South Korea’s tech giant Samsung Electronics Co. unveiled its new non-premium smartphone Galaxy A9 with high-end features including four rear cameras, accelerating its efforts to tap deeper into emerging markets.

The new Galaxy A9 made an impressive debut on Thursday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the company’s first launch event for a budget model, joined by 1,000 corporate leaders and reporters from all over the world.

The new phone is the world’s first smartphone featuring four rear cameras - the main camera with the resolution of 24 megapixels, a 10-megapixel telephoto lens with 2x optical zoom, an 8-megapixel ultra wide-angle lens and a 5-megapixel depth camera. It sports another 24-megapixel lens on the front.

Samsung Electronics is joining the race to enhance smartphone camera feature with five cameras. LG Electronics recently announced to launch its new flagship smartphone model V40 ThinQ with five cameras - three rear cameras and two front cameras - this month in the U.S.

The phone is also loaded with the same intelligent camera system, first fitted in the company’s premium smartphone Galaxy Note 9, to capture the perfect photo. The artificial intelligent (AI)-controlled camera system enables users to easily snap shots with settings like contrast, brightness and white balance optimized automatically.

The Korean smartphone giant held a special launching event for its budget smartphone model for the first time, showing its confidence in the new non-premium phone Galaxy A9 with innovative specifications and technologies that have been applied only for premium phones.

Koh Dong-jin, President and CEO of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics, announced August that the company would start applying premium features to its budget models in a move to regain its ground from its global rivals in the smartphone market in emerging countries.

By Kim Gyu-sik and Lee Ha-yeon

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