Samsung is a wide reaching company with all sorts of products in every region of the world. Sometimes a product can be launched worldwide since it has wide appeal, such as the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge have had. Sometimes though a product can only be released in a few regions for a number of reasons, such as software or hardware differences that just wouldn’t make sense elsewhere in the world. One such area is China where flip phones are still popular, and in fact Samsung and a few other device manufacturers have started specializing in making smart flip phones that appear like a regular candy bar shaped smartphone at first, but flip open to reveal a second screen and a traditional T-9 keyboard below.
These phones would almost certainly not sell well in the rest of the world but the China market definitely likes them quite a bit, so much so that Samsung seems to be planning another model for release sometime soon. Caught on an import list in a cargo shipment to Samsung India, the SM-G9198 code name Philipe appears to be different than what it was once thought to be. We’ve seen this design from Samsung as recently as late 2014, which surprised a number of people when it made its debut on the market. The Philipe as its known for now is sporting some pretty impressive specs for any smartphone, much less one that looks like a phone from the days of yore.
Inside you’ll find a Qualcomm Snapdraon 808, the same chipset found inside the LG G4 to be precise. That’s a powerful chipset no matter how you slice it, and it runs significantly cooler than Qualcomm’s beastly Snapdragon 810 that’s been causing issues since its launch a few months ago. In addition to that there’s an Adreno 418 GPU, 2GB of RAM for great multi-tasking performance and 16GB internal storage. If you can believe it the same 16-megapixel rear-facing camera from the Galaxy S6 seems to be present here, as well as the 5MP shooter sitting on front. Even more astounding is that this handset is running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop, something almost no phone on the market outside of Nexus devices is officially running. This is certainly a beastly phone in an unexpected form factor, and it’s likely to be released quite soon.