If you heard the words Fan Edition, chances are you'd expect something extraordinary. Perhaps a limited edition design or a feature that takes a product to a level that only true fans can appreciate. This is not the case with the deluge of hardware Samsung just announced: the Galaxy S23 FE, Galaxy Tab S9 FE, and Galaxy Buds FE.
These are all slightly cheaper versions of their top-tier counterparts that Samsung announced throughout the year. They're not attention-grabbing, and they have lesser specs, but they cover the middle ground for buyers who don't want to spend the big bucks on the company's flagship hardware and don't want to settle for the budget devices. Truly, they're for Samsung loyalists—there might be better devices for the money, but there's no way you'd shell out on the competition, right?
The Fan Edition of the Galaxy S23 has many of the features of its pricier sibling, such as an IP68 water resistance rating, which means it can survive dips in the pool. There's 5G support, wireless charging, and 128 GB of storage. However, the cuts have to come somewhere, and the most notable place is the body: The back of the phone is plastic instead of luxe glass.
The S23 FE is slightly larger than the base Galaxy S23, with a 6.4-inch full HD AMOLED screen and a 120-Hz screen refresh rate. It's powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, the flagship chipset from 2022—it should be able to handle most apps and games with no trouble. It runs Android 13 and will get four Android OS upgrades and five years of security updates.
You still get a triple-camera system on the back with a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 12-megapixel ultrawide, and an 8-megapixel telephoto. However, don't expect the results to be the same caliber as the photos you get from Samsung's flagships. There's a 4,500-mAh battery capacity, which is slightly less than the battery in the larger Galaxy S23+, so it'll likely last a little more than a day on a single charge.
The Fan Edition S23 comes in mint, purple, cream, and graphite, and will cost $600. There are no preorders, but it'll go on sale on October 26.
Samsung has a hard time announcing just one tablet at a time. Instead, the company is giving us three new tablets in the Tab S9 FE line. The three slates match the three flagship Tab S9 series tablets perfectly, with totally no opportunity for confusion for the average consumer. There's the Tab S9 FE, Tab S9 FE Plus, and Tab S9 FE 5G. As you can guess, the latter is the only one of the lot with a cellular connectivity option. It otherwise shares the same specs as the Tab S9 FE.
Starting at $450, the Tab S9 FE has a 10.9-inch LCD screen, an included S Pen stylus that magnetically sticks to the back or edges of the tablet, and retains the IP68 dust- and water-resistance rating as its high-end counterpart. Unlike Samsung's more powerful slates, the FE utilizes Samsung's Exynos 1380 chipset, the very same inside the Galaxy A54 smartphone. In my review of the phone, I noted that while performance on the whole was pretty solid, I did encounter stutters here and there. That's something you can likely expect on the Tab S9 FE series, which is a shame considering the powerful performance you can get on the likes of the 10th-gen iPad.
The Tab S9 FE Plus upgrades the screen to 12.4 inches and adds an ultrawide lens to the rear camera system. The bigger size means a larger 10,090-mAh battery capacity, and you also get slightly more RAM (8 gigabytes) in the base model. These slates will get four Android OS updates and five years of security updates.
The Tab S9 FE and the 5G model both come in gray, silver, lavender, and mint, but the Tab S9 FE Plus only comes in gray. They'll be available on October 10.
That leaves us with Samsung's new wireless earbuds, the Galaxy Buds FE, which cost $100 and are the cheaper version of the Galaxy Buds2 Pro. Samsung is touting six hours of battery life on these buds with active noise cancellation turned on, and nine hours with it off. The case can add up to an additional 30 hours of juice, however, the case doesn't support wireless charging, so you'll have to plug in with a USB-C charger to re-up. They have an IPX2 rating, so they're sweat-proof and will be fine in the rain. Nab them in black or white. They go on sale October 10.
The problem with Samsung's Tab S9 tablets is that they're all expensive, costing $800 and up. The $450 Tab S9 FE presents a nice, cheaper alternative, though the midrange Android tablet market is heating up with new affordable options like the $499 Pixel Tablet and the $480 OnePlus Pad. The Galaxy Buds FE are a tougher sell even at $100, mostly because of the never-ending stream of cheap wireless earbuds, all of which are pretty good. The recent Anker Liberty 4 NC earbuds, for example, come with the same $100 price but include a wireless charging case, one-upping Samsung.
Samsung has a reliable A-series line of smartphones that includes devices such as the $200 Galaxy A14 5G to the $450 Galaxy A54 5G. The S23 FE is a step above those phones feature- and price-wise, but it sits a bit too close to the base model S23, which is frequently on sale for $700. Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy S24 series early next year, so there likely will be even steeper price drops on its flagship phones as we go into the holidays.
Nevertheless, we'll be putting these devices through their paces soon to see whether they're truly worthy of Samsung's most devoted fans.
