Samsung’s A-series phones are for people who can’t, or don’t want to, pay the high price of a top-end S-series model like the Samsung Galaxy S9.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is one of the higher-end A phones, though. It costs $479 (£449, $AU609). It is not cheap but is still a lot more affordable than the S9: mission success.
This is a solid phone all-round. However, if you’re not set on owning a Samsung, you’ll find more competitive mobiles from companies like OnePlus, Honor and Huawei.
It’s also worth considering an older Samsung. As progress in phones has slowed down in some key areas, the Samsung Galaxy S8 is significantly better in just about every way. And so is the Samsung Galaxy S7, if you don’t mind its rapidly aging 16:9 display shape. Still, there's a lot to like here.
Key features
- Dual-lens front-facing camera
- Bright, colorful display
You might end up with a Galaxy A8 if you decide you want a Samsung, one released in the last year, but don’t want to spend Galaxy S9 money.
Each part of the phone is a little worse, or a little more basic, than the Galaxy S9. Its chipset is less powerful, the frame less curvy, the camera less versatile and the screen is less sharp.
The most important question is whether you’ll notice that much. The Galaxy A8 may not match up to the S9 on paper, but for many the perceptible difference won’t stack up to the difference in price. This is still a great phone.
What do we notice the most? The speaker is much less powerful, and less bassy, the camera is much worse at night and the design doesn’t have anything like the impact of Samsung’s best. Its entry-level spec also only has 32GB of storage, which is fairly poor considering the price.
Elements you’re less likely to notice so clearly are the less punchy Exynos 7885 octa-core chipset and lower screen resolution. The Galaxy A8’s display is 'only' 1080p, but still looks sharp, bright and colorful.
Does it have anything the Galaxy S9 lacks? Yes, actually. It has dual front cameras, which let you create images with background blur for a more dramatic selfie look.
Design
- A glass back and metal frame
- Water-resistant
- A plain appearance
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is a mid-range phone, the kind that could easily have been a top-end model were it released a year or so earlier. However, as usual Samsung has made its A-series phones slightly more ordinary-looking to avoid stepping on the S-series’ toes too much.
Its basics are the same, though. The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a glass back, a glass front, and a band of metal around the sides.
So how is it different to a Galaxy S9? That phone’s glass is curved on the front and back. The Galaxy A8's back is curved, if slightly less so than the Galaxy S9’s, and the front is just '2.5D' glass. Some people describe this as curved, but it’s really just rounded-off at the edge.
There’s also a little bit more blank space above and below the display, and the finish is plain. It comes in black, grey, blue and gold, and these colors are flat, without the light-reactive layer used by some other phones. Even the Moto G6, at half the price, reacts a little to light. This is a real no-nonsense design.
However, the Samsung Galaxy A8 is water-resistant to IP68, a feature not seen in cheaper mid-range phones and even some around the same price. This spec means it can withstand being submerged at a depth of 1.5 meters for 30 minutes. But you still can’t take it swimming.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a fingerprint scanner on its back. While we’re very happy with its reliability, it is not the fastest around. Taking just under a second to get you to your home screen, its speed is actually closer to the Moto G6’s than the Huawei P20 Pro’s. But, yes, we are quibbling about a fraction of a second’s difference here.
Storage is another just-okay part. The entry-level Samsung Galaxy A8 has 32GB of storage, and for $479 or £449 that does not seem terribly generous. There is, however, a microSD slot in one of the SIM trays.
In an unusual design move you get two separate trays here. One on the side holds your main SIM, the other up top a second 2G/3G SIM and a memory card slot.
Why split them up? It seems odd to us too, but is likely where Samsung’s engineers found enough space. It also means you can swap memory cards without losing phone signal, which could be useful to those pathologically afraid of missing phone calls.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is not a phone that screams excitement, lacking the design edge of the Galaxy S9. However, when you break down its parts its build quality is actually comparable.
It’s also a friendly size. The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a 5.6-inch screen but as it has an extra-tall 18.5:9 shape, the phone doesn’t end up too wide.
