Samsung earlier this week confirmed plans to unveil its next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S9, at an Unpacked event ahead of next month's Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona. Fortunately, we won't have to wait another month to see what the device will look like.
Serial product leaker Evan Blass on Friday published what appear to be official renders of Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. Given Blass' stellar track record, there's little reason to doubt the legitimacy of the images.
Samsung in 2017 gave its Galaxy S line a comprehensive redesign. As you can see, the South Korean electronics giant isn't straying far from that recipe with its upcoming offering. Instead, the S9 and S9+ will largely consist of internal component upgrades.
According to Blass, the new phones - codenamed Star and Star 2 - will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845 SoC in the US and China and Samsung's own Exynos 9810 chip in other markets. The standard S9 will pack 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage while the Plus model will be configured with 6GB of memory and 128GB of local storage.
The phones' biggest improvement, as Samsung highlighted in its recent teaser, will be in the photography department. Blass notes that both devices will feature a variable aperture on the primary 12-megapixel camera that switches between f/2.4 and f/1.5.
Blass previously said the new handsets would be available to pre-order on March 1 ahead of a March 16 launch.