Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event set to show new Galaxy S21 on January 14

Samsung's next Galaxy Unpacked event will take place on January 14, the South Korean giant has confirmed, with the live presentation expected to feature the Galaxy S21 range, including the S21+ and the S21 Ultra.

A video invitation for the event, subtitled "Welcome to the Everyday Epic," confirms rumors of a January launch, which will be streamed by on YouTube at 10 a.m. Eastern on January 14. Published on Sunday night, the invitation provides relatively few clues about what to expect, but copious amounts of rumors and leaks seem to have covered almost everything Samsung will show off.

The short video shows a blurry black object floating within a computer-generated frosted glass cube, with the object seemingly having three divots on one side. Based on previous rumors, this may be in reference to a new camera bump design for the new smartphone models, which will incorporate the bump into the main chassis material in the corner.

So far, Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy S21, S21 , and S21 Ultra, its flagship smartphones that are the main rivals to Apple's iPhone 12 range. The three models are tipped to have 6.2-inch, 6.7-inch, and 6.8-inch OLED displays, with the Ultra potentially including S-Pen support, albeit without any way to holster the stylus.

All models are thought to have either the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC or Samsung's Exynos 2100 SoC, with 12 gigabytes of memory. It remains to be seen if either chip will be able to topple Apple's A14.

On the back, the new camera bump will allegedly offer 12-megapixel wide and ultra-wide cameras along with a 64-megapixel telephoto on the S21 and S21+. On the Ultra, Samsung could use a 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera, a 108-megapixel main camera, a laser sensor for autofocus, and a pair of 10-megapixel cameras with OIS to handle telephoto shooting, with 3x and 10x optical zooms touted.

The models are all expected to offer 5G LTE support, fast charging, Bluetooth 5.1, and Wi-Fi 6, though the Ultra may go one step further into supporting Wi-Fi 6E.

2 Comments

chasm 10 Years · 3624 comments

About 3 years ago

Sounds like it will be very comparable to the iPhone 12, though ISTR that the 888 SoC has already been tested against the A14 and found to be lacking. That said, for typical users it will be "fast enough" to be comparable. As for the "advantage" of possibly supporting Wi-Fi 6E, this is a non-issue for next couple of years (much like "5G") for 99 percent of users. Both Apple and Samsung do good work on the cameras, though I suspect Apple's current advantage on its LIDAR-equipped models and night mode will continue.j

Bottom line: if you're not into Apple (what are you doing here but whatevs), this will be Samsung's flagship phone(s) and will be the best they can do, which at their best is a worthy rival. And as with Apple, boy will you pay for that option. Samsung traditionally doesn't sell very many of their flagship (compared to either iPhones or Samsung's own midrange lineup), and doesn't make much money on them -- but they are very premium smartphones.

KITA 6 Years · 402 comments

About 3 years ago

chasm said:

the 888 SoC has already been tested against the A14 and found to be lacking

I'll repost something I said previously about the 888 vs A14:

This is a bit deceiving given the claim seems to hang mostly on peak CPU and peak GPU performance.
While I understand it's going on what's been provided, the Snapdragon 888 likely has a more powerful GPU in sustained performance (claimed and historical implementations demonstrate this).
Note - the higher end Snapdragon 865/+ based devices have typically offered the same peak and sustained performance. Meanwhile, the A13 and especially the A14 can be a bit of a mess despite that impressive peak performance.

The 888 also has a better integrated 5G modem and an extremely impressive ISP. In terms of AI? The 888's DSP (+CPU/GPU) offers 26 TOPS, the A14 only offers 11 TOPS.
So I wouldn't exactly say the 888 is lacking, it just has all of its strengths outside of Geekbench and a peak GPU performance test.