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CES, in general, isn’t much of a phone show. That certainly applies to Samsung, which tends to save its big mobile news for Mobile World Congress, a month or two from now. Instead, the event is more about big things: TVs, washing machines, etc.
Over the past few years, however, the electronics giant has used the show as a platform for launching its budget flagship — again, just ahead of the launch of its…flagship-flagship S series. Over the years, Samsung has toyed around with various names for the product, including the “Lite,” before settling on “FE” — short for “Fan Edition.” Seems last year’s device was a big success for the company. It notes, “Since its launch in Q4 2020, Galaxy S20 FE sold 10 million units in just over a year, making it one of Samsung’s best-selling Galaxy smartphones over the past year.
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Image Credits: Samsung
Ultimately, the company no doubt landed on the notion that naming a device “Lite” was really leading with the fact that the product was “less than,” from a spec standpoint. So it’s positioning these devices as a kind of fan service — offering some of the luxuries of the higher-priced devices, while dulling some of the bleeding edges in the name of keeping costs down.
For the newly announced Galaxy S21 FE 5G, that’s a starting price of $699 (roughly one dollar per letter of the product’s name). That’s the same price point the company hit with last year’s S20 — and $100 more than Google’s Pixel 6, which has catapulted to the top of the list of affordable flagships (apologies if the flagship and budget distinctions get sort of nebulous here).
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Image Credits: Samsung
“We saw an incredible response to the Galaxy S20 FE and Galaxy S21 lineup,” says Samsung’s TM Roh in a release. “So we applied the same approach with S21 FE 5G, equipping it with the premium features that matter most to our loyal Galaxy fans — because we’re focused on delivering a smartphone that meets their most important needs.”
The handset sports a 6.4-inch display with a 120Hz refresh rate, powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 processor, as its successor, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, is starting rollout on flagships from companies like Xiaomi. There’s a triple camera system with a 12-megapixel main, 32-megapixel ultrawide and 12-megapixel telephoto. The system comes with either 6 or 8GB of RAM and 128 or 256GB of storage, along with a solid 4,500mAh battery. And, of course, as the name implies, there’s 5G on-board.
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Image Credits: Samsung
The design borrows plenty of cues from the standard S21, though the premium build has been swapped out for a lower-cost plastic construction. The S21 FE starts shipping January 11.