Samsung will launch its Galaxy S7 flagship smartphone in 2016 as a follow up to its Galaxy S6, which was launched by the company earlier this year as its flagship handset. Rumor has it that the device will come earlier than has been the norm thus far with Samsung’s Galaxy ‘S’ range of flagship handsets. While the rumor cannot be confirmed as of now, seeing as the company already preponed the launch of the Galaxy Note 5 this year, you probably wouldn’t want to bet against another early launch from Samsung next year. A brand new report coming out of the company’s home base of South Korea now quotes an anonymous Samsung Electronics official, to claim that the impending new flagship device from Samsung will be launched as early as in February, 2016. This year of course, the South Korean consumer electronics company launched its Galaxy S6 smartphone in March, so a February launch cannot be ruled out entirely, even though there’s no way to verify or double check these reports as of now.
The report also claims that at least one version of the device will come with tri-band carrier aggregation and support the Cat.12/13 LTE standard, which allows for 600 Mbps downlink and 150 Mbps uplink speeds. Which is to be expected from the Galaxy S7 of course, seeing as it is believed to come in two different versions, one of which will be powered by Qualcomm’s upcoming top-of-the-line Snapdragon 820 chipset with custom Kryo cores. The SoC will have an X12 LTE modem, which supports Cat12/13 LTE standards, meaning theoretical download speeds of 600 Mbps and upload speeds of 150 Mbps. It bears mentioning here that Samsung apparently is planning another variant of the Galaxy S7, which will be powered by the company’s own, in-house Exynos 8890 SoC, with Samsung’s own custom Mongoose cores. Details about that particular chipset however, is still a bit sketchy, but various rumored benchmarks have already indicated that it will definitely not be a laggard when it comes to processing power, to say the least.
Coming back to the report coming out of South Korea that forms the basis of this article, the report does not specifically mention which version of Samsung’s upcoming flagship will support 600 Mbps downloads. So with the Snapdragon 820 variant almost definitely supporting that particular standard, it will be interesting to see whether the Exynos 8890 will also come with Cat.12/13 connectivity.