United States marketed Three months ago to the day, the ultra-high-end Galaxy S20 family had a missing link until the start of the week. It was a big model, remember, as the smallest and cheapest model in Samsung's latest flagship lineup could not be purchased directly from the largest wireless service provider in the country.
Of course, nothing stopped you from buying the 6,2-inch handset in an unlocked variant in the US and activate it on Verizon, but unlike the S20+ and S20 Ultra, the "standard" S20 does not have mmWave 5G technology. And because Big Red's blazingly fast 5G ultra-wideband network happens to be based exclusively on that kind of spectrum, not everyone was willing to compromise and settle for 4G LTE speeds across the country.
No love for digital hoarders
Enter the special Samsung Galaxy S20 5G UW Edition, available now for $999,99 at full retail or $150 less than that with Verizon Installment Plans. Even better, you can also get a $150 gift card when you bring an existing phone number to the carrier, plus an additional $350 with a qualifying trade-in.
At first glance, these are pretty good deals for an upgraded version of a device that normally costs $ 999,99 with support for 5G networks under 6 GHz, aka low and medium spectrum, aka T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T. Then again, nothing is free in this world, especially in this world of mobile technology, so it turns out that Samsung and Verizon have decided to quietly cut a few corners to keep up the aforementioned price tag.
The theory is that it wasn't so much a decision to cut costs as a decision to save space, with the physical room being freed up by ditching the microSD card slot possibly occupied by mmWave antennas needed to provide the stand of Verizon's controversial 5G ultra-wideband network.
Watch out for multitasking!
Whether that's the case or not, it can be annoying (to say the least) to spend a thousand dollars on a phone with 128GB of internal storage and no physical way to expand that. Keep in mind that even The Galaxy Note 10, which came with no memory card slots worldwide, could accommodate no less than 256 GB of data internally.
Meanwhile, the other compromise was almost certainly made to keep production costs under control, with the 12GB RAM count of all other 20G-enabled Galaxy S5 series devices downgraded by four gigs on Verizon. It's true, the S20 5G UW "only" comes with eight gigs of good stuff, which isn't a bad count, but it's still... less.
Heavy multitasking will probably notice the difference already, not to mention how things should turn out later down the line for things like hardcore mobile games and even productivity tools.
At the end of the day, maybe Big Red should have raised the price by $100 and made the Galaxy S20 5G UW a bit heavier compared to the "regular" variant rather than crippling the phone that way and mention neither. disadvantages on his official product webpage.
But hey, at least the Samsung Galaxy S20 5G UW is up for grabs a lovely cloud white color, as well as cloud pink and cosmic gray paint jobs.
