Samsung’s most ambitious mid-range smartphone, the Galaxy A8+, starts selling in Kenya

At the end of last year, Samsung announced a new smartphone that was meant to bring the look, feel and features of its premium Galaxy S and Note lines to the mid-range segment. That device, the Galaxy A8+, is now available on sale across the country. And it costs a small fortune.

At Kshs 60,000, the Galaxy A8+ is one of the most expensive mid-range smartphones available in the Kenyan market.

Sure, the Galaxy A8+ brings up those beautiful narrow bezels that made us fall in love with the Galaxy S8 last year, and the display in the 18.5:9 aspect ratio (all of which make up the “Infinity display”), no less and those hallowed dual selfie cameras but is that enough to coax us to part with much more money than we need to purchase Huawei’s flagship smartphone from last year? Or to get the latest OnePlus smartphone?

I don’t think so and here we have the same classic case of paradoxes that continue bedeviling Samsung’s Galaxy A series. Sure, the devices are every bit desirable (edible, even) but the price!

Feature-wise, the Galaxy A8+ sticks as close as possible to the software additions that one gets in the Galaxy S8, S8+ and Note 7. The added selfie camera is for enabling Live Focus, a feature that debuted on the Galaxy Note 7 and which is a big part of the Galaxy S9 and S9+’s impressive feature set. Like I noted earlier, “Live Focus is just a fancy name for (real-time) portrait mode (depth-of-field bokeh i.e. effects that result in the blurring of backgrounds).” There’s also Bixby but the dedicated Bixby button does not accompany Samsung’s digital assistant.

Samsung also makes a big deal of the device’s video digital image stabilization (VDIS) feature which is supposed to make shaky videos a thing for the past.

This is the device’s spec list: