-Inch Display And A Huge Battery

Samsung's Galaxy A9 Has 6-Inch Display with Huge Battery

Though flagship smartphones have apparently stopped growing, most of them having 5 to 5.5-inch screens, there's still a market for larger devices, and Samsung is hoping to grab some of it with its latestphablet, the Galaxy A9.

Following in the footsteps of its predecessor, the 5.7-inch Galaxy A8, the A9 is a slim, elegant and large smartphone, with specs that are a hair or two weaker than those found in Samsung's Galaxy S line of devices.

The Samsung Galaxy A9, which the company launched in China on Wednesday, does have several very important improvements.

Besides the 6-inch, 1080p AMOLED screen (which may not be an improvement for some), it also sports an enormous (but non-removable), 4,000mAh battery, which should hopefully extend the phone's battery life over the dreaded barely-one-day mark we so often see in smartphones these days.

Other specs include an octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor, 3GB RAM, 32GB  storage (expandable  microSD cards up to 128GB in size), and a 13-megapixel camera on the back and an 8-megapixel Front camera.

It runs Android 5.1.1 Lollipop a trend we're seeing a lot these days, though Android 6 has beenavailable since October. A fingerprint scanner and support for Samsung Pay are included as well.

All of these goodies are stuffed into a glass and metal case that's just 0.29 inches thin, and even though that's quite a bit fatter than the Galaxy A8's 0.23-inch thin profile, it's still pretty good for such a large phone.

The phone will be available in China later this month; pricing and international availability have not beenannounced.

The Galaxy A9 joins the recently annoucned Galaxy A5 and Galaxy A7 (not to be confused with older models of the same name — Samsung points out the difference by placing a "2016" denomination next to their names), which are already available in China.

The 5.2-inch and 5.5-inch phones both feature the same metal design and similar specs, but have much smaller batteries — 2,900mAh and 3,300mAh, respectively. International availability has not beenannounced, but the price in China is 2,398 yuan ($370) for the A5 and 2,699 yuan ($417) for the A7.