News and rumors of Samsung’s next iteration of its S series smartphone are trickling onto the Internet. Mere months after Samsung Galaxy S8 invaded the smartphone market, the Korean-based smartphone manufacturer is reportedly working on its Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus flagships that are expected to be released in 2018.
Samsung hoarding Qualcomm chipsets again
According to The Inquirer, both Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus will debut in early 2018, and may actually appear at next year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). With Samsung’s plan of releasing these devices early next year, rumor has it that the company bought up all available Snapdragon 845 chipsets.
The said System-on-Chips will be featured in S9, specifically those models that will be sold in the United States, while European and Asian versions will use Exynos 9810.
To support earlier rumors, a Weibo user called @ice - who has a fairly decent track record in predicting - claimed that Samsung will hoard SoCs again for its next S series. It can be remembered that the company also did this earlier this year when it hoarded Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chips.
Not much is known about Snapdragon 845, but it is said that the chipset is more powerful than the US version of Snapdragon 835 found in Galaxy S8. Furthermore, 845 will likely be the successor of Snapdragon 836 – a chipset that could only be seen once Pixel 2 will be out in the market.
Meanwhile, aside from featuring Snapdragon 845, Samsung’s upcoming flagships (S9 and S9 Plus) will reportedly feature 5.8” and 6.2” AMOLED QHD+ curved display at 570ppi and 529ppi, respectively. Both devices are rumored to feature Android O, an embedded fingerprint scanner on display, USB-C port, dual rear-facing camera, Bixby, Exynos SoC for the U.K.
consumers and Cat 18 LTE that can support download speed of up to 1.2Gbps.
Other Samsung products
Another Samsung device appeared on a popular benchmarking website. According to GSM Arena, GeekBench leaked details about Galaxy A5 (SM-A5300) packed with Snapdragon 660 SoC and 6GB of RAM. Though the listing did not specifically state that it is the updated version of A5, many believe that the device will be the 2018 version because of its A530x model number.
According to the listing that was uploaded on Aug. 21 at 3:57 am, the device has a 1591 and 5706 single core score and multi-core score, respectively. Based on the same listing, the new samsung galaxy A5 will feature the latest Android 7.1.1 operating system – an updated version of the A5 (2017 version) that came with Android 6.0.
