Samsung Galaxy S22 range may launch in SA with Snapdragon processors

Samsung may be the number one smartphone producer in the world but its fans aren’t always happy with its products. 

Samsung fans in South Africa, Europe and Latin America have historically only been able to get their hands on devices sporting the company’s own SoC, called the Exynos chip. Many fans believe the Qualcomm Snapdragon counterpart, available in the US, is the more powerful SoC. 

If South Africans wanted to get their hands on a Snapdragon-powered Samsung device, they would have to import it. 

Samsung’s Exynos is not dead

On 11 January 2022, the company was scheduled to announce its upcoming Exynos 2200 SoCs. This would have revealed the processing units for its upcoming flagship devices. 

The announcement was canned, after which Samsung deleted a tweet that revealed the 11 January event date. This could only mean the company is facing issues with its chips behind the scenes. 

According to GSMArena, a Samsung official spoke to Business Korea and detailed that the company isn’t facing production issues. It simply pushed out the launch date to coincide with the S22 launch. 

“We are planning to unveil the new application processor at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone. There are no problems with the AP’s production and performance,” it said.

If the above comment turns out to be true, Samsung devices in certain territories (including SA) will launch with Samsung’s own Exynos 2200 SoC.

The other rumour

Shortly after the news that the company’s launch event bit the dust, leaker Ahmed Qwaider took to Twitter to announce that there won’t be any Exynos 2200 variants of the Galaxy S22 lineup. 

“The South Korean firm will reportedly sell the Galaxy S22 series across the world with just one processor: Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. This is great news for Galaxy fans in regions like Asia, Europe, and Latin America as they used to get the Exynos version of Galaxy Note and Galaxy S series smartphones,” SamMobile reports. 

While the Tweet should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt, the fairly accurate leaker Ice Universe retweeted the leak, saying “European Samsung users will be too excited to sleep tonight.”

In this case, South African Samsung fans can expect to get a hold of Snapdragon-powered devices fairly soon. The company may still announce its own chips a month or two after the devices, which means there will be some supply coming in with various chipsets.