There’s a headphones jack on the bottom too, a feature missing from quite a lot of high-end phones at this point.
Screen
- A vivid Super AMOLED display
- 5.6-inch 1080 x 2220 screen
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is a reminder of the power of OLED displays. Using its default setting the 5.6-inch screen is incredibly color-saturated. It’s the kind of vividness most LCD screens just can’t recreate.
Of course, not everyone likes this style. It’s the equivalent of a sugary, syrupy drink. You can alter it, though.
Other color modes in the Samsung Galaxy A8’s settings menu make the screen look much more restrained, or well-saturated but not to the cartoonish level of the standard 'Adaptive display'. The other modes are called AMOLED photo, AMOLED cinema and Basic, the same seen in other high-end Samsung phones.
Just about every other element of the screen is great. It’s bright enough to make watching YouTube videos in bright sunlight enjoyable, contrast is superb and sharpness is very good.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is much less pixel-dense than the Galaxy S9, with a 1080 x 2220 resolution. But you have to look very close to notice the slight pixel fizz visible on Samsung OLED displays that are not ridiculously high-res.
It’s a great screen. And when you watch 16:9 format videos you can choose whether to leave little black bars to the left and right of the image or zoom in slightly to fill the whole screen area.
- Thanks to Vodafone for providing us with a Samsung Galaxy A8 for review
Battery life
- 3,000mAh battery lasts a day of moderate use
- Supports fast charging
The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a 3,000mAh battery, now the standard for phones with an 18:9 style screen. Predictably, then, real-world battery life is only decent.
On days when we’ve subjected the phone to some podcast streaming, YouTube watching, and the screen has been forced into an ultra-bright setting by the ambient light level, we’ve had to give the phone a battery pick-me-up in the early evening. It won’t last a full day of very heavy use but will last a full day of normal use.
However, the display is incredibly efficient. In our standard battery test, where we play a 90-minute video at maximum brightness, the Samsung Galaxy A8 only lost 9% charge. This is among the best results we’ve seen in a phone, and it’s doubly impressive considering how bright the screen is.
Last year’s Samsung Galaxy A5 lost 12% in the same test, which was already a great result.
Other tasks, like streaming audio in the background or general mixed use, do drain the battery at a more normal pace, though.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 comes with a fast charger, designed to get you from 0 to 100% in under two hours. However, there’s no wireless charging.
Camera
- Dual-lens front-facing camera works well
- 16MP rear camera works well in daylight, less so at night
- Video recording tops out at 1080p
The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a dual-camera array, but only on the front. A single 16MP lens sits on the back, alongside a simple single-LED flash.
In daylight the phone takes excellent pictures. They’re bright, detailed, and punchy-looking. Colors are slightly oversaturated at times, but not to an extent that looks obviously unrealistic. Shooting is fairly fast too, a refreshing change after the somewhat slow Moto G6.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 lacks the upgrades that make the Samsung Galaxy S9 such a strong camera for all occasions, though. It doesn’t have a sensor with sensitivity-improving large pixels or optical image stabilization.
Shoot at night and you’ll find quite a lot of your shots end up blurry, and those not ruined by hand shake are seriously softened by image processing.
As there’s no second camera on the back, you can’t use the common background blur feature either. This emulates the effect of a wide-aperture DSLR lens.
Samsung has reserved this for the front, which gets a 16MP and 8MP sensor and a Live Focus mode that lets you blur out the background in your selfies for a more dramatic look.
It works pretty well, using progressive blurring to avoid any clear outlines between layers of blur strength. And the object recognition is mostly successful too, largely because the secondary sensor is a relatively high-res 8MP resolution chip. You’ll see some confusion of the blur effect in complex objects, but that is the case with all modes like this.
Anecdotally, it seems at most slightly worse than the Huawei and Apple blurring modes. The selfie camera is great all-round, even retaining a good amount of detail in lower light.
