Samsung’s budget Galaxy S6 look-alike, the Galaxy J3, is now available online from Virgin Mobile in the U.S., and it will arrive in Boost Mobile's stores on January 18 and and online on January 19.
Samsung seems to like to adopt the same design language for its smartphone products across all its lineups. When it launched the Galaxy S3, not only did it keep using and evolving that design for the Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5, but it also used it for other lower-end devices. This has the advantage of familiarity for customers, but it can also become detrimental in the long term if customers end up feeling bored with same-looking devices from Samsung. That means Samsung will also need to keep overhauling its design style every two or three generations of smartphones if it wants customers to remain excited about the new models.
With the Galaxy S6, Samsung changed its design strategy, making the devices look slimmer and feel more premium, and now it’s transitioning that design style to other smartphones as well, including the Galaxy J3.
The Galaxy J3 is a lower-end smartphone that comes with features such as a quad-core 1.2 GHz processor, a 5” HD Super AMOLED display, 1.5 GB of RAM, 16 GB of storage, LTE support and 5MP rear / 2MP front cameras.
The phone will arrive with Android 5.1 on board, and so far Samsung hasn’t said whether the device will receive the Marshmallow update. Samsung, as well as other OEMs, tend to forget much more quickly about updating lower-end devices than they do their flagship smartphones, which also creates security problems for the many users that tend to buy these budget phones.
The Samsung Galaxy J3 is priced at $179.99 (plus tax), and it can also be purchased with Boost Mobile plans starting starting at $30, and with Virgin Mobile plans starting at $35 a month.
Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware. You can follow him at @lucian_armasu.
