Samsung Galaxy A8S announced with pinhole camera

Hot on the heels of the Honor View 20, Samsung has announced its first phone with a pinhole camera. Dubbed the Samsung Galaxy A8S, it has a single-lens 24MP f/2.0 camera on the front, cut into the top left corner of the screen.

That pinhole is 6.7mm wide and it's cut into a 6.4-inch 1080 x 2340 screen with a 19.5:9 aspect ratio. 

Other specs of the Samsung Galaxy A8S include a Snapdragon 710 chipset, 6GB or 8GB of RAM, and a triple-lens rear camera, made up of a 24MP f/1.7 main lens, a 10MP f/2.4 telephoto one and a 5MP f/2.2 depth sensor.

There's also 128GB of storage, a microSD card slot, a fingerprint scanner, a 3,400mAh battery which supports fast charging, and Android 8.1.

As for the design, you can see that there's a small bezel below the screen, but very little above it, and the Samsung Galaxy A8S comes in blue, green and grey shades.

The Samsung Galaxy A8S has three rear cameras

The Samsung Galaxy A8S has three rear cameras

Availability unknown

Pre-orders for the phone open in China on December 20, however it's unclear if or when the Samsung Galaxy A8S will land outside China. 

We also don't know what it will cost, but pinhole camera aside those are upper mid-range specs, so expect it to significantly undercut the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Note 9.

We suspect that if the Galaxy A8S gets a global launch at all it probably won't do so until after the Honor View 20 – a pinhole camera phone that’s landing in January, so that will probably be your first pinhole option.

However, the Samsung Galaxy S10 may well have a pinhole camera of its own and could be announced in late February, so you might want to wait for that.

James is a freelance phones, tablets and wearables writer and sub-editor at TechRadar. He has a love for everything ‘smart’, from watches to lights, and can often be found arguing with AI assistants or drowning in the latest apps. James also contributes to 3G.co.uk, 4G.co.uk and 5G.co.uk and has written for T3, Digital Camera World, Clarity Media and others, with work on the web, in print and on TV.

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