Samsung is bringing the $200 Galaxy A16 telephone and the $60 Galaxy Match 3 health tracker to the USA, with the A16 getting six years of updates. This makes the Galaxy A16 one of many lowest-cost telephones to get a software program and safety replace dedication longer than 5 years, which may very well be a profit for somebody seeking to purchase a easy telephone that might be up to date.
Samsung’s Galaxy A16 has already been launched in different territories, but it surely’ll begin promoting within the US on Jan. 9, in accordance to the corporate’s Thursday announcement. The telephone prices £129 within the UK and AU$349 in Australia. This 12 months’s telephone will get a slight refresh over final 12 months’s A15, together with a bigger 6.7-inch show (in contrast with the A15’s 6.5-inch show) with a 90Hz refresh charge. It’s going to additionally transfer to utilizing Samsung’s personal Exynos 1330 processor, as an alternative of a Mediatek processor just like the one the Galaxy A15 included.
The Galaxy A16 seems to have an analogous digital camera system to the A15, together with a 50-megapixel extensive lens, a 5-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel macro lens and a 13-megapixel front-facing digital camera. Additionally carrying ahead from final 12 months might be a 25W wired charging pace, a 5,000mAh battery and 128GB of storage alongside 4GB of RAM. A microSD card slot permits for increasing storage as much as 1.5TB.
The Galaxy A16 continues Samsung’s line of entry-level handsets, that are among the many hottest telephones offered within the states. Final 12 months’s Galaxy A15 ranks because the fifth best-selling smartphone within the US as of Sept. 2024, in response to analysis agency Counterpoint Analysis, behind 4 of Apple’s iPhone fashions. In my Galaxy A15 assessment, I used to be notably impressed by the promise of 4 years of software program updates and 5 years of safety updates, however I did discover the telephone to run slowly. We’ll have to check the Galaxy A16 to see if its new Exynos 1330 processor can pace issues up, however the promise of an extended software program and safety replace window does set a brand new help customary amongst telephones within the $200 worth vary.
In the meantime, the Galaxy Match 3 health tracker is being touted as a lower-cost, less complicated manner of monitoring health and well being than the $300 Galaxy Watch 7 or $650 Galaxy Watch Extremely. Samsung stated the Match 3 is rated for 13 days of battery life and contains train and sleep monitoring together with an always-on show possibility and 100 digital watch faces.