Samsung is unveiling the Galaxy S21 earlier than ever, on January 14

Enlarge (credit: Samsung)

Samsung has officially announced its next big product launch event, "Galaxy Unpacked 2021." This show will unveil the Galaxy S21 and will be broadcast live on Samsung.com on January 14, 2021 at 10am ET. Typically, the Galaxy S announcement is in February, so this is earlier than ever for Samsung. January 14 is also the last day of this year's all-digital CES.

If you needed confirmation that the leaks were on the right track, Samsung's teaser image above confirms the rumored S21 camera bump design, which is shown disembodied and stored in a glass box. The new camera bump is the big design change this year-Samsung's camera solution has a new wrap-around design and is integrated into the corner of the phone. This sounds a bit scary for drop survivability, but the official renders seem to show a seam along the edge of the phone, hopefully indicating that the camera glass doesn't actually wrap around the sides of the phone. It certainly looks distinctive.

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  Leaked official images of the Galaxy S21 Ultra, from Evan Blass. [credit: Evan Blass ]

We know most of what we'll be getting with the Galaxy S21. The S21 will be the US' first phone with the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 SoC (the world's first Snapdragon 888 phone, the Xiaomi Mi 11, has already been announced for China, and some territories will get an S21 with a Samsung Exynos chip). The 888 will bring an ARM Cortex-X1 design to market, integrate a 5G modem into the main SoC design, and, for select ultra-premium phones, will include Wi-Fi 6E.

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