We may not see the Samsung Galaxy S22 launch when we expected, going by a new round of release date leaks.
Jon Prosser (backed up by fellow leaker Max Weinbach) claims that the Galaxy S22 series' launch will be "delayed" by a day. February 9 will now supposedly be the day Samsung introduces us to its flagship phone for the year, rather than February 8 as had previously been rumored by Prosser.
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The retail date however has been knocked back a whole week, to February 25. Bad news if you wanted to pick up the phone without gambling on a pre-order.
The reasoning Prosser gives for the delays is Samsung's supply chain. This perhaps explains why the pre-order date (which doesn't rely on having physical units ready at that precise moment) hasn't changed much, while the retail release date has.
Let's just hope this doesn't turn into another Samsung Galaxy S21 FE situation. That phone was likely meant to arrive in October this year, or possibly even earlier. However now it's rumored to be launching in January, having had to battle several months of production problems to get there.
A new poster leak
Delaying the Galaxy S22's launch hasn't delayed other leaks though, such as this new image of the Galaxy S22 and the S22 Ultra. This piece of official-looking promo material was published by LetsGoDigital, which claims that it has verified that the image is genuine.
The standard Galaxy S22 (on the right in white and silver), looking like a simplified version of the Samsung Galaxy S21. The camera bump still sits right in the top left corner of the phone, but it no longer overlaps the phone's side rail, and looks to be much flatter as well.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra looks very different. It has five camera sensors all embedded individually into the back, rather than together in a single block. We can also see the all-black S Pen stylus resting on top, which looks like the built-in stylus that we've been hearing the S22 Ultra would be receiving, rather than the separate accessory you could buy for the Galaxy S21 Ultra.
That S Pen focus had led some to believe that Samsung could rename the Ultra model to the Galaxy S22 Note this year. But as we can see from the poster, it seems that Samsung's sticking to the existing Ultra monicker.
We can also see the Galaxy S22 Ultra's color, a reddish-bronze color. It looks similar to the Mystic Bronze color that Samsung offered on the Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and the Galaxy Z Fold 2, but it's not quite the same. There have been rumors of a red Galaxy S22 Ultra color being an option, so perhaps this is what those rumors meant, rather than the brighter color you may have imagined.
Until February 9 then (as we covered above), we won't get an official rundown of the Galaxy S22 series' specs. Happily a bagful of leaks are already out there to help us get some idea of what to expect.
One of the big changes includes the new 6.06-inch and 6.55-inch handset sizes for the Galaxy S22 and Galaxy S22 Plus, which are notably smaller than the last couple of years' handsets. Both of these phones are also said to be getting some big camera system changes, including a 50MP main camera and a 3x optical zoom telephoto camera.
The Galaxy S22 Ultra is thought to be getting a wider, squarer body shape (another similarity with Galaxy Note phones), and the most RAM of any of the phones in the range, just like the Galaxy S21 Ultra that came before it. All three models are believed to be powered by the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset in the U.S., while most other countries could use a new Samsung-made Exynos 2200 chip.
