Samsung Offers Peek at New Galaxy S6 Phones

Samsung Offers Peek at New Galaxy S6 PHONES

Details about Samsung’s new Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge smartphones were hard to come by until last weekend, when the South Korean tech giant posted the support pages for both products on overseas Web sites.

Pages for the Galaxy S6 (product number SM-G920X) and the S6 Edge (SM-G925X) were spotted on Samsung’s Finnish and Swedish Web sites, respectively, by Dutch Samsung expert site GalaxyClub.nl. TechnoBuffalo reported that Samsung filed for a trademark on Galaxy S6 in South Korea last week. The filing lists Samsung C & T Corp. as the applicant.

Reminiscent of iPhone

The support pages didn’t contain any images or product specs, but it was the first acknowledgment from Samsung that the new phones officially existed. The standard Galaxy S6 will have an aluminum unibody chassis, reminiscent of Apple’s iPhone, and the S6 Edge will copy the side edge display of the Note 4, according to the images that were leaked elsewhere last week. Because of its curved design, the Galaxy S6 Edge will probably cost considerably more than the Galaxy S6.

As for the insides of the phones, Samsung has abandoned Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips for most of its phones, so the S6 models will be powered by Samsung's own 64-bit Exynos chipset, augmented by 3 GB RAM, a 20-megapixel camera, up to 128 GB of storage and a 2K display expected to be about 5 inches.

Samsung’s TouchWiz Android skin will again be used, but in a scaled-down, modular version that will let users remove elements they don’t need or want. Each of the handsets is said to come with a 5-megapixel front-facing camera and a 20-megapixel rear camera, although some reports are saying that the S6 Edge may feature a 16-megapixel camera. Both devices are expected to run the Android 5.0 Lollipop operating system. The devices will have non-swipe fingerprint scanners to facilitate Samsung’s upcoming Samsung Pay payment system.

Debut Coming Soon

Other reports have disclosed that Samsung is mass-producing embedded package-on-package (ePoP) memory modules that presumably will go with the new phones. The use of ePoP, which stacks the RAM and NAND storage on top of a device’s processor, could potentially allow for greater battery capacity in the Galaxy S6 as well as Samsung phones released in the future.

Both the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in the first week of March. Samsung is under pressure because, among other reasons, its previous smartphone, the S5, underperformed in the marketplace.

Samsung might be priming the market for the S6 with a new giveaway. It announced Friday that anyone who buys a Samsung Galaxy smartphone on an AT&T Next plan is eligible to receive a free Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 8.0 tablet. However, users will have to add a wireless plan to the tablet, starting at $15 per month.