New Galaxy A series commercials showcase premium design and solid camera

Samsung has released a series of new Galaxy A (2016) commercials, showcasing a few of the neat features in this year’s lineup. The ads are all about you, or should I say A4U, and are proudly brought you by the letter ‘A’. Or is it ‘U’?

Metal and glass

The first ad promotes the build materials for the new A series. The Galaxy A3 (2016), Galaxy A5 (2016), Galaxy A7 (2016) and Galaxy A9 (2016) all feature a similar metal and glass construction to the flagship Galaxy S7 range but retain the flared corners of the Galaxy Note 4. They offer a distinctly premium look for otherwise upper mid-range phones and have pretty microscopic side bezels.

Samsung Pay

Where would a Samsung commercial be without Samsung Pay? The new A series are equipped with NFC for newer touchless payment terminals and they also work with the older magnetic stripe terminals via Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) technology, meaning you can pay with a Galaxy A pretty much everywhere. Payments can be secured with the built-in fingerprint scanner (except on the Galaxy A3).

Camera

The 2016 Galaxy A series come with Samsung’s 13 MP f/1.9 aperture camera and optical image stabilization (except for the Galaxy A3, which misses out on OIS). The A3, A5 and A7 feature a 5 MP f/1.9 aperture front-facing camera for solid low-light performance, while the A9 bumps the resolution up to 8 MP. Samsung doesn’t tell you any of this in the ad though, it’s more about nice pictures and color than actual information.

Seeing these ads and revisiting the specs of the Galaxy A series I’m reminded how good a job Samsung did with them. They offer a lot of flagship features – OIS, fingerprint scanner, Samsung Pay, metal and glass construction – in a much more affordable package. When you naturally tend to focus on high-end devices it’s nice to realize just how good even mid-range phones are these days.

Who do you think does the best mid-range phone? What flagship features do you want in mid-rangers?