Samsung May Announce Galaxy S9 in February 2018

Samsung is the top Android device maker by a comfortable margin, which makes it a natural rival to Apple. The companies are constantly trying to one-up each other with their latest flagship designs, and the most recent blow was struck by Apple with the iPhone X. Despite that high starting price, the iPhone X is doing well. Samsung may be looking to slow Apple’s momentum with an earlier-than-expected unveiling of the Galaxy S9. Sources report Samsung is looking to show off the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus in February 2018.

With the Galaxy S8, Samsung introduced big design changes, completely dropping the flat OLED panel as an option for its flagship phones. Both the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus have curved displays, and the screen ratio increased in height to better use the device’s space. As a result, the iconic navigation buttons were tossed in favor of on-screen navigation. The fingerprint sensor moved to the back of the phone next to the camera module.

By all accounts, the Galaxy S9 will be less of a radical departure. The display aspect ratio is not expected to change, but it will probably be a newer-generation OLED with higher brightness and faster refresh. It’s also possible Samsung will relocate the fingerprint sensor lower on the back of the phone, which we saw in the recently unveiled 2018 Galaxy A8. The addition of a second camera on the back seems like a foregone conclusion as well. The Note 8 added a second camera with 2x telephoto zoom to the 12MP main camera. This has the added benefit of making “portrait mode” photos more reliable.

The early release could be an attempt to slow Apple’s momentum with the iPhone X.

Samsung will almost certainly be first out of the gate with a Snapdragon 845 ARM chip in the GS9, which Qualcomm just recently announced. Last year, the Galaxy S8 gobbled up Qualcomm’s entire supply of 835 chips for several months, forcing LG to launch the G6 with the previous-generation 821 SoC. The Snapdragon 845 comes with eight updated CPU cores in high-speed and high-efficiency clusters of four cores. It includes an updated GPU, DSP, and modem as well.

The February announcement is a month ahead of the Galaxy S8’s announcement last year. Samsung will reportedly begin shipping the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus a month later, which again is a month ahead of last year’s GS8 schedule. This could all happen just several weeks ahead of IFA 2018, a mobile trade show where plenty of new devices are expected to pop up.

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