Samsung Announces The Galaxy S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra: 120Hz, 5G, Huge Batteries, Craz

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The year is 2020. The 20’s are back (we’ll see if they’ll be roaring or not), and not only is it a new decade, but it’s also time for a new enumeration scheme for Samsung’s newest Galaxy S devices; Today Samsung is announcing the new Galaxy S20, S20+ and S20 Ultra flagship phones. The new phones have some similarities in the external design to last year’s S10 line-up and a clearly a successor – but in terms of specifications and hardware capabilities, it’s one of Samsung’s largest ever updates.

The new trio of devices shake things up again compared to what we’ve seen in last year, and there’s a different positioning at the low- and high-end of the series. The S20 and S20+ are relatively straightforward successors to the S10 and S10+, however the lower end S10e sees no continuation, with Samsung instead opting for a super-high-end premium model in the form of the S20 Ultra – a literal behemoth of a phone.

The hardware updates this year are massive: This is Samsung’s first year where 5G connectivity comes as a standard feature for all models of the line-up (There are still some 4G variants depending on markets), featuring the newest Snapdragon 865 and Exynos 990 SoCs and their corresponding new generation modems. The phones now come with a 120Hz refresh rate screen all while retaining 1440p resolution on all models, and we’ve seen some substantial upgrades in terms of battery capacities to be able to power the new SoCs, 5G connectivity, and new display.

The biggest upgrade and key focus point of the new S20 series however is the new camera configurations and setups. This is Samsung’s first time in several years that the company has opted to go for bigger camera sensors, and while there’s still “only” three cameras for the models in the line-up, they are completely revamped in their designs and have very little to do with their past brethren. The new S20 Ultra even goes a step further in terms of differentiation and now comes with a gargantuan 108MP main camera sensor as well with what Samsung describes a “100x Super Zoom” telephoto module that’s enabled by a prism optics right-angle mounted sensor setup. The camera improvements are numerous, and we’ll go into detail of each of them in just a bit.

Snapdragon 865 & Exynos 990 - Next Gen-SoCs as The Brain of the Phones

At the heart of the S20 series we find Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 SoC as well as Samsung’s Exynos 990 chip. The Snapdragon 865 is a straightforward follow-up to the Snapdragon 855 that powered the vast majority of mobile devices in 2019 in an excellent manner. The new chip comes with a slightly updated manufacturing process and sports Arm’s newest Cortex A77 CPU cores which bring a 25% performance through microarchitectural updates, and an updated GPU sporting a 20% performance uplift. We’ve covered the Snapdragon 865 more extensively in our performance preview piece, and we’re sure the Galaxy S20 models using this chipset variant will give excellent experiences for 2020.

European costumers (and maybe others?) will see the new Exynos 990 chip being used. We don’t know too much about the chip’s performance, but it sports 2x new Samsung M5 CPU cores at 2.73GHz alongside 2x Cortex A76 cores at 2.5GHz and 4x Cortex A55 cores at 2GHz. On the GPU side, we see the brand-new Arm Mali-G77 in a 11-core configuration at yet undisclosed clocks. Samsung had claimed the CPU performance is 20% higher than that of the Exynos 9820, and first leaked benchmarks does put it roughly around the same level as the Cortex A77 cores of the Snapdragon 865 – of course this is all to be confirmed once we get our hands on the chip. There’s a more generational gap in terms of process node here between the S10 and S20 as we see the transition from 8nm to 7nm EUV – it would be more similar to the Exynos 9825 of the Note10, it will be interesting how power efficiency ends up at this year and how both Exynos and Snapdragon versions of the Galaxy S20 will fare against each other.

Both chips bring with them massive upgrades in their imagine signal processors as well as their neural processing units, significantly increasing the processing power that’s required to operate the S20’s new complex camera systems.

5G Becomes Mainstream - At Least For Some Markets And Variants

Common between both chipset variants is the introduction of 5G connectivity that’s enabled by new discrete modems on both platforms. Qualcomm says that the Snapdragon 865 exclusively comes with the new X55 5G modem and it’s likely we’ll be seeing this being deployed in the majority of leading 5G markets such as the US and China, maybe even South Korea. The Exynos models however also have 5G connectivity thanks to the new Exynos Modem 5123 and these variants will be prevalent in European markets.

At this moment it’s still unclear what S.LSI’s situation is on mmWave– we know that the company has solutions that they claim as being planned for adoption in 2020, but until Samsung confirms S20 variants with the functionality it’s something we currently can only speculate on. The vast majority of markets haven’t even begun licensing out mmWave spectrum, much less deploy it. At the time of writing, it’s also unclear whether all Snapdragon variants of the S20 will feature mmWave modules, or if we’ll be seeing a segmentation between sub-6 only models and sub-6+mmWave models depending on country or region. One thing that is clear is that Samsung is not completely abandoning 4G only variants of the S20 series, as these will still be launched in markets lagging in 5G adoption. These variants seemingly will feature the Exynos chip, but we’re unclear whether it’ll come with a different modem, or if it’ll simply just lack the corresponding 5G RF system that’s required for connectivity.

Iterative Redesigns For S20 & S20+, New Behemoth S20 Ultra Form-Factor

In terms of design, the S20 and S20+ are iterative to their predecessors, with Samsung now tweaking the bezel situation as well as elongating the form-factor. All the new phones come with a 3200 x 1440 resolution display which results in a 20:9 aspect ratio, slightly longer than the 19:9 aspect ratio of the S10 series. The new 6.2” and 6.7” screen diagonals of the S20 and S20+ shouldn’t scare you off in thinking that the phones have majorly changed their form-factor, in fact, the width of the new models is actually narrower than the S10 and S10+ - it’s only in the length that the new phones have grown in size, meaning it should largely still have similar ergonomics. Thickness is the same as well, but the phones are a little bit heavier by 6 and 13 grams respectively, while still being relatively reasonable on the scale at 163g and 187g.
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