Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition
We’d been hearing rumors of a Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition for a while, and now it’s official, with Samsung holding a dedicated launch event for the new phone. This is likely to be the last of the company’s ‘20’ phones after the S20 and Note 20, as it won’t be long until the Galaxy S21 / S30 is here.
The Galaxy S20 FE, as Samsung seems to be styling it, is effectively a ‘lite’ version of the Galaxy S20 launched in February, with a similar design and specs but corners cut here and there. It’s also a Galaxy S10 successor in some respects – at least, that’s the impression we got from Samsung, who used that phone as a point of comparison more than any other when briefing us on the S20 FE.
We’d imagine the Samsung Galaxy S20 FE will be an exciting prospect for people on a budget who tend to buy older handsets from the company rather than newer ones. It’s a little more affordable than the company’s other phones of 2020, and while it doesn’t scream ‘flagship’ it has lots of top-end specs, and if you opt for the 5G variant you're future-proofed with the latest connectivity tech.
But, as we’ve said, corners have been cut, and while this phone might sway some people who were considering the Galaxy S20, there will be others who should still look to Samsung’s flagship line.
Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition price and availability
The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition comes in 4G and 5G variants, and there are two key differences between the two, other than connectivity: one is the chipset they use, and the other is price.
The 4G version of the Galaxy S20 FE costs £599 in the UK and AU$999 in Australia, with the price rising to £699 / $1,149 for the 5G model. Only the 5G phone is available in the US, priced at $699.
For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S20 5G cost $999 / £899 / AU$1,499 at launch, so it was a good bit pricier. The cost of that phone has gone down a little over time though – you can see the current best prices for that phone below, to help you decide if the S20 FE represents a good deal.
While the Galaxy S20 FE is cheaper than its bigger sibling, in markets like Europe and Australia there are a plethora of phones on the market that bring 5G, and similar specs to the FE, to lower price points, so in those regions the phone doesn’t appear to offer such good value.
Design and display
The most popular feature of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition could turn out to be the choice of colors it comes in – you can choose from six vibrant colors to pick up the phone in, and there isn’t a black or dark gray option to be seen. Those colors are navy blue, bright red, white, pale orange, pale pink and mint green – so there should be something for just about everyone.
The first thing we noticed when picking the S20 FE up is that it’s pretty lightweight – in fact, at 190g it felt pretty close to weightless. This is likely due in part to the build material – while the phone has a metal frame, the back is Samsung’s ‘glasstic’ or glass-plastic, which we also saw in the Galaxy Note 20. As a result, the phone looks like it’s made of premium glass, but feels like it’s made of plastic – and we found that it felt a little cheap.
There’s a textured effect on the back that’s designed to repel fingerprints, and it seems pretty effective – the rear of the device remained clean and smooth while we were testing it.
As well as the 'glasstic' body, another thing that may prove divisive is that, unlike the other Galaxy S20 phones, the Galaxy S20 FE’s display doesn’t curve at the edges. The body has a fairly rounded frame, so the phone feels pretty comfortable in the hand, but not as much as if the display had that soft taper.
Overall, this is your average ‘chocolate-bar’ smartphone. There’s a rectangular camera array on the rear of the phone at the top-left, and it looks a lot like the one on the Galaxy S20. The power button and volume rocker are on the right edge, and there’s a USB-C port on the bottom of the phone, but no 3.5mm headphone jack. The handset is IP68 protected, which means it's dustproof and waterproof up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes
On the front, the selfie camera lens is housed in an impressively small ‘punch-hole’ cut-out in the top-centre of the display – its miniscule size means we don’t imagine it’ll intrude too much on your viewing experience. There’s a noticeable bezel around the screen, but it’s not too thick – you’d notice it if you put the S20 FE next to one of the flagship S20 devices, but if you’re upgrading from an older Galaxy S phone or a Galaxy A model, you won’t mind at all.
The display is a 6.5-inch FHD+ screen, so it sits between the screens on the Galaxy S20 and S20 Plus in terms of size, but it doesn’t match their higher WQHD+ resolution. It uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED X2 screen tech – that’s mostly marketing jargon, but essentially it means the colors are punchy and bold.
