The Galaxy S20 FE – a.k.a. the Fan Edition – is an affordable take on the Korean company’s flagship phone series that’s made one immediate and obvious play to win over European fans: using the Snapdragon 865 processor.
Samsung fans in the UK and Europe can buy the 5G version of the S20 FE and get a Snapdragon-powered device – though the cheaper 4G variant will still use the much-maligned Exynos 990. By contrast, every previous S20 model uses the Exynos chip in Europe, reserving Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors for the US market.
While performance between the two chipsets is arguably comparable in day-to-day usage, the Snapdragon tends to outperform the Exynos in many benchmarks. More importantly it’s substantially more power-efficient, meaning that Galaxy phones using a Snapdragon processor often last hours longer than their Exynos equivalents.
The rest of the S20 FE’s specs are similarly impressive. 6GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, a 6.5in 120Hz AMOLED screen, and chunky 4500mAh battery make the Fan Edition pretty comparable to the standard S20 across the line.
It even comes equipped with the exact same main camera lens as the S20, though the rest of the lens differ slightly. They’re not all for the worse though: the S20 FE has a genuine 3x optical zoom lens, which while only 8Mp may deliver better zoomed in shots than the 64Mp shooter in the S20 and S20+, which is technically only at 1.1x zoom and uses digital zoom and cropping to make up the difference.
There are downsides, of course – there’d have to be, since at £599 for the 4G model and £699 for the 5G variant this is around £200 cheaper than the S20. The big one is that the phone’s colourful rear (seriously – there are six models, and none of them are black) is plastic rather than glass, but there’s also slightly less RAM, a lower-resolution display, and no option to record video at 8K. Check out our complete guide to the S20 FE for a breakdown of how it compares to the S20 and S20+.
The Galaxy S20 FE is available to pre-order from today ahead of a full launch on 2 October. Pre-orders come with your choice of a free Galaxy Fit 2 wearable or three months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate plus a MOGA XP5-X+ gamepad.
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Author: Dominic Preston, Deputy Editor
Tech Advisor's Deputy Editor, Dom covers everything that runs on electricity, from phones and laptops to wearables, audio, gaming, smart home, and streaming - plus he's a regular fixture on the Tech Advisor YouTube channel.