Samsung Announces Budget-Friendly Galaxy A51 and A71

Samsung’s budget phone lineup used to be a mess, but it started revamping many of those midrange devices under its A-series brand last year. The Galaxy A70 and A50 were widely praised, and now the successors are official. Markets across the world will start seeing the improved A71 and A51 in the coming weeks.

These phones sit below the flagship Galaxy S and Galaxy Note series, but not too far below. The A71 (above) and A51 (below) still have features like edge-to-edge displays with integrated fingerprint sensors and a quad-camera array. The A71 even has faster charging than last year’s Galaxy S10 (25W versus 15W). They’ll also both run Android 10 out of the box.

The A51 will be the cheaper of the two phones, probably clocking in around $300 to start. It will have a midrange Exynos octa-core ARM chip with 4-6GB of RAM and up to 128GB of storage. It has a 6.5-inch 1080p OLED display with a small hole-punch for the 32MP front-facing camera. The A71 will cost more, possibly $450-500 based on rumors, but it has a more powerful Snapdragon 730 chip and up to 8GB of RAM with 128GB of storage. This device will be a little larger at 6.7-inches with the same 32MP selfie camera peeking through the display.

These devices have visually identical camera modules with four sensors, but the setup varies. The A51 has a 48MP main sensor along with a 5MP depth sensor and a 5MP macro camera. There’s also a 12MP ultra-wide camera. The A71 has the same accessory cameras along with a 64MP main camera. Unlike Samsung’s flagship phones, neither of these devices has a telephoto camera.

You might notice there’s no visible fingerprint sensor on this phone, but it does have one under the OLED panel. It’s not ultrasonic like the Galaxy S or Note devices, though. The A71 and A51 use cheaper optical sensors for fingerprint recognition, but that might be fine considering Samsung’s recent fingerprint security snafu.

Samsung hasn’t announced official pricing or launch timing yet, but the new A-series phones should launch in Asian and European markets in the next few weeks. It’s unlikely the A71 will come to the US, but the A51 will most likely will. Samsung released the A50 in the US about three months after it hit Europe.

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