Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Galaxy S20 Fan Edition: Hear Me Out!”.
Hey, what’s up mkbhd here, okay, hear me out flagship phones, getting much better and also much more expensive has made the overall landscape of phones much more interesting! Stick with me here. So there was a time not very long ago, maybe like eight years ago, where smartphone prices used to max out at like 550, that was the highest it got. So these are phones like the droid x, and the galaxy nexus coming out. All in their day were amazing flagships, but basically there were only two kinds of phones back then flagships or not flagships, but as we’ve all seen, the prices of these flagship phones have not so slowly crept up.
Since then, the google play edition m7. One of my favorite phones 599 rip google play edition. Then in 2014 the galaxy s5 launched for 6.49 and the iphone 6 plus launched at 7 49 and by 2017 we had the iphone 10 launching for a thousand bucks and raising plenty of eyebrows. So now fast forward to 2020 and a bleeding edge, folding smartphone will run you anywhere from 1500 to 2 000, and so we also just got the announcement here of the galaxy s20 fan edition and at first at least for me, it was kind of confusing to Try to answer the question like what is a fan edition like we saw. We did the note 7 fan edition back in the day when the note 7 had its battery issues. But what is a fan edition? Who is it just for fans for only fan? Only fans, but the phone itself has got a snapdragon 865 just about the highest end. Chip available short of the 865 plus there’s a nice big bright.
Six and a half inch 120 hertz display, but it’s a 1080p panel and you can tell it’s not their highest end and typically, i wouldn’t call out bezels that are this thin already, but hey there’s a little bit of bezel here and it is a flat display Which i actually like and you’re, also looking at a 4500 milliamp hour battery with wireless and reverse wireless charging, triple cameras at 12, 12 and 8 megapixels, a 32 megapixel selfie camera and their smallest hole, punch cutout ever an ip68 water resistant rating and a plastic back. So metal side rails and the whole rear is plastic in one of any of these six colors it comes in so this one’s blue. It looks even darker in person actually than it does in the official images but yeah. So it’s a what is it it’s a? It’S trimmed down galaxy s20, basically with a better battery life and a better selfie camera cut out, but also worse cameras.
I don’t it’s hard to say exactly what the fan edition is, but then the 699 price tag ultimately solidified it. For me see the fan edition. Doesn’T really have a theme, yet matter of fact. You can probably make the argument that the biggest fans are actually the least likely to buy this fan edition.
But really the fan edition is another variant of a phone samsung can offer at another competitive price, because that’s what they do just because they can samsung right now offers a phone at basically every significant price from super budget all the way up to the highest and Bleeding edge, folding phones and everything in between and we’ve known that this is samsung’s strategy for a long time to just throw as many options at you as they can to see what sticks, but seeing it actually laid out in front of you is something different. If you actually go to samsung.com right now and sort their smartphones by price from low to high of all the phones, they’ll sell you right now. They’Ll offer you a phone at 99, 129, 199, 225, 325, 350, 425, 475, 499, 599, 650, 699, 750, 799, 850, 950. 1000, 1050.
1200. 1980. 32.99, and there is much much more i didn’t even show. So that is a lot of phones at a lot of different prices, and we’ve known like i said that this has always been samsung’s thing, but back when phones maxed out at 600. Bucks there was just a lot less variety of different things. You could do with a smartphone to offer different people different things.
So my original point is now that the ceiling of smartphone tech has gotten so much higher and so much better. Yes, of course, naturally, the prices of the flagships has gone up over time, but now there’s also way more variety and way more difference between all these different middle smartphone prices than ever before. It’S the birth of, and this flourishing of this awesome mid-range price tier of great phones that take all the stuff from the high end and bring it down, and so the fan edition isn’t just for fans it’s for anybody. Looking for yet another different phone that offers a compelling set of boxes, checked at 6.99. So that’s one thing and then also samsung revealed another thing really interesting in their briefing, which was sales volume.
