We’ve been saying for months that Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S10 is shaping up to be the company’s most exciting smartphone in years. Excitement can often cool as more details trickle out, and we’ve seen that happen time and time again with upcoming Samsung smartphones. In the case of the company’s Galaxy S10 lineup, however, we’ve found so far that excitement has only grown as additional rumors and reports surface.
Just yesterday we learned from a source with a solid track record that the larger Galaxy S10+ phablet will have a total of five cameras onboard. We also learned exactly what each of those five lenses will do. The triple-lens camera on the back of the phone will include a standard wide-angle sensor, a telephoto sensor for optical zoom and background blur effects, and a super-wide-angle sensor with an impressive 120-degree angle of view. Then around front the phone will have wide-angle and a telephoto sensors for Portrait Mode selfies. There was an interesting tidbit buried in that report that we and other sites covering the news missed though, and it’s worth circling back to because it’s exciting news.
As far as its mobile business is concerned, Samsung is a company of extremes right now. In 2018, Samsung’s flagship smartphones are boring and uninspired. The Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ looks just like their predecessors and don’t really include any novel new features to encourage upgrades. As a result, sales have been woefully slow to the point where the phones actually managed to drag down Samsung’s second-quarter earnings. Sadly, we expect more of the same from the upcoming Galaxy Note 9 set to debut on August 9th.
Next year, however, we’re expecting Samsung to swing to the other extreme. The Galaxy S10 believed to be lined up for a January launch will pack tons of exciting new tech such as a new optical fingerprint sensor embedded right under the display. The phone is also believed to sport a new design with almost no bezels above or below the screen. It’ll be followed up by another exciting phone when Samsung launches the new foldable Galaxy X, but it remains to be seen whether or not that phone will live up to the hype. With the Galaxy S10, meanwhile, we can safely say at this point that the phone won’t just meet our expectations, it may very well exceed them based on what we’ve read and heard from our own sources.
The only bad news we’ve heard about the Galaxy S10 lineup so far doesn’t come as much of a surprise, but it’s bad news nonetheless: Samsung’s next-gen flagship phones are going to be very expensive.
Jacking up the prices of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ didn’t work very well at all for Samsung, but that’s likely due to the fact that the phones themselves are boring updates. Next year’s Galaxy S10 lineup will may be priced as high as Apple’s iPhone X models, but the novelty, new design, and exciting new features could warrant the price increase for many Samsung fans.
We’re of course expecting the supersized Galaxy S10+ phablet to be the most expensive of the three Galaxy S10 models rumored to be debuting in January. But it appears as though the differences between the Galaxy S10 and the S10+ model might not be as significant as we had previously heard. The premium Samsung will charge for the plus model was thought to cover the larger display and the new triple-lens camera system on the back, but yesterday’s big Galaxy S10 report suggests that won’t be the case at all.
Toward the end of Monday’s report from Korean-language financial news site The Bell, the site drops a very interesting tidbit that contradicts earlier Galaxy S10 rumors. “The [Galaxy S10] has a single camera on the front and a triple camera on the back, which makes the front camera less than the [Galaxy S10+],” reads a machine translated version of The Bell’s reporting. We had previously heard that the triple-lens rear camera would be exclusive to the larger Galaxy S10+ to help draw more people toward the pricier model, but this report says that won’t be the case. Instead, both the Galaxy S10+ and the Galaxy S10 will feature the same triple-lens camera on the back, while a new dual-lens front-facing camera setup will be exclusive to the S10+.
So far The Bell is the only site we’ve seen report this news, but it has been a reliable source of information in the past when it comes to unreleased Samsung smartphones.
