The Galaxy A31 is planned to go on sale in India online via Flipkart tomorrow, June 4. Pricing details for the new mid-range device haven't been officially disclosed yet, but the phone should eventually hit physical retail stores for the price of INR 21,999 ($292), according to Pricebaba citing its sources.
It's unclear exactly when the Galaxy A31 will go on sale through offline channels across India, but the rule of thumb is that offline prices are generally higher than online prices. In other words, the Galaxy A31's price at Flipkart could be lower than INR 21,999 once the phone goes on sale tomorrow.
More expensive than the Galaxy A30 at launch, but there are reasons
You may be aware that the Galaxy A30 was considerably cheaper than its successor at launch, commanding a price of around INR 17,000. Nevertheless, there are reasons why the Galaxy A31 costs nearly INR 5,000 more than its predecessor. First of all, many components have been upgraded, especially the camera setup. It's been bumped from a two-camera to a quad-camera combo. The phone also received an under-display fingerprint sensor for better or for worse, and it got a higher-capacity 5,000mAh battery, up from 4,000mAh.
More importantly, and likely the main reason why the Galaxy A31 is more expensive, is that the variant sold in India should be the one that's better equipped, featuring 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. That's 2GB extra RAM and twice the storage of the most expensive version of the Galaxy A30.
All things considered, even if the higher price can be justified, only time will tell whether or not Samsung India's strategy to debut the Galaxy A31 in the best-possible memory configuration pays off. We expect other memory variants to be made available at some point in the future.