Now we didn’t get exact numbers or anything, of course, but i found it really interesting. They mentioned that the galaxy s20 ultra, the flagship, was the most popular phone in the s20 lineup for the first month of sales, the one that made all the headlines the one that all these early adopters and enthusiasts bought on week, one that was the most popular. But then, over time the volume buyers caught up and way past it to the point where the ultra is the least popular phone in the s20 lineup now and the cheaper ones. The s20 and s20 plus are in the hands of way more people. So the curve for which phones people buy at which prices starts off, looking like this and then quickly starts to shift to this way up. There are way more buyers and purchases and actual volume and sales at this lower to mid-range price than the high-end.
Even though we spend all of our attention on the high-end flagship stuff, so naturally for these smartphone companies, there’s a lot of focus and a lot of attention being put into this mid-range price phone. Where there’s a lot of customers and being able to offer them a bunch of different things, including really unique, sets of boxes checked in phones like this, when also a lot of us enthusiasts are paying careful attention to what they’re doing on the bleeding edge on their Highest dense stuff, and if you think about it, that’s why we use the word flagship right. It comes from the ship in the group of boats that has the flag on it: the first one, the biggest the most heavily armed, the most important one, the one to pay the most attention to that’s only partially true, but we’ll just go with it, and that Goes for all smartphone companies by the way, not just samsung, so the cheaper iphones outsell, the thousand dollar iphones, regularly uh the oneplus nord put them back on a map in a way that none of their flagships ever really could have for the regular person and xiaomi And huawei’s dominance comes mainly from their lower and middle tier price phones more than their thousand dollar ones. So it’s it’s a well-known trend so anyway yeah that’s just the thought i wanted to get out there. I’Ve mentioned it for sure on the waveform podcast, but never really articulated it in video form.
So there it is, but hey in case you’re wondering this s20 fan edition is a surprisingly good phone. I mean, i guess i shouldn’t be surprised. You know there’s plenty of other good phones at this price, but hey after just a few days of using it. I really do like this balance, especially of a big flat 120 hertz, oled display and plenty of high-end parts to pair with it.
If you think about it, a lot of samsung’s other 120 hertz oleds are either curved over the edges or folding in half. So i have enjoyed this display for everything from everyday use to gaming, to watching videos and, of course, with the high refresh rate it kept feeling fast, along with the qualcomm chip that actually ships with the 5g version in every region. So, no matter where you are, if you get the 749 5g version of this s20 fan edition, you actually get a snapdragon 865, no exynos anywhere.
So that’s pretty sweet. Now the triple camera system is cut back a bit from the rest of the s20 series. But i honestly don’t find it lacking that much for most everyday use, even in low light, it hasn’t suffered as much as some thought it might, and even though it doesn’t have space zoom past 30x.
It also doesn’t have the autofocus issues of the huge sensor in the ultra, but there are some video limitations as well. The plastic back here might get the most negative attention. Just because yes, plastic does have a bad reputation with thousand dollar flagship phones, but for this 6.99 phone i think it actually works pretty well here again, it’s less likely to shatter when it’s dropped. My biggest complaint with this plastic is the finish on it. It just doesn’t feel as high quality, and it shows fingerprints a bit more than usual. I’Ve seen some others that hide them way better, but hey most people put a case on their phone anyway, as i keep getting reminded so yeah plastic to get the price down turns out to be a good call here.
This phone is a good buy for a lot of people. Really it’s got that great screen. It’S got great battery life on this phone for sure performance, fine, cameras, fine, and then it’s got the three years of promised software updates or three generations of promise.
Software updates also that samsung’s saying we’re gon na get so many have sort of pegged this as the iphone 11 competitor, because naturally, it’s launching at the same price that the iphone 11 launched at and still sells at to this day. But of course we all know the new iphones are like a month away, so we should probably stick to comparing it to those when they come out, but also, i think it’s interesting, because pixel 5’s rumored launch price also happens to be exactly 6.99, which would be Really interesting to see that’s also yet to be seen sometime in october, but generally there’s a lot of action now at this price. So that’s all for now. Now you know a little more about this phone and where it comes from and i’m actually curious, i want to know from you, people who watch these videos, people who actually leave comments on these types of videos. What type of phone do you use right now? Is it a flagship or a non-flagship? Did you pay flagship money or not for your phone? I’M curious.
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