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Samsung Galaxy S9 To Lack Quick Charge 4.0 Support: Report

The variants of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Powered powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 will miss out on Quick Charge 4.0 support, one industry insider from China said earlier this week, adding that the two handsets will still be limited to Quick Charge 3.0. The omission of the feature is said to be related to Samsung‘s unwillingness to pay even higher licensing fees to Qualcomm than it already does, albeit it’s still unclear whether the decision was prompted as part of a wider cost-cutting effort or in response to some potential change to Qualcomm’s royalty rates.

The Snapdragon 845-powered units of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus will be sold in the United States and China, as was the case with the majority of Samsung’s previous Android flagships, older reports suggested. The devices aimed at other markets are said to sport the Exynos 9810, Samsung’s latest system-on-chip which the company unceremoniously announced in November. The new Exynos-branded silicon is expected to improve on the firm’s Adaptive Fast Charging, though it’s currently unclear how will the new technology fare against Quick Charge 4.0 which is sometimes stylized as Quick Charge 4+. Commercially available handsets with support for Qualcomm’s lastest charging solution remain extremely scarce, with the Razer Phone still being the only mobile offering to be compatible with this technology out of the box. The availability of Qualcomm’s charging tech is likely to expand over the course of the next year as manufacturers are expected to put a larger focus on quicker recharges seeing how the new generation of chips isn’t significantly more energy-efficient than the previous one, with both still being based on the 10nm process node.

The South Korean tech giant isn’t expected to debut a large overhaul of its Android flagship series next year as most industry insiders agree the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus will instead seek to offer a refined version of the widely successful Galaxy S8 formula. While Samsung already said the handsets are unlikely to debut at Consumer Electronics Show in the first half of January, their launch is understood to be scheduled closer to the latest iteration of Mobile World Congress, whereas both should begin retailing come spring.