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Galaxy S21 FE to launch on this day in October

By Doroteya Borisova

Published: Sep 01, 2021, 11:42 PM

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Galaxy S21 FE to launch on this day in October

For the last while, it certainly seemed like we'd be forced to wait a few more months to see the Galaxy S21 FE in the market. We thought it may launch closer to the January 2022 release of Samsung's next line of flagships, the Samsung Galaxy S22 series.

This was mostly due to the continuously dire case of a global chip shortage, which has already forced Samsung to lower the S21 FE's initial production target by three million units.

The Samsung Galaxy S21 FE may be released on October 29

However, according to the most recent leak, it appears we might well see the Galaxy S21 FE released into the world as soon as October.

The well-known tipster, Jon Prosser, claims he received information from insider sources affirming that the official launch date is set for October 29, while Samsung (and participating retailers) will begin taking pre-orders just over a week earlier, on Wednesday, October 20.

This actually makes quite a bit of sense, as long as the chip shortage situation isn't too dire, as the "fan edition" phone's predecessor, the Galaxy S20 FE, also arrived in October last year.

It has also been widely rumored for a while that the date of the phone's unveiling will be on September 8, which is in less than a week. Interestingly, Prosser claims that this has not been corroborated by his apparently irrefutable sources, while the new October pre-order and launch dates can be considered more solid.

The S21 FE will be refreshingly different from the S20 FE (in some ways)

Also read: S21 FE specs

Samsung's upcoming release is said to come in four colors in the US: White, Graphite, Lavender, and Olive Green. The storage options are looking like 128GB and 256GB, and we expect the S21 FE will retail for around $649–$749 (this is based on its already leaked price in Korean won).

Unlike its predecessor, this year's Galaxy S21 FE won't ship with a charger; and keeping up with the times, it also won't feature an SD card slot this time around—limiting storage to either the on-device capacity, or whichever cloud storage service you're paying for. There won't be a headphone jack, either, which means you have to own a pair of Bluetooth wireless headphones.

Four months ago, a Geekbench database listing popped up, revealing an entry for none other than the Snapdragon 888, the latest and greatest of Qualcomm's chipsets (appearing under the code name "lahaina," given to the SoC by Qualcomm). The leaked Geekbench test results, by the way, were nothing to write home about; a slight jump up from the S20 FE.

A more recent Geekbench listing, however, points to an Exynos 2100 as also powering a variant of the new handset—and the test bench results showed similar performance between the Qualcomm and Exynos chipset, so we shouldn't be too worried.

Like the S20 FE, this year's Galaxy Fan Edition will feature a high-tier version with 8 Gigabytes of RAM, which is plenty sufficient for any multitasking or gaming you may plan to do on it. Unfortunately, if this top version is the one powered by the Exynos SoC, we likely won't be seeing it on the US market.

So far, only a 6GB version has been leaked for the United States, so that one will almost certainly be carrying the Snapdragon chip.

The display (leaked by a Google Play Console listing) is an FHD+ six-incher, rocking a smooth 120Hz refresh rate, which is becoming industry standard for high-tier phones. A variable refresh rate is questionable for this model, though.

The S21 FE's triple-camera system will feature a 32MP main camera, a 12MP ultrawide camera and an 8MP telephoto camera as well. The front punch-hole style camera will have 12 megapixels, on the other hand.