As the future Galaxy S23 series approaches, the vanilla Galaxy S23 is set to keep one foot in the past – it will launch with 128GB of base storage. Leaks The ice universe brings some more bad news for potential S23 buyers, apparently the 128GB version will use the older UFS 3.1 storage format.
The taller 256GB version will use the new, faster, more efficient UFS 4.0 and, at least at launch, will be available for the same price as the 128GB model. According to Ice, Samsung has not manufactured 128GB UFS 4.0 packs, only 256GB and above. Right now, only Japanese rival Kioxia seems to have UFS 4.0 in 128GB capacity, but Samsung Electronics is reluctant to use them.
UFS 4.0 can achieve sequential speeds of up to 4,200 MB/s for reading and up to 2,800 MB/s for writing
There may be a good reason for that. Flash storage connects chips in parallel to increase data transfer speeds – the more chips, the faster the storage. This means that it is often the case that the smallest storage configurations are slower than larger ones. This means that the 128GB UFS 4.0 packs may not perform at levels worthy of the “UFS 4.0” label.
Another leaker, @chunvn8888, claims that Samsung has cut back even more on the vanilla Galaxy S23. You can read our What to Expect post for more details on the specs. For starters, the little S23 will be the only one stuck to 25W charging, not much of a surprise.
But chun’s tweet paints a bleaker picture of the S23 – Wi-Fi 6E instead of Wi-Fi 7, slightly thicker bezels around the screen and a less advanced vibration motor. Not mentioned in the tweet, but it looks like the little S23 still won’t get UWB.
The latter is important if you want to use the more advanced SmartTag+ trackers with direction finding. As for Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi 7 isn’t finalized yet, so current devices that claim to support it actually only support a draft of the standard. But something similar happened with 802.11n (now called Wi-Fi 4) and it worked okay.
Samsung Galaxy S23
Even with all these cost-cutting measures, the base Samsung Galaxy S23 is expected to increase in price in Europe and India, though not in the US. All this is based on unconfirmed information, the official reveal will come on Wednesday.
