Samsung’s Galaxy A9 Pro (2016) wants you to go big or go home

Samsung‘s Galaxy A (2016) series has been quite impressive thus far with a good build and good camera. Now, the South Korean electronics giant wants to bring out the big guns for the Malaysian market with their new Galaxy A9 Pro (2016) smartphone — a 6-inch behemoth that’s designed to eat up media tasks.

The handset comes with a large 6-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display with narrow bezels that is supposed to give the user a more immersive experience. Inside, it’s powered by a 1.8GHz octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor with 4GB of RAM and 32GB of storage that you can expand via a microSD card up to 256GB.

Building on the big theme, Samsung are also throwing in a 64GB microSD card for free with every purchase of the new Galaxy A9 Pro (2016). That means you get almost 100GB of storage out of the box.

For imaging, the handset looks to get all the goodies too, with a 16-megapixel rear camera with a fast f/1.9 aperture lens and optical image stabilisation. In front, the smartphone gets an 8-megapixel f/1.9 selfie camera.

Keeping the lights on is a large 5,000 mAh battery that has support for quick charging and can be topped up from 0% in just 160 minutes.

Taking a look at these specs and the price of RM1,999 (comes in black, white and gold), the Samsung Galaxy A9 Pro (2016) seems like pretty good value, especially for a Samsung device. There aren’t many phones out there for the consumer that wants a large phablet device. At this price range, it’s in direct competition with the RM2,099 Huawei Mate 8.

Sure, the Mate 8 is a flagship smartphone, but it’s also pricier and comes with less RAM and a smaller battery. In the camera department, it looks rather similar, though Samsung has a strong track record for making solid cameras. Perhaps the biggest difference lies in the processor where the Mate 8 has a flagship-level Kirin 950 SoC. But as we already know, the Snapdragon 652 is no slouch either.

Throw in the free 64GB microSD card Samsung bundles with the A9 Pro (2016) and you’ve actually got a really tough choice to make. What do you guys think of the Galaxy A9 Pro (2016)? Would you get this if you were in the market for a 6-inch monster phablet?