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LEAKED: Samsung's iPhone 6 killer... the Samsung Galaxy S6

If leaks are real, Apple is in trouble

Newly leaked specifications for the Samsung Galaxy S6 show the South Korean company taking the fight back to Apple. The expected flagship is expected to debut a year after we saw the S5 at Mobile World Congress.

The “64-bit eight-core 14nm CPU which is 50% faster” could be the rumoured Snapdragon 820, but that’s likely to be further off than this year and would be more than 50 per cent faster than the 801 in the S5.

It could be the 810 as seen in the Galaxy Note 4, but that’s on a 20nm process, not 14nm.

Bloomberg has reported that it won’t be a Qualcomm chip at all. This would be a major blow for Qualcomm. The most likely candidate is an Exynos. That would fit with the radio side. The leaks, which come from phone fan site BGR, claim it is CAT-6 (300Mbps) and the Snapdragon 820 is CAT-10 (452Mbps).

Samsung hasn’t given up on mobile payments. NFC might have spent more than a decade “coming soon”, so the S6 is rumoured to support quaint magnetic stripes. The S6 is believed to have a vivid 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display with a 577ppi dot pitch (iPhone 6 is 326ppi and 6 Plus is 401ppi). The camera specs meet the Sony Xperia Z3 compact with 20 mega pixels and ups the ante by having optical image stabilisation to put it on a par with the Nokia 930. The selfie camera is 5 megapixel f/1.8. Samsung has used the Apical software in phones before, so that’s to be expected. The reports say the phone will support 128GB of removable storage and have a 2550mAh battery.

Wireless charging is great (wake up Apple) so it’s no surprise to find it here, but it is slow. There is also believed to be a mode which gives a four hours of usage on a 10-minute charge.

BGR claims to have pictures it can’t show, but from the description it owes more to the Galaxy Alpha than the S5.

Samsung will need the S6 to be a hit; the company has re-organised its business around fewer phones with more sales expected from each one. It is coming under increasing pressure from local brands, notably Xiaomi in China, but many regions are patriotic in their support for local brands. ®

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