The Samsung Galaxy A71 5G UW for Verizon
is official and you can pre-order it today at a promo price of US$ 15 a month for
24 months on an Unlimited plan. This works out to US$ 360 while its regular retail
price is US$ 650. This means that after the promo period is over, the handset will
go up to US$ 27.09 a month, which makes the whole US$ 650.
Starting on July 16 you will be able to
pick up the phone from any Verizon location. The carrier dubbed this “the most
affordable 5G Ultra Wideband smartphone”, by the way. You can get up to US$ 250 in
credit towards the new phone by trading in an old handset (and you’ll need to
sign up for a Premium Unlimited plan).
UW stands for Ultra Wideband, which is
what the carrier calls its mmWave network. Currently, there’s coverage in 35
cities – for more details, check out the coverage map. mmWave can hit speeds
over 1 gigabit per second, but is limited to only the densest urban areas as
the signal can’t travel very far.
To that end, the Galaxy A71 5G UW will also
be able to connect to Verizon’s low-band 5G network – this won’t be much faster
than current 4G networks, but has significantly wider coverage than mmWave (the
carrier is aiming for nation-wide coverage). The low-band 5G network will be
activated later this year.
There’s not much more to say – there’s no
official confirmation that the phone switched to the Snapdragon 765G, but it
most likely did as the Exynos 980 used in the regular Galaxy A71 5G does not
support mmWave. The memory capacity is 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB storage, plus up
to 1 TB more in the form of a microSD card. For comparison, the vanilla A71 5G
starts at 6/128 GB and has an MSRP of US$ 600 (but you can grab one from
Samsung.com for US$ 430 right now).
The rest is unchanged, including 6.7”
Super AMOLED screen, the 4,500 mAh battery with 25 W charging and the cameras.
There’s four of them on the back, starting with the 64 MP main cam, 12 MP ultra
wide one, a 5 MP macro camera and a 5 MP depth sensor. The selfie camera on the
front has a 32 MP sensor.