Around the back you get Bixby Vision instead. This is the camera side of the Samsung digital assistant. You can use it to scan barcodes and will get you information about landmarks if you take pictures of them.
Is Bixby a reason to buy the Samsung Galaxy A8? No. It also feels a little slow, and the animated sparkles that appear on-screen come across as cheesy. There’s even an argument that a digital assistant like this doesn’t really belong in a photography app as it’s something quite different.
There’s also a Stickers section in the camera app, which copies the kind of face-changing animations used by apps like Snapchat. It puts 3D animated dog and cat ears on you. There’s a lot less wit and invention to these than those sometimes found in Snapchat, though. They are here for the kids.
These extra parts may make the Samsung Galaxy A8 camera app sound cluttered, but it’s actually very easy to use. Point and shoot, then the phone does the rest for you, including Auto HDR optimization that really works.
There’s more under the surface if you want it, too. Flicking up and down switches between the Samsung Galaxy A8’s front and back cameras, but flicking left and right on the camera view opens up menus for additional modes and filters. These include Pro mode, Hyperlapse and Panorama.
The aim is to provide an app that seems simple, but has hidden depth if you dig deeper.
Its video modes are not particularly ambitious, though. The Samsung Galaxy A8 can only shoot at up to 1080p resolution. There’s no 4K. The absolute max is the same resolution as the screen, 1080 x 2220.
It’s a disappointment but isn’t worth getting too upset about when other phones at this price tend to offer unstabilized 4K capture. Given you probably hold your phone when shooting video rather than using a tripod, stabilization is pretty important. The Samsung Galaxy A8’s 1080p footage is stabilized.
Camera samples
Interface and reliability
- Runs Android 7 rather than Android 8
- There's quite a lot of pre-installed bloat
- Navigating the interface is fast and smooth
The Samsung Galaxy A8 does not run the latest version of Android at launch, which is a bit of a surprise. It uses Android 7.1.1, despite the fact that Android 8.0 has been around since late 2017.
However, it’s not as big an issue as it may seem as several Android 8.0 changes would be overwritten by the custom Samsung interface anyway. Google changed the settings menu and notification drop-down design in 8.0, but the Galaxy A8 has a Samsung-designed take on both.
One part we do miss, just a bit, is the way notifications pool into mini icons as you scroll through them in 8.0. You don’t get that here.
The interface also looks a little different to vanilla Android. Soft keys look a little sci-fi, icons are more rounded, and you can flick up or down on the home screen to get to the apps menu.
The apps menu is also organized into pages rather than a vertical scroll. However, it ultimately feels reasonably similar to 'normal' Android.
It’s fast too, with barely any difference between the Samsung Galaxy A8 and an even pricier phone. The camera app started off a little glitchy and crashed a few times, but Samsung released an update just a couple of days after we started using the phone to address this exact issue.
There is, however, a lot of extra stuff bunged into the Samsung Galaxy A8. Microsoft’s app suite comes pre-installed as well as Google’s, and there are a whole bunch of Samsung apps too.
They include the smart home platform SmartThings, voice assistant S Voice, the Galaxy apps store and health/fitness tracker Samsung Health. There are more, too many to list without boring you.
Samsung sensibly files most of these away in folders, ensuring the Samsung Galaxy A8 does not seem bloat-sodden. From one perspective, it is. However, we can’t get too upset as a lot of Samsung’s apps are actually quite good at this point, where companies like Asus and Huawei have extras we can barely even imagine using.
Movies, music and gaming
- The speaker is merely okay
- Games and movies look great on the screen
- Game Launcher gives you gaming tools
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is a great phone for games and movies. It has enough power, the screen can make media look super-rich and 32GB of storage gives you a reasonable amount of room for game installs.
Should we really get more storage given the price? Absolutely. Phones from Honor and OnePlus get you more phone per dollar. But this is a Samsung, what do you expect?
We count the inclusion of a headphone jack as a big win for media fans too. You don’t need wireless headphones or an annoying adaptor.
