With the annual Consumer Electronics Show coming up next week, some hardware makers have already started announcing their new products. The latest big name to join the fray is Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., which today debuted two new versions of its Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Note10 flagship phones that will ship under the Lite brand.

Samsung said the S10 Lite and Note10 Lite make their namesakes’ premium features available at an “accessible price point.” What that price range will be has not yet been shared by the company. Neither was the launch date, but some industry watchers speculate that Samsung will seek to bring the handsets to market before the budget-friendly iPhone Apple Inc. is said to be planning for the first quarter.

The S10 Lite and Note10 Lite are fairly similar in their basic design. They feature 6.7-inch Super AMOLED screens with a resolution of 2400 pixels by 1080 pixels, while over on the back of the case, both models sport three cameras. Their respective camera arrays consist of a primary wide-angle lens, an ultrawide-angle lens for landscape photos and a zoom lens that enhances close-up shots.

The phones’ specifications start diverging substantially from there. Samsung based the S10 Lite’s screen on a newer variant of the Super AMOLED display technology than the Note10 Lite, while the latter handset ships with an S Pen stylus and remote control included in the box. The cameras are different, too: The S10’s primary rears lens comes in at 48 megapixels, whereas its counterpart on the Note10 Lite provides 12-megapixel resolution.

Samsung added some variation under the hood as well. The S10 Lite packs a seven-nanometer Qualcomm Inc. processor and the Note10 Lite runs on a homegrown Exynos chip that uses a 10-nanometer architecture with a slightly lower maximum clock rate. 

Major phone makers such as Samsung have added more budget-friendly devices to their lineups in recent years to expand their addressable market. Consumers are upgrading their phones less often and, according to a study released this past December, under 10% of U.S. users plan to buy $1,000-plus flagships such as the Galaxy S10 5G. There’s therefore a good chance Samsung will make the two Lite models available below the $1,000 price point. 

Photo: Samsung