Samsung appears to be developing a new Fan Edition tablet for 2023 in addition to the Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablet line. In fact, this year, Samsung appears to be working on two Fan Edition tablets. Additionally, they were both seen wearing the same Exynos chip in an online benchmark.
First, the online benchmark Geekbench revealed the existence of an unannounced Samsung tablet with the model number SM-X516B. The Galaxy Tab S9 FE is thought to be the device. Then, however, another tablet, the SM-X616B, was found by our colleagues at GalaxyClub, which strongly suggests that Samsung may release at least two Fan Edition tablets this year.
It makes sense to assume that the recently discovered model numbers SM-X516B and SM-X616B are less potent variations of the flagship tablets given that the high-end Galaxy Tab S9, Tab S9+, and Tab S9 Ultra should have model numbers SM-X716, SM-X816, and SM-X916, respectively.
In other words, they both most likely fall under the Fan Edition series and could be sold under the name Galaxy Tab S9 FE.
The online benchmark reveals that at least one feature of the two enigmatic tablets is shared with the Galaxy A54 5G. Both devices have Exynos 1380 chipsets, as indicated by the motherboard’s “s5e8835” and governor’s “energy ware” designations.
The new mid-range Galaxy A54 5G smartphone from Samsung uses the same approach. It has a Mali-G68 MP5 graphics processor, four Cortex-A78 CPU cores running at 2.4GHz, and four Cortex-A55 cores running at 2.0GHz.
If these two Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablets have Wi-Fi-only variants, they haven’t yet appeared in the benchmark, and it’s not clear if they’d use the same Exynos 1380 chipset with disabled 5G capabilities, no SIM slot, no 5G antennas, etc.
The two benchmarks that are available demonstrate that both devices’ single- and multi-core performance is comparable. Additionally, they show that the SM-X516B tablet, which should be the less expensive, smaller Galaxy Tab S9 FE variant, has 6GB of RAM while the SM-X616B, which may have a more expensive price tag and a larger display, has 8GB of RAM.
Given that it announced the original Galaxy Tab S7 FE in May, Samsung will likely reveal the Galaxy Tab S9 FE tablets alongside the regular high-end Tab S9 trio at Unpacked in August-September, if not earlier.
However, the naming scheme is unknown, so it’s not clear whether both tablets will have the same name or names that reflect their screen sizes, or if one Fan Edition variant will also be known as a “Plus.” How Samsung will differentiate between them is currently unknown, but one will undoubtedly be more affordable than the other.
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