We have good news and bad news for Samsung fans on Thursday morning. The bad news is the fact that each new day brings more evidence that the upcoming Galaxy Note 9 is going to be just as boring as we’re all expecting at this point. Samsung doesn’t seem to have any surprises in store, as was the case with the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. But we’ll get to that later. The good news is that the Samsung smartphones that will follow the Note 9 are shaping up to be the most exciting new flagship devices Samsung has released in years.
Yes, we’re talking about the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ flagships set to launch early next year. Everything we’ve heard so far has painted a picture of next-generation flagship phones that are going to blow us away. Now, a report on Thursday morning adds new pieces to the puzzle that help paint an even clearer picture of Samsung’s exciting next-gen Galaxy S phones.
Before we get to the new stuff, let’s quickly recap what we think we know so far. The TLDR version is this: Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ flagship phones are shaping up to be the hottest new smartphones the world has seen in years.
To elaborate, it appears as though 2018’s new Samsung flagship phone launches are merely stopgaps until the company is ready to mass-produce all the exciting new tech it’s working on. The Galaxy S10 and S10+ will feature the redesign people were hoping for in the Galaxy S9 and S9+, and it all starts with a new Infinity screen design that has even narrower bezels than before.
The screens themselves may be bone-conducting speakers on the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+. This way Samsung doesn’t need a separate speaker above the display. They’re expected to be next-gen OLED panels that are even more stunning than the displays we currently see on the Galaxy S9, which are by far the best in the business right now. But perhaps the most exciting news about the Galaxy S10’s display is that it’ll be the first on a mass market smartphone to feature an in-display fingerprint sensor. Instead of having the sensor annoyingly positioned on the back of the phone like it is on current Samsung handsets, it’ll be an optical sensor that’s integrated right into the bottom of the screen.
We can expect big power and performance improvements on top of all that, courtesy of next-generation Exynos and Qualcomm Snapdragon chipsets. Of course there’s more to performance than just a phone’s processor, and that’s why Thursday morning’s new leak is so exciting. According to Ice universe, an insider with a terrific track record when it comes to leaking information about unreleased Samsung devices, the Galaxy S10 will include next-generation RAM and flash storage modules.
“Samsung will mass-produce LPDDR5 and UFS3.0 chips in the second half of the year, and I look forward to the Galaxy S10,” the leaker wrote in a post on Twitter. The implication, of course, is that these next-generation components will be included in the Galaxy S10.
The Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ currently uses UFS 2.1 flash storage modules and LPDDR4 RAM chips. In both cases, they’re among the fastest available chips for current-generation mobile devices. But Samsung’s next-generation UFS 3.0 and LPDDR5 components are expected to offer big performance improvements over the current-gen components, and the Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ will seemingly be the first smartphones to reap those benefits.
According to earlier reports, Samsung could announce its new Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+ flagship phones as soon as CES 2019 in January, and they might hit store shelves as early as February. This would make room for a mid-year launch of an entirely new kind of flagship phone, the foldable Galaxy X.
