Ice universe, one of the web’s most prominent mobile leakers, recently took to Twitter to add their input about some alleged misunderstandings that had apparently taken place regarding the Galaxy S10 lineup. The misunderstandings in question regard some of the features of the upcoming trio of devices. Ice universe has been pretty active in leaking the Galaxy S10 family, so it’s no surprise to see them standing up to set the Twitterverse right on these matters. One correction regards the camera lineup, which is to say that the two more expensive Galaxy S10 variants, at least, will actually have three cameras, and the second regards what storage and RAM standards the new phones will use.
Background: According to Ice universe, the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus will both have three cameras. The more basic Galaxy S10 Lite was not mentioned in that particular Tweet thread, which could mean that it will sport either a single camera for a more basic photography experience, or a dual camera setup like its predecessors, the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9 Plus. Another misunderstanding regards storage and RAM, and this one is a bit more nebulous. Samsung’s website says that the Exynos 9820 processor that will be powering some versions of the Galaxy S10 family cannot support LPDDR5 RAM standards, but can support UFS 2.1 and UFS 3.0 standards for internal storage. Ice universe says that the upcoming phones won’t sport LPDDR5 RAM, which makes sense, but goes on to say that these expensive flagships will not be using UFS 3.0 storage, even though rivals like OnePlus are upgrading for 2019, and will instead fall back on the older UFS 2.1 standard that 2018 flagships used, as well as some 2017 devices.
Impact: If Ice universe’s corrections are indeed indicative of the final state of Samsung’s Galaxy S10 lineup, then you can expect storage and RAM performance that’s not much different from today’s phones, though it could be optimized better. The whole package will obviously be a good bit faster due to the newer processing packages on board, supposedly being the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 or Samsung’s own Exynos 9820, depending on where the phone is bought. A large number of other features and design tweaks, such as a camera hole in the screen rather than a frontal notch, may well make the upgrade worth it even for Galaxy S9 owners, despite the alleged technical hiccups. Even with the same storage and RAM performance, the newer phones are bound to be quite a bit faster. The Snapdragon 855, for instance, upgrades to a whole new processor architecture version, being custom cores based on ARM Cortex A76, and each core has twice the L2 cache compared to the Snapdragon 845’s cores. A 7-nanometer process will help cooling and battery life, versus the 10-nanometer process used in the Snapdragon 845. The new processor’s GPU, ISP, DSP, and modem are all a bit beefier as well, and the Snapdragon 855 has the unique benefit of being one of the first chips that may be able to support many iterations of commercial 5G out of the box. The Exynos chip will carry similar benefits. Naturally, Samsung could end up surprising everybody with the final product, though it should be stated that Ice universe has a stellar track record with accurate leaks.