If you heard the words Fan Edition, chances are you’d expect something extraordinary. Perhaps a limited edition design or a feature that takes a product to a level that only true fans can appreciate. This is not the case with the deluge of hardware Samsung just announced: the Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Tab S9 FE, and Galaxy Buds FE.
These are all slightly cheaper versions of their top-tier counterparts that Samsung announced throughout the year. They’re not attention-grabbing, and they have lesser specs, but they cover the middle ground for buyers who don’t want to spend the big bucks on the company’s flagship hardware and don’t want to settle for the budget devices. Truly, they’re for Samsung loyalists—there might be better devices for the money, but there’s no way you’d shell out on the competition, right?
Galaxy S23 FE
Photograph: Samsung
The Fan Edition of the Galaxy S23 has many of the features of its pricier sibling, such as an IP68 water resistance rating, which means it can survive dips in the pool. There’s 5G support, wireless charging, and 128 GB of storage. However, the cuts have to come somewhere, and the most notable place is the body: The back of the phone is plastic instead of luxe glass.
The S23 FE is slightly larger than the base Galaxy S23, with a 6.4-inch full HD AMOLED screen and a 120-Hz screen refresh rate. It’s powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the flagship chipset from 2022—it should be able to handle most apps and games with no trouble. It runs Android 13 and will get four Android OS upgrades and five years of security updates.
You still get a triple-camera system on the back with a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and an 8-megapixel telephoto. However, don’t expect the results to be the same caliber as the photos you get from Samsung’s flagships. There’s a 4,500-mAh battery capacity, which is slightly less than the battery in the larger Galaxy S23+, so it’ll likely last a little more than a day on a single charge.
The Fan Edition S23 comes in mint, purple, cream, and graphite, and will cost $600. There are no preorders, but it’ll go on sale on October 26.
Galaxy Tab S9 FE
Photograph: Samsung
Samsung has a hard time announcing just one tablet at a time. Instead, the company is giving us three new tablets in the Tab S9 FE line. The three slates match the three flagship Tab S9 series tablets perfectly, with totally no opportunity for confusion for the average consumer. There’s the Tab S9 FE, Tab S9 FE Plus, and Tab S9 FE 5G. As you can guess, the latter is the only one of the lot with a cellular connectivity option. It otherwise shares the same specs as the Tab S9 FE.
