No announcement, no event. Samsung just put out press releases in France, Norway and Sweden and let the Galaxy A18 4G appear. It’s on Samsung France’s store now at €280, about $305, shipping from 18 September, in Gray, Light Blue or Black. There’s no 5G version yet.
The upgrade over the A17 is thin
Here’s what actually changed:
- Exynos 1610 chip in place of the MediaTek Helio G99
- IP64 rating instead of IP54, so it’s now properly dust tight
- Slightly thicker and heavier at 7.7mm and 196g, up from 7.5mm and 190g
Everything else carries over. Same 6.7in Super AMOLED at 1080 x 2340 and 90Hz, same notch, same 13MP selfie camera, same 50MP main with no OIS, 5MP ultrawide and 2MP macro, same 5,000mAh battery with 25W charging. Samsung rates the battery for 1,200 cycles and says 30 minutes gets you to 50%.
No one had heard of the Exynos 1610, including Samsung’s own website
The chip never appeared in any official material before this. Digging by gamma0burst into the kernel source shows it’s built on 5nm with eight cores up to 2.4GHz, and the CPU and GPU are the same parts used in the Exynos 1280 and 1330. What Samsung actually upgraded is the image signal processor, which now handles 4K60 recording, plus the video encoder and decoder.
Which makes the camera spec odd. The A18 records 1080p at 30fps, nothing more, even though the chip inside it can do 4K60. Samsung is holding that back on purpose.
Software support is the genuinely good part
Android 17 and One UI 9 out of the box, six years of OS updates, and security patches running until the end of October 2032. For a phone at this price, that’s the strongest thing on the sheet.
The price is where it stings
The Galaxy A17 4G launched last year at €200, and it came with 6GB of RAM. The A18 asks €80 more and gives you 4GB. Norway’s press release lists NOK 3,290 for 128GB and NOK 5,190 for a 256GB model that France doesn’t get, and there’s at least a microSD slot on all of them. Memory prices have gone mad across the whole industry this year, so Samsung isn’t alone in this, but the buyer still ends up paying more for less.
