Samsung Is BEGGING You To Buy The S23 FE (And I Am Too!)

What's going on, guys? My name is Wade with Tech Daily. So, this is my Samsung Galaxy S23 FE. I bought it pretty much right when it came out last October, and it seems like I was just about the only person who actually bought this phone. If you don't believe me, well, the S23 FE obviously didn't make it on the list of the top-selling smartphones for Q1 of this year. Samsung also immediately discounted the S23 FE by up to $200 just a month after it launched. When Samsung announced that they weren't bringing their other super popular mid-range device, the new A55, to the US—a huge disappointment—they explicitly cited the reason being that they want people to buy the S23 FE instead. So, Samsung is not just trying to entice you to buy this phone; they're sort of begging you to or purposely limiting your other options so you have to.

The thing is, this phone isn't bad at all. There's no outright reason not to buy it. It's really just that Samsung sort of killed all the hype with their FE or Fan Edition phones by having a weird release cycle and cutting back on some of the specs and features that used to make it a stellar deal. There's also the fact that Samsung has a billion phones to choose from among their A Series, S Series, and other international devices. But this year, they are streamlining their lineup a little bit. The S23 FE is still a nearly flagship phone for a somewhat more reasonable price—that's the whole idea, anyway. It's got a great camera that far exceeds the cheaper A Series phones, the display is almost as good as what you get on the current S24 flagship, and it's a powerful enough device that you can do anything you want. It definitely feels like you're using a $1,000 smartphone. Recently, Samsung even added their new Galaxy AI features that they originally claimed were reserved only for the new flagship S24 this year. They've since added Galaxy AI to a lot of other devices, but still, that's technically a flagship feature set too. The S23 FE has a lot going for it.

Keep in mind that it's the distant successor to one of the most popular phones Samsung ever released: the original S20 FE, which really paved the way for mid-range smartphones. I don't want to see this phone die a pitiful death, so I'm begging you to buy it too—if only to encourage Samsung to keep releasing a decently priced and moderately spec'd smartphone. Just after they hear the few suggestions I have for it, which I'll talk about,. By the way, while those new Galaxy AI features are a nice addition to the S23 FE, there are still things they don't do, like figure out who those annoying spam phone calls are from or give accurate information about a random email you might have received. That's where Circle, this video's sponsor, comes in.

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Okay, so what the heck is wrong with the S23 FE and why is nobody buying it? Well, for starters, what made the original S20 FE so popular is that it was this hot mid-cycle summertime launch where Samsung enticed any holdout customers who didn't buy the flagship at the start of the year with a near-flagship spec smartphone that came in a ton of fun, funky new colors, but that wasn't like $1,000. That phone, the S20 FE, in my opinion, set a new precedent for mid-range devices. You got a name-brand phone that was 90% as good as the high-end ones for two-thirds the cost, and you weren't embarrassed using a cheaper phone because it didn't look or feel any cheaper. The S20 FE quickly became a best-selling device, and to be honest, I don't know that Samsung expected that or even really wanted that. The S20 FE was easily outselling the flagship phones, and even if it was bad for business, Samsung had to follow up the S20 FE with a successor.

Unfortunately, stemming from a myriad of reported rumors, Samsung was unsuccessful in launching the S21 FE. It was delayed month after month, and it was thought that Samsung might not release it at all. But 16 months after the original S20 FE, and the same week as the new S22 flagship phones were released, Samsung finally quietly and without much fanfare released the S21 FE. It felt like a reluctant afterthought, and while it was a decent phone, the timing didn't make sense, and its position in Samsung's lineup, mixed in with last year's discounted flagships, the A Series and the just-launched S22, really made it a tough sell. That was absolutely the first nail in the coffin for the FE series.

But then Samsung went and did something even more ridiculous: they just straight-up didn't launch an S22 FE. This was actually their first attempt at trying to refocus people's attention on the flagship S Series, but it didn't really work. Everyone just went out and bought an A53 or A54 instead, and suddenly the A Series was outselling the flagship phones by a wide margin. Now, like I mentioned earlier, Samsung fixed one of those problems: the new A55 just straight-up isn't coming to the US and some other regions where it would no doubt be a bestseller yet again. Instead, Samsung explicitly said they wanted customers to buy the S23 FE.

The problem with that is that Samsung again totally botched the release of the S23 FE on multiple fronts. They launched this phone the last week of October, which, yeah, at least they timed it right before the holidays, I guess, but it was so late in the year. The flagship phones were already heavily discounted. Speaking of price, Samsung did actually make the new S23 FE $100 cheaper than previous FEs, which is awesome, and right now it's even an additional $50 off on Amazon. But because it came out so late in the year last year, the discounted flagship S23s were still cheaper than the FE.

You might also be wondering to yourself, well, why was the S23 FE $100 cheaper than prior years? Was Samsung just being extra nice? Well, no, not exactly. The S23 FE is cheaper because this time around, spec-wise, it actually doesn't align as closely to its flagship namesake. The original S20 FE had the same new, at-the-time flagship Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 5G processor that the flagship S20s and S20 Ultra launched with just six months prior. The S21 FE, even with its belated launch, also packed the same Snapdragon 888 flagship chip that the flagship S21s and S21 Ultra had. The S23 FE, however, is powered by a processor that's one year older than what's inside the flagship S23s and is in fact more than two years old in total now. It has the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 inside, which is what the S22s had.

This is really the first argument people are making as to why they're not buying this phone this year. Spec-wise, you're just not getting a current-year flagship comparable. You're actually getting a previous-year spec. Now, that's not to say that the S23 FE performs poorly—that's not the case at all. It's a powerful phone with all the flagship features, like Galaxy AI. It's on the current version of Android and One UI 6.1. It can game at the highest possible graphics and frame rate settings. There's no problems here. It's just more so the principle of the thing when you really break it down dollar for dollar and spec for spec, and if performance is most important to you, it obviously just doesn't make sense to spend $600 on this phone when you're getting the components of the two-year-old S22, which itself is like $250 on Amazon now, or you can instead get the better-spec flagship S23 for cheaper still, or honestly even a used S24 now for a similar price.

So, okay, let's instead say that performance maybe isn't the most important thing, and maybe it's not even specifically a price thing, but perhaps you're looking at this phone from an overall value-for-features perspective. Like, collectively, does this phone offer all the things you'd want or maybe some extra stuff that a cheaper A Series phone, for example, lacks? Well, yes and no. The display on the S23 FE arguably is its best feature overall. Aside from its fairly thick black borders that frame the view, its Dynamic AMOLED 2X panel with HDR10+ support and a 120Hz refresh rate not only visually looks stunning, but spec for spec, this is almost on par with the flagship S23. It's a full HD 2340 x 1080p display, so it's sharp. I think size-wise, 6.4 inches is the sweet spot—not too big, not too small. The only thing it lacks is brightness. The S23 flagship has a higher peak brightness reading, and I think you can still see this phone is definitely prