UPDATE (SEPTEMBER 14) – SAMSUNG HAS OFFICIALLY ANNOUNCED THE LAUNCH EVENT
The Galaxy S20 FE is launching on September 23rd so there is still more than a week left for the launch.
2016 was a devastating year for Samsung’s mobile business because that was the year of Galaxy Note 7 fiasco. In case you don’t know about that, a major battery flaw caused multiple Note 7 units to catch fire or explode due to which the company later discontinued the phone. Then in 2017, Samsung launched the Galaxy Note FE (Fan Edition) in which the company fixed the battery flaw.
The whole point of talking about all this was to understand why Samsung launched the first “Fan Edition” phone. By the end of this month, Samsung Galaxy S20 FE is rumoured to launch, but this time, Samsung isn’t launching it because of any issues with the S20. It looks like from now on, we will get a “Fan Edition” phone from Samsung every year.
Now, we already have the official images as well as the full spec sheet of the Galaxy S20 FE so, in this article, we will talk about everything we know so far.
SAMSUNG GALAXY S20 FE – DESIGN & SPECIFICATIONS
Talking about the design first, the Galaxy S20 FE comes in not two, three, four or five but six color options. There are White, Blue, Green, Lavender, Orange, & Red. Now, the edges of the device are less curved, so the design is more like the Galaxy Note 20 than that of Galaxy S20 which is interesting because it is not named “Note 20 FE”. There is a rectangular camera module with triple cameras in it.
On the front, there is a “Flat” Infinity-O display, so the single selfie camera is placed in the center inside a tiny hole-punch cutout. It is a 6.5-inch Super AMOLED panel featuring 120Hz refresh-rate & Full-HD+ resolution. So, the display is bigger than the 6.2-inch panel on the S20 but smaller than the 6.7-inch panel on the S20+. There is Corning Gorilla Glass 3 on top & the fingerprint scanner is placed under the display.
Now, there are two variants of this phone – 4G & 5G. Based on which one you choose, you get different chipsets. So, the 5G Galaxy S20 FE has the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 SOC whereas the 4G variant has the Exynos 990. There is 6GB RAM & 128GB UFS 3.1 internal storage.
The triple camera setup on the rear includes a primary 12 Megapixel unit with f/1.8 aperture lens + OIS, a secondary 12 Megapixel ultrawide camera with 123-degree FOV, and a third 8 Megapixel telephoto unit with 3X Optical Zoom + OIS. So one downgrade from the Galaxy S20 is that the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE doesn’t have that 64 Megapixel telephoto camera. On the front, there is a 32 Megapixel camera for selfies compared to the 10MP selfie camera on the S20.
Finally, the Galaxy S20 FE has a 4,500mAH battery, so the battery is bigger than the one inside S20 (4,000mAH). In the European market, the phone will comes with only a 15W Adapter in the box. There is also support for Wireless Charging & the device comes with IP68 certification.
There is no information on the launch date yet, but there are rumours of it launching by the end of this month of at the beginning of October.