The Samsung Galaxy A8’s own speaker is passable. It offers okay volume but is not as close to as loud or powerful-sounding as the Samsung Galaxy S9. There’s minimal bass. It also has just one driver, on the right side.
It’s a slightly unusual position (if one Samsung has used before) but does make blocking the speaker accidentally more difficult. Play a landscape game or watch a movie and it ends up on the top. Play a casual game and it sits higher than your hand.
The Samsung Galaxy A8 also has the Game Launcher feature. This pops up in the soft key area when you play a game, and lets you easily record video footage of your games, and take screenshots. You can also block alerts and lock the soft keys so your gaming isn’t disturbed.
This is the one obvious media extra, though. There aren’t any pre-installed games or custom media player apps.
Performance and benchmarks
- Octa-core Exynos 7885 chipset delivers middling benchmark results
- You can get better chips elsewhere for the money
The Samsung Galaxy A8 has 4GB of RAM and an Exynos 7885 octa-core chipset. It’s Samsung’s take on a true mid-range CPU.
It has six standard low-power 1.6GHz cores, the Cortex-A53 kind you’ll find in phones half the price or less. However, there are also two 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 cores, used when more power is needed.
The Exynos 7885 chipset has more power on tap than the Moto G6 Plus, as you’d hope. But it’s embarrassed by the Honor View 10, which has double the number of performance cores (but two fewer ‘everyday’ cores).
Things get worse when we look at the GPU. The Samsung Galaxy A8 has a dual-core Mali G71. The Honor View 10 has a 12-core Mali G72. Yep, that’s six times the number of cores, and the cores themselves are better in the Honor.
The Exynos 7885 chipset represents fairly poor value for money at this level. It should really have a more powerful GPU. However, unless you’re into emulating early 2000s 3D console games this won’t be too glaring in day-to-day use.
It scores 4,223 points in Geekbench 4. It’s a fine score in isolation, but just okay given the price.
Verdict
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is a solid phone that offers a comfy middle-ground in price and specs between an affordable phone and models like the Samsung Galaxy S9.
You can get more phone per dollar with a Motorola, Honor or OnePlus handset, but we knew that would be the case before we even turned the A8 on.
So the Samsung Galaxy A8 is not the most value-packed phone at the price, but is a decent all-round option if you have your heart set on a Galaxy.
Who's this for?
This phone is perfect for someone who definitely wants a Samsung but is not willing to spend the money a top-end handset demands.
Should you buy it?
The Samsung Galaxy A8 is not terrific value at its launch price. An older Samsung flagship is a better buy if you find one on sale. And Honor, Huawei and OnePlus offer more at the same price.
However, if you’re set on a new Samsung it does its primary job, of offering us something more affordable than a Samsung flagship.
The Galaxy A8 has some serious competition from the following handsets:
Honor View 10
If you want more phone for the same amount of money, the View 10 is one to check out. It has four times the storage, a more powerful chipset and a more versatile rear camera. The screen is LCD rather than OLED, so not as vivid, but the Honor has sheer value on its side.
Read our full Honor View 10 review
OnePlus 6
The OnePlus 6 is only very slightly more than the Galaxy A8 for its entry-level 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage configuration.
It's already off to a good start then, and it's also available in 128GB and 256GB variants too. The design of the OnePlus 6 is just as, if not more premium than the A8 with Gorilla Glass adorning the front and back.
The isn't any wireless charging, microSD slot or stereo speakers, but you do get an awful lot of a power, a big screen and dual rear cameras for your money.
Read our OnePlus 6 review
Moto G6 Plus
The latest Moto G6 phones get you surprisingly close to the Galaxy A8 for just over half the price. They have glass backs, good screens and decent rear cameras. The Moto G6 Plus’s screen is far less vivid-looking, and the selfie camera is not in the same league, but you can’t argue with the basics here.
Read our Moto G6 Plus review
First reviewed: May 2018
- Thanks to Vodafone for providing us with a Samsung Galaxy A8 for review
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