Samsung has already confirmed that it won’t be unveiling its Galaxy S flagship smartphone at next month’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona as has become the norm in the last few years. While the company has yet to reveal what it will be up to when the world’s largest trade show dedicated to showcasing the latest in mobile telephony kicks off in late February, we probably have a rough idea.
Reports from the company’s home, Korea, indicate that it may have finally gotten around to releasing a premium tablet for the first time in nearly one and a half years.
The company’s last high-end tablet, the Galaxy Tab S2, was released way back in early September 2015 at another trade show, Berlin’s IFA, before being given a little sprucing up in the form of a 2016 edition last year. Its successor, tipped to be going by the name Galaxy Tab S3, is rumoured to be unveiled at MWC.
If that happens then Samsung will have kept its trend of unveiling a flagship device at MWC even though this will just be a tablet and not its famed shiny Galaxy smartphones. Still, it is likely to provide a window into whatever Samsung has been working on to improve the software installed on its mobile devices which we would expect to see when the Galaxy S8 drops the following month.
The Galaxy Tab S3 is tipped to pack a 9.6-inch display, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 processor (not the latest and the greatest, though), 4GB RAM, Android 7.0 Nougat, a 12-megapixel shooter at the back backed by a 5-megapixel selfie snapper on the front and be available in both cellular network and Wi-Fi only models.
A late February unveiling means that the device, rumoured to cost not less than an equivalent of $600, will hit the market some time in March providing the perfect escape route from all the attention that Samsung’s eagerly anticipated Galaxy S8 will be garnering not long after when it launches a few days later and hits the market the following month.
There has been no shortage of purported Galaxy Tab S3 sightings and missed release schedules. As far back as June last year, talk of the device was rife in the usual corners of the internet where people obsess over devices and pieces of silicon for hours on end (like here on this site). Back then, the device was tipped for an IFA 2016 unveiling in Berlin in keeping with the early September launch timeline of its predecessor. That was never to be as Samsung was said to have pushed forward its release to this year, specifically the first quarter. Here’s to hoping the tablet is actually worth the long wait Samsung has subjected us to.
