Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition review

 

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition looks a good phone for those who are looking to upgrade from an older Samsung phone. 

The price could be a little high, and its build senses a touch cheap, but compared to the main S20 phones this phone cuts the price but not too many specs. 

The Galaxy S20 FE, as Samsung seems to be styling it, is effectively a ‘lite’ version of the Galaxy S20 launched in February 2020, with a similar design and specs but corners cut here and there. 

This phone looks a Galaxy S10 successor in some respects – at least, that’s the impression we got from Samsung, who used that phone as a point of comparison more than any other when briefing us on the S20 FE.

It’s a little more affordable than the company’s other phones released in 2020, and while it doesn’t scream ‘flagship’ it has lots of top-end specs, and if you opt for the 5G variant you're future-proofed with the latest connectivity tech.

Price and Availability:

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition comes in 4G and 5G variants, and there are two key differences between the two, other than connectivity: one is the chipset they use, and the other is the price. 

The 4G version of the Galaxy S20 FE costs £599 in the UK and AU$999 in Australia, with the price rising to £699 / $1,149 for the 5G model. 

Only the 5G phone is available in the US, priced at $699. For comparison, the Samsung Galaxy S20 5G cost $999 / £899 / AU$1,499 at launch, so it was a good bit pricier. 

The cost of that phone has gone down a little over time though – you can see the current best prices for that phone below, to help you decide if the S20 FE represents a good deal.

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Design and display: 

The most popular feature of the Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition could emerge to be the choice of colors it comes in – you can choose from six vibrant colors to pick up the phone in, and there isn’t a black or dark gray option any more. 

These colors are navy blue, bright red, white, pale orange, pale pink, and mint green – so there should be something for just about everyone.

The first thing we noticed when picking the S20 FE up is that it’s pretty lightweight – in fact, at 190g it felt pretty close to weightless. 

This is likely due in part to the build material – while the phone has a metal frame, the back is Samsung’s ‘glasstic’ or glass-plastic, which we also saw in the Galaxy Note 20. 

As a result, the phone looks like it’s made of premium glass, but feels like it’s made of plastic – and we found that it felt a little cheap. 

There’s a textured effect on the back that’s designed to repel fingerprints, and it seems pretty effective – the rear of the device remained clean and smooth while we were testing it. 

As well as the 'classic' body, another thing that may prove divisive is that, unlike the other Galaxy S20 phones, the Galaxy S20 FE’s display doesn’t curve at the edges. 

The body has a fairly rounded frame, so the phone feels pretty comfortable in the hand, but not as much as if the display had that soft taper. Overall, this is your average ‘chocolate-bar’ smartphone. 

There is a rectangular camera array on the rear of the phone at the top-left, and it looks a lot like the one on the Galaxy S20. 

The power button and volume rocker are on the right edge, and there’s a USB-C port on the bottom of the phone, but no 3.5mm headphone jack. 

The handset is IP68 protected, which means it's dustproof and waterproof up to 1.5 meters for 30 minutes.

On the front, the selfie camera lens is housed in an impressively small ‘punch-hole’ cut-out in the top-center of the display – its minuscule size means we don’t imagine it’ll intrude too much on your viewing experience. 

There’s a noticeable bezel around the screen, but it’s not too thick – you’d notice it if you put the S20 FE next to one of the flagship S20 devices, but if you’re upgrading from an older Galaxy S phone or a Galaxy A model, you won’t mind at all. 

The display is a 6.5-inch FHD+ screen, so it sits between the screens on the Galaxy S20 and S20 Plus in terms of size, but it doesn’t match their higher WQHD+ resolution. 

It uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED X2 screen tech – that’s mostly marketing jargon, but essentially it means the colors are punchy and bold. 

The Galaxy S20 FE has a 120Hz display, which means the screen refreshes 120 times per second, which means motion looks really smooth. 

The other Galaxy S20 phones have this, but the tech is rarely seen in non-premium phones, and even many top-end devices still only have 90Hz displays, so the FE is one of the few phones offering this feature at a lower price point.

Camera: 

The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition has three rear cameras: 12MP f/1.8 main, 12MP f/2.2 ultra-wide, and 8MP f/2.4 telephoto. The colors in our test shots looked bright and punchy. 

The quality of images may be down to the post-processing as much as the hardware – phones from Samsung typically have great image optimization, and that looks to be the case with the S20 FE. 

Autofocus was snappy and accurate too, which is something Samsung phones have had problems with in the past. The telephoto camera supports 3x optical and 30x digital zoom. 

When you zoom in you can see a little preview of the wider image you’re zoomed in on, letting you easily adjust if you zoomed in on the wrong place. We found this mode pretty useful.

The selfie camera here is 32MP f/2.2. That might seem very high-res for selfies, but it actually has a wider-angle lens than most selfie cameras. 

This lets you take group selfies at 32MP, but ‘standard’ pictures just of you will be cropped, and lower-resolution.

Specs and performance: 

The 4G Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition has an Exynos 990 chipset, while the 5G version gets the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865. 

Generaly Samsung phones have the Exynos processor in Europe and China, and the Snapdragon equivalent elsewhere, so the 5G version presents one of the few opportunities for European buyers to get a Samsung phone with a Qualcomm processor.