Samsung Galaxy A8s has a hole in its screen, no audio jack

Launched today in China, Samsung’s Galaxy A8s breaks many a boundary for the Korean manufacturer.

For one, it’s the company’s first phone with the selfie camera cut-out. Instead of a notch or a large top bezel, the 24MP selfie camera is sunk into the top-left portion of the screen itself.

This does give it a particularly striking appearance, but you are sacrificing a large chunk of notification space on the 6.4 inch AMOLED LCD screen.

Additionally, it’s also the first Samsung to kill the headphone jack. Yeah, don’t make promises you can’t keep, smartphone manufacturers.

This decision might be because the phone has launched in the Chinese market, but you will either need Bluetooth earphones or a USB-C dongle to listen to music.

Internally though, the phone’s a pretty beefy prospect on paper.

It features the Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 chipset — the same chip found in the Nokia 8.1 — with a base choice of 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage. There’s also a rather large 3400mAh battery.

At the rear, there’s a centre-mounted fingerprint sensor, and three cameras: one primary 24MP sensor with f/1.7 aperture, a 10MP sensor with telephoto lens featuring a f/2.4 aperture, and a 5MP depth sensor.

And yes, the phone runs Android 9.0 Pie out of the box with Samsung’s Experience UI.

Pricing is unavailable at present, and it’s not clear if Samsung’s willing to extend the device’s availability to other markets.

Even if it doesn’t though, the Samsung Galaxy A8s does suggest that the Korean firm is willing to go back on its promises, even if that means recreating the notch, and murdering the headphone jack.

Correction: A previous version of this article mentioned that the Samsung Galaxy A8s has an AMOLED screen. It in fact has an LCD display. We’ve since corrected the error.

Feature image: Samsung