Samsung is finally taking the covers off of its most-awaited smartphone series, the Galaxy S10. The series is celebrating its 10 year anniversary, and what better way to celebrate it than to introduce a bunch of new features to it, including an improved AMOLED display and in-display fingerprint readers.
The South-Korean conglomerate is launching not 2, but 4 different models in the series. Going from the bottom to top, we have:
There’s a lot to unpack here so without further ado, let’s take a look at what Samsung has brought to the table for 2019.
The phones share a lot of design features, with the highlight being the Dynamic AMOLED display, successor to the Super AMOLED panels that Samsung traditionally uses. These are also the first phones to come with HDR10+ (up from HDR10).
All of them have a glass sandwich design, with IP 68 water resistance, stereo speakers tuned with AKG with Dolby Atmos support, and a headphone jack.
Starting off with the S10e, Samsung has opted for a flat screen, the first one since the S7. It features a 5.8″, 19:9 aspect ratio, Infinity-O FullHD+ display, with a side-mounted fingerprint reader. No in-display reader for this one.
Next is the vanilla S10, with a curved 6.1″ display at QHD+ resolution. There’s a camera hole at the top right corner which houses a single camera unit and there’s also an ultra-sonic fingerprint reader on the display near the bottom edge of the phone.
Moving into the large phone territory, there’s the S10 Plus with a 6.4″ 1440p+ display. It has dual front cameras housed on the top right edge of the display, with a similar ultra-sonic fingerprint reader as the S10.
Finally, there’s a humongous 6.7″ 1440p+ display on the S10 5G model, also with dual front cameras on the display and an in-display fingerprint scanner.
Powering the S10 phones will be a Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 or Samsung’s own Exynos 9820 chipset (depending on the region). Thankfully all the S10 phones are getting these chips, so you won’t be losing performance on any model you go with.
RAM and storage options for the phones are as follows, note that all phones have a microSD card slot aside from the 5G model:
The S10 series runs on Android 9.0 Pie with Samsung’s new One UI, which features improved one-handed navigation, rounded UI elements and new icons (on the S10 series only).
The S10 series has dual/triple camera setups on the back and dual cameras on the front for the S10 Plus and S10 5G.
Starting with the S10e, Samsung has outfitted the phone with a dual 12+16 MP setup with a regular and ultra-wide angle (123 degrees) sensor.
The main 12MP sensor has Dual Pixel autofocus and OIS with dual apertures (f/1.5 and f/2.4). The wide-angle camera has no autofocus and is only there for the wide-angle shots.
It has a single 10MP sensor on the front, capable of 4K video.
Next is the regular S10, which has a similar front camera setup. On the back, the S10 gets an additional 12MP telephoto lens with OIS and phase detection autofocus, with the same main and wide-angle camera as the S10e.
For the S10 Plus, Samsung added dual 10+8 MP cameras on the front for bokeh effect. The rear cameras are the same as the regular S10.
The Galaxy S10 5G gets an additional 3D time of flight (ToF) camera on the back (the rest of the cameras are the same as the S10 and S10 Plus) which enables the phone to capture 3D images and Video Live focus.
We’ll explain what it does in a separate article later on.
The battery capacity has been generally improved across the series. Here’s how they stack up:
For fast charging, Samsung has added support for up to 15W for three of the phones, which is kinda slow if you compare it to the likes of Xiaomi (27W on Mi 9) and Oppo (50W with SuperVOOC).
The 5G model, on the other hand, will have SuperFast Charging, going up to 25W.
There’s also fast wireless charging (15W), and a little something called Wireless Powershare, which allows the S10 phones to charge other devices wirelessly. This is the same feature that was introduced by Huawei on their Mate 20-series phones.
The prices are pretty much the same as what was leaked before, here’s what the S10 series will cost:
These phones (minus the 5G model) can be pre-ordered in other countries from today. They will be available in select markets on March 8th. You will be able to get the Galaxy Buds (worth $130) with the S10 phones in select markets as well.
The Galaxy Buds (Bluetooth earbuds) are Samsung’s version of the Apple Airpods.