Samsung's Bixby crossing borders, now headed for the midrange A series

Samsung's Bixby voice assistant is still somewhat a divisive topic. Some are willing to wait it out and see if it unfolds into a useful service, others are annoyed by the redundancy of having a feature that is well covered by the already existing Google Assistant and doubly annoyed by that hardware button, which Samsung constantly tries to force you out of remapping.

Whether you like it or not, it seems Samsung is really pushing for Bixby to become a big deal on its devices. The Galaxy A7 (2017), which was released for international markets back in January, has finally launched in South Korea. Everything about the phone's hardware and software is the same, save for one thing — it now has Bixby.

It's nowhere near as prominent, as it lacks a hardware Bixby button, and there's no Bixby Voice (but then again, half of the world is still waiting for that one). This is not the first time we see a “base” Bixby on a phone, too — the Galaxy Note FE, a.k.a the non-exploding relaunched Note 7, also launched recently in South Korea with a “mini” Bixby on board.

This could mean one of two things — either Samsung is planning to impose its voice assistant on more of its midrange devices in the near future and is just having a practice run in its home country now; or it's really only going to have a “base” Bixby experience for its devout fandom in South Korea. We're pretty sure that a ton of international users would prefer that second option, but still — voice your opinion in the comments. Do you want to see Bixby on your Galaxy midranger?