What you need to know
- The first live images of Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S20+ have been leaked.
- They confirm previously leaked renders about its design, such as a quad-camera setup on the back.
- The phone's screen, though, marks a departure from Samsung's penchant for lustrous curves on its phones.
Excitement for Samsung's upcoming series of flagships is running high, even a month before their release. And with the release of the first live images of the phones, the folks at XDA Developers have just added more kindling to the Samsung faithful's long wait till February.
Courtesy of the site, we finally know what the Galaxy S20+ will look like — and how accurate previous renders of the series were. As it turns out, pretty accurate. The images show an identical camera array on the rear with four cameras stacked beside a flash module and what seems to be an additional microphone, according to XDA. The latter might radically improve audio quality for video recording on the series, which appears to be a big priority for Samsung this time around.
Samsung's decision to revamp the naming scheme for its flagships is apparently not the only surprise it's got in store for us. As the leaks reveal, the company is also doing away with a signature of the Galaxy S series since the S6. The Infinity-O display on the S20+ — it features only a single front camera in the center — has much flatter edges than its predecessors. Now, there is still a slight curve to it, but as the source behind the leak puts it, it feels almost flat to the touch.
Also surprising — but a welcome change — is Samsung's apparent decision to finally grow up and stop forcing Bixby on customers who, for the most part, really don't want it. All that's to say that there's no Bixby button on either side of the phone this time around.
The entire series will be available with both a 4G and a 5G variant, though the U.S. market is slated to get only the 5G models. The phone will be powered by a Snapdragon 865 stateside — with the addition of the X55 modem making it compatible with both the sub-6GHz and mmWave flavors of 5G networking — and by Samsung's own Exynos 990 elsewhere.
If previous rumors are to be believed, the S20+ itself won't be the most premium offering in the Korean giant's stable this time around. With the deprecation of the 'e' variant of the Galaxy S series, Samsung is positioning the regular S20 to be the 'smallest' of the bunch, and adding a new, ultra-premium model at the higher end, aptly named the Galaxy S20 Ultra. This model will likely also get a much better set of imaging tech than the S20 and S20+.
