Samsung's New Budget Rugged Phone Could Keep The Much-Loved Removable Battery
The past few years have seen Samsung announce several enterprise-ready, rugged smartphones under its XCover lineup. Apart from being built to take some serious punishment, handsets like the Galaxy XCover 4, XCover 4s, and the XCover 5 also happened to score high on affordability. Back in 2020, Samsung launched a better equipped, relatively feature-packed rugged smartphone called the Galaxy XCover Pro. Two years on, it looks like the company is finally readying a successor to this model.
Popular leaker Steve Hemmerstoffer (@Onleaks) – in collaboration with Zoutons – today shared the first-ever renders of a new smartphone believed to be called the Samsung Galaxy XCover Pro 2. As evident from its name, this phone will replace the now aging 'original' Xcover Pro that was launched back in January 2020. The 2022 edition of the Galaxy XCover Pro is likely to have several upgrades over the outgoing model, some of which have already been detailed in leaks. For a start, it's expected to retain some trademark Galaxy XCover features like MIL-STD-810G compliant ruggedness, and the convenience of a removable battery.
What we know so far
The images shared reveal several design changes to the XCover Pro 2, compared to its predecessor. The newer variant of the phone is noticeably larger, and most of this comes from the upgraded display that sees a noticeable increase in size. Compared to the 6.3-inch IPS LCD panel that the 2020 phone used, Samsung will likely turn to a far larger 6.56-inch panel on the XCover Pro 2. It's unclear at this stage if the 2022 edition of the phone will see an AMOLED upgrade.
Another key design change this time around is Samsung's decision to use a V-shaped notch to house the front-facing camera, instead of the hole-punch camera used on the XCover Pro. A quick glance at the rear panel also reveals some subtle changes. While Samsung is likely to continue using a dual-camera setup on the XCover Pro 2, with a vertical camera layout, the position of the LED flash has been moved slightly.
While the 2020 edition of the phone used Samsung's Exynos 9611 chipset, the XCover Pro 2 is rumored to come powered by the brand new Exynos 1280 SoC — the same chip used on the Galaxy A53. There's no word as yet about possible RAM and storage variants, but the older phone came with 4G RAM and 64GB of storage along with the option to add microSD cards. We'd expect things to remain largely similar this time around. That being said, we'd not argue if Samsung decided to splash out on at least 128GB of storage, even on the base variant. It also seems likely that the Galaxy XCover Pro 2 will support 5G, something Samsung has been consistently rolling out across its handsets in the past 18 months or so.
There's no word as yet about the possible camera specifications of this phone, but it hardly seems a stretch to assume that it will have better photography talents compared to those of the Galaxy XCover Pro 2. The expectation is that this new, affordable Android 12 device will make it to the market by summer 2022, giving plenty of time for Samsung to make all the details official.