Here’s galaxy A18 could be imminent – but don’t get too excited
A fresh spec leak has filled in one essential detail concerning the Samsung Galaxy A18.
It was around this time last month that we brought you the first news of the Samsung Galaxy A18. We caught a glimpse of a familiar-looking budget smartphone option through leaked CAD renders, along with one or two alleged specifications.
What we didn’t know at the time, exactly, was the identity of the SoC (System on Chip) that would be power the phone along in either its 4G or 5G iteration. Now we do.
Over on the popular Geekbench benchmarking website, a device going by the name of the Samsung SM-A185G has appeared. This is the code name for the Samsung Galaxy A18, which will be Samsung’s next entry-level smartphone option.
Through this listing we gain the insight that the follow-up to the Samsung Galaxy A17 will run on the MediaTek MT6789 chip, also known as the MediaTek Helio G99. That happens to be the very same chip that powers the aforementioned Samsung Galaxy A17 4G.
There’s also the same paltry 4GB of RAM onboard.
Geekbench
Samsung Galaxy A18 performance
Sure enough, the Geekbench results are pretty modest, to say the least. A single-core score of 745 and a multi-core score of 2073 won’t be setting any records, even for a sub-£200 phone.
We’d heard previously that the Samsung Galaxy A18 4G would run a MediaTek chip, while the 5G version would employ a low-end Qualcomm Snapdragon equivalent.
The latter will represent a bit of a departure, if true, given that the Samsung Galaxy A17 5G we reviewed last year ran on a Exynos 1330 chip.
On a more positive (if unsurprising) note, the Samsung Galaxy A18 is here found to be running on Android 17, which almost certainly means that Samsung’s latest One UI 9 is running on top. This made its debut with the recent Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8.
We’re not expecting much in the way of progress with the Samsung Galaxy A18 generation, though. Expect the official launch to come any day now, as the Samsung Galaxy A17 launched on 6 August last year.
