Samsung presents its first device with Android Go

Samsung has presented its first smartphone with Android Go, the version of Android for cheap phones. The J2 Core will be released first in India and Malaysia this week. It is unknown whether the phone will be released in the Benelux.

According to Samsung, the Galaxy J2 Core has a 5 “LCD with a resolution of 960×540 pixels. The 143×72 mm phone is 8.9 mm thick and weighs 154 grams. The J2 Core, like some other variants of the J2, has a battery. with a capacity of 2600mAh.The housing lacks a home button, something that many other cheap Samsung smartphones have.

The J2 Core runs on an Exynos 7570-soc from Samsung itself. That’s a 14nm soc with four Cortex A53 cores at up to 1.4GHz, with an ARM Mali T720MP1 GPU. That soc can 4g with a maximum of 150Mbit/s down and 50Mbit/s up.

The phone will be released first in India and Malaysia this week for an undisclosed price; J2 phones in India usually cost between 70 and 100 euros. Samsung no longer sells such cheap phones in the Benelux for a while. The manufacturer would have tested the J2 Core in Europe.

Samsung does not say why it has started using Android Go, but does mention the larger storage compared to the regular version of Android. In Android Go there are fewer apps, which are also each lighter. Updates of apps and the operating system also require less data and Android Go is more economical with memory. The J2 Core runs on the Oreo version of Android Go and not the recently announced edition based on Android 9.0 Pie.

Many manufacturers have started using Android Go. This is presumably because there are fewer mandatory apps on cheap smartphones, allowing manufacturers with less memory and large storage. Manufacturers are allowed to give the interface their own appearance and add their own apps.