With new phones coming in the new year, Samsung will be one of the first to launch the Galaxy S22 series. The device should be released sometime in the next month or two, so naturally there are plenty of leaks to look out for.
91mobiles has official renderings of the company’s next flagship from Samsung. The big news this year is that the high-end Galaxy S22 Ultra will be converted into a replacement for the Galaxy Note and will come with a built-in S-Pen. Last year, Samsung killed off the Galaxy Note with the S-Pen, saying that the Note and S lines were too similar and that ditching the flat line would allow Samsung to focus more on foldable devices. With its boxy design and the S-Pen featured in all renders, the S22 Ultra is a Galaxy Note in all but name.
S-Pen fans will be happy, but Samsung is sacrificing battery life for S-Pen storage. You can’t do without having to cut out a large chunk of interior space to store the stylus, and in 2020 the 5000mAh S20 Ultra had 500mAh more battery capacity than the 4500mAh Note 20 Ultra. This year, the S22 Ultra is rumored to draw 5,000mAh even with an S-Pen hole, thanks to improved battery density. However, without S-Pen storage, the battery could have been larger.
The ultra model has separate rear camera lenses instead of last year’s large, angular protrusion. The front camera is still a punch hole, although it’s hard to see in these renders. It is assumed that the phone is still built on a 6.8-inch display with a frequency of 120Hz.
91Mobiles also posted renderings of the base S22, which appears to be in line with last year’s design. This means the camera’s corner protrusion is making a comeback, along with more rounded corners. The new phone is actually smaller than last year’s model, but with a 6.09-inch display and a 3,700 mAh battery compared to the S21’s 6.2-inch display and 4,000 mAh battery.
In some regions, such as the US, Samsung will be one of the first companies to launch a device with the new flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 SoC (Xiaomi is the first). The chip is a follow-up to last year’s Snapdragon 888 and Qualcomm’s first ARM v9 SoC. It is built on a 4nm process and follows an ARM-recommended layout with one 3GHz Cortex X2 core, three 2.5GHz Cortex A710 mid-range processors, and four small Cortex A510 processors.
These are all brand new core designs, allowing high-end devices to finally move away from the old A55 core that has been doing small-core work for the past four years. ARM is also working on 64-bit processors. Only A710 mid-cores still support this generation’s 32-bit code, and next year, ARM’s flagship design will only support 64-bit code.
In other regions, Samsung will ship the Exynos SoC (Exynos 2200) in the Galaxy S22. All of Qualcomm’s descriptions above most likely also apply to Samsung’s Exynos chip, but this year the Exynos division is making major changes and collaborating with AMD on the GPU. Samsung has already started thinking about this partnership, naming AMD’s GPU architecture “RDNA 2″in a tweet:
As the tweet says, the big Exynos announcement will take place on January 11th and we will see the S22 announcement in a while.