Samsung is all set to hold its first in-person smartphone launch since 2020 on February 1 at this year’s Galaxy Unpacked event, at least we hope that it is.
This year the smartphone maker is expected to release its flagship S23 lineup, which comes at a very crucial time for the company, which was quoted by Bloomberg saying that it “sees demand for mobile devices shrinking in the current year”. This was after Samsung witnessed its biggest profit drop in over a decade. So, will the S23 lineup change the company’s outlook? Let’s find out.
Samsung stuck with the same design for the smaller S21 and S22 series, while only making changes to the S21 and S22 Ultra, giving a full makeover and adding S Pen support to the latter. The S23 Ultra, if rumours are to be believed, will be similar in design to the S22 Ultra, and the base models — the S23 and the S23 Plus — will be receiving a facelift this year. The design is rumoured to be similar to the recently launched A04 and A14 series — ditching the camera island (or whatever you wanna call it) and taking a more Ultra approach.
Veteran Samsung leaker Ice Universe tweeted photos of what the devices could possibly look like with some fresh colours.
Ice Universe has a reputation of being correct almost all of the times.
While the specs are not likely to be very different from the previous generation, there is one good news for users in Europe and India regions. Samsung has a history of shipping both Qualcomm SoCs (system on chip) and its in-house Exynos SoCs in separate regions, where Qualcomm’s Snapdragon clearly outperforms the Exynos and the users are left believing they have bad devices.
The Exynos devices had battery issues and heating issues among others. This year, however, there are reasons to believe that Samsung will be only shipping the Qualcomm SoCs — the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to be precise. According to The Verge, Qualcomm suggested as much in an earnings call last year when chief financial officer Akash Palkhiwala said Qualcomm’s processor share would increase from “75 percent in G S22” to “global share in G S23.”
Talking about the S23 lineup would be incomplete without mentioning the very rumoured 200-megapixel main shooter on the S23 Ultra camera setup, which is almost double the 108-megapixel on the S22 Ultra.
The screens and battery on the devices will also receive upgrades but how big a jump this will be from last year is hard to say. The charging speeds are likely to remain the same, given how Samsung has stuck with 45W super-fast charging and 25W fast charging for the longest time.
Pricing for the Galaxy S23 is expected to be comparable to its predecessor, starting at $799.99 for the base model, $999.99 for the S23 Plus, and $1,199.99 for the S23 Ultra, according to internal Verizon documents that were shared to Reddit. However, European customers might not be as fortunate. Pricing leaks indicate that in nations like Spain and Germany, the beginning prices for some models may have gone up by about 100 euros.
The flagship Galaxy smartphones are not the only launch that is expected from the Galaxy Unpacked event. Historically, we also see Samsung’s flagship S series tablets but this year, however, a report from South Korean publication The Elec claims that the company postponed the launch of its next tablets (likely the Tab S9) from their initial December 2022 release date because of a decline in consumer electronics demand. However, The Elec predicts that a new generation of tablets will still be released this year.
Instead, we are likely to witness an upgrade to the Galaxy Book lineup at this Unpacked event. If Samsung follows suit, we will have a Galaxy Book 3, Book 3 360, Book 3 Pro, and Book 3 Pro 360 along with an additional Galaxy Book 3 Ultra. According to leaks, the Book 3 Ultra will have a 16-inch 1080p OLED display, an Intel i9 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 4070 discrete GPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB of storage, and will be compatible with the S Pen. All Galaxy Book 3 models are also likely to be equipped with the 13th Gen Intel processors.
If you are someone who is waiting for a new pair of Galaxy Buds Pro or the Galaxy Watch, you should probably sit this one out as the devices recently received an upgrade during Samsung’s August Unpacked event. Samsung could launch a new pair of the base Galaxy Buds since they last received an upgrade in 2021 but nothing can be confirmed yet and the leaks aren’t saying anything so there is very little chance that this is happening.
The Galaxy Unpacked will live-stream on the company’s YouTube channel on February 1 at 11.30 pm IST.
