While the Galaxy Z Fold 5, Galaxy Z Flip 5, Galaxy Watch 6 and Galaxy Tab S9 all seem nailed-on certainties to appear at this month’s Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event, one phone is less of a sure thing.
Despite there being no S22 FE, the Samsung Galaxy S23 FE has been tipped to debut between August and September time, which may make it a dark horse bet for the show (if Samsung doesn’t just push it out via press release, of course).
While previous rumors suggested that the handset would be stuck with the Exynos 2200 chipset in every region, a version of the phone sporting a Qualcomm chipset has popped up on the Geekbench browser.
The handset in question is labeled SM-S711U1 and is likely for the U.S., while the Exynos 2200-powered one (SM-S711B) is probably destined for the rest of the world. Both have corresponding placeholder support pages on the Samsung website.
The first model is listed as having the “taro” motherboard, which means it’s the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. The other one, meanwhile, has a chip codenamed s5e9925 — the Exynos 2200. Both come with 8GB RAM.
Neither of those chips is the latest and greatest, with the Samsung Galaxy S23 getting the follow-up Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in every region. Instead, it seems that the S23 FE will be more of a match for 2022’s Galaxy S22. Like Apple, it looks like Samsung is reserving the latest chips for its flagships.
But that still doesn’t make either flavor of the S23 FE sluggish, with scores of 1,549/1,613 in Geekbench’s single-core test, and 3,718/4,049 in its multi-core one. Indeed, both come with higher scores than the Geekbench average for the S22, though the Exynos 2200 version has the edge in both single and multi-core scores suggesting some optimization in the 18 months since it originally launched.
Even so, it’s still some way behind the Samsung Galaxy S23’s average (1,843 single-core, 4,857 multi-core), meaning that the S23 FE will still need to be competitively priced to make it worth getting one ahead of a now below-MSRP Galaxy S23. And that potentially puts it in an awkward place, when, at the budget end of the market, Samsung’s Galaxy A54 presents such super value for just $449.
