Samsung Galaxy A5 (2017) spotted, A-series refresh incoming

It’s been about 9 months since Samsung’s last Galaxy A series announcement, and now we know that the company has some 2017 successors in the works, as we would expect. A Galaxy A5 (2017) handset has been spotted over at Geekbench and the same model number has been spotted over on an Indian import list.

The model numbers for the 2017 edition are the SM-A320F, SM-A520F and SM-A720F for the Galaxy A3, A5 and A7 respectively.  It’s the A520F (Galaxy A5) model that was spotted making its way into India for testing, and we’ll probably see the other handsets follow soon enough.

The import data doesn’t give anything away about the handset’s hardware, but we have a benchmark result for that. It appears that the Galaxy A5 will come with 5.2-inch display, 3GB of RAM, a Samsung Exynos 7880 processor, and Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow. The Exynos 7880 is an octa-core processor with four 1.87GHz Cortex-A72 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.3GHz, paired up with an Mali-T860MP4 GPU. If true, this would present a notable boost to single thread and graphics performance over the 2016 model.

There’s still a few months left to wait until Samsung’s typical December launch window for its Galaxy A series, so we’ll treat these early reports with the due scepticism. Still, it’s looking like Samsung’s 2017 mid-range handsets might be a little more competitive.