The Galaxy S20 FE has a 120Hz display, which means the screen refreshes 120 times per second, which means motion looks really smooth. The other Galaxy S20 phones have this, but the tech is rarely seen in non-premium phones, and even many top-end devices still only have 90Hz displays, so the FE is one of the few phones offering this feature at a lower price point.
It’s worth pointing out that the Samsung Galaxy S20 phones only let you enable either 120Hz or WQHD+ at the same time, not both simultaneously, so if you wanted to use 120Hz you had to downgrade the screen resolution to FHD+. So if you prioritize a fast refresh rate over resolution, you can effectively enjoy the same screen performance on the S20 SE as on its premium siblings.
Camera
The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition has three rear cameras: 12MP f/1.8 main, 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide and 8MP f/2.4 telephoto.
While on paper those specs might seem inferior to those of the Galaxy S20 phones, due to the lack of a high-res sensor on the telephoto snapper, we didn’t really find the FE's camera chops demonstrably worse. The main camera has a larger sensor than in the Galaxy S10, so presumably the camera will perform well in low-light settings, although we haven’t had a chance to test it in such conditions.
The colors in our test shots looked bright and punchy. The quality of images may be down to the post-processing as much as the hardware – phones from Samsung typically have great image optimization, and that looks to be the case with the S20 FE. Autofocus was snappy and accurate too, which is something Samsung phones have had problems with in the past.
The telephoto camera supports 3x optical and 30x digital zoom. When you zoom in you can see a little preview of the wider image you’re zoomed in on, letting you easily adjust if you zoomed in on the wrong place. We found this mode pretty useful.
The selfie camera here is 32MP f/2.2. That might seem very high-res for selfies, but it actually has a wider-angle lens than most selfie cameras. This lets you take group selfies at 32MP, but ‘standard’ pictures just of you will be cropped, and lower-resolution.
The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition features some of the useful photography modes which debuted with the S20 range, including Single Take, which takes pictures from all three cameras and picks out the best, and an improved Night Mode that uses the large main camera sensor.
Specs and performance
The 4G Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition has an Exynos 990 chipset, while the 5G version gets the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. Typically Samsung phones have the Exynos processor in Europe and China, and the Snapdragon equivalent elsewhere, so the 5G version presents one of the few opportunities for European buyers to get a Samsung phone with a Qualcomm processor.
Both chipsets are top-end, so they should return superb benchmark results. They’re paired with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, which is expandable up to 1TB.
The phone runs Android 10, not the newest version Android 11, although no phones have been released running that software yet. Samsung’s OneUI is laid over the top, which changes the look of app icons and other design elements, and like other ‘forked’ versions of Android, which you prefer is a matter of personal taste.
The S20 Fan Edition has a 4,500mAh battery, which is a fairly typical size for a phone, and we’d expect the device will last at least a day between charges; we’ll be thoroughly testing battery performance as part of our full review process.
The handset supports 25W wired charging, which isn’t the fastest speed out there, but is snappy enough. There’s also 15W wireless powering and Bilateral Charging, aka reverse charging, which lets you use the handset as a wireless charging pad to power up other devices. You don’t get that feature in many devices at this price point, and this is one of the most affordable handsets we’ve seen touting it.
Early verdict
Our first impressions of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition are fairly positive: we like the various vibrant colors of the phone, and we appreciate how light it feels given many phones released nowadays are pretty heavy.
We can't shake the feeling that the handset is a little pricey though – it's hard to view a $699 / £699 / $1,149 phone (for the 5G version) as 'lite' in any way, and given the many other affordable 5G and similarly-specced phones on the market, the Galaxy S20 FE has some steep competition.
Still, Samsung fans might find the S20 FE an enticing alternative to top-end phones from the company, and that's really who this phone is for - as evidenced by the name. If you've got an older Samsung handset and are looking to upgrade, this could be a great option.
We’ll need to put the phone through our full review process before we can deliver a definitive verdict, though, so check back for that soon.
- These are the best Samsung phones
Comments
Post a Comment