Next year’s Samsung flagships – the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus – will be the first devices to arrive boasting Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 SoC on board. That’s according to a tweet from Moscow-based journalist Eldar Murtazin. In addition, the same tweet goes on to say that Samsung’s premium devices will also arrive around a month earlier than they usually would, putting the release timeframe at around March 2018, if the information turns out to be correct. Other flagships, Murtazin continues, will have to wait for an unspecified length of time to get their hands on the upcoming Qualcomm SoC.
It almost goes without saying that the information most likely only applies to the U.S. variant of Samsung’s next generation flagship devices, since nearly every other region typically receives Samsung devices packing a Samsung-built Exynos-branded SoC. However, it shouldn’t be too surprising that Samsung may end up with the Snapdragon 845 before other Android manufacturers. The company is, after all, among the most successful handset makers on the planet, so its smartphones are typically first or among the first to have the very latest in technological advancements and hardware, and has lent its chipmaking expertise and processes to Qualcomm more than once over the last couple of years. Most recently the two companies worked together to bring Samsung’s 10-nanometer FinFET process to bear on the previous Snapdragon 835 SoC. Which also ended up being a processor that was largely reserved for Samsung and its Galaxy S8 line of products at first. So with that in mind, it might be almost a given to assume the same will happen in 2018 with the release of the Galaxy S9 line.
In the meantime, current speculation also hints that the Samsung Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus will ship with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage as part of the least expensive variant. The storage is, as with other Samsung flagships, expected to be expandable. Current rumors also claim that the cameras on the devices will be Samsung-built, this time around, using the company’s own sensors in a dual-camera setup. Finally, the design of the handsets is presumed to continue Samsung’s bezel-less design aspirations, though none of that information has been formally verified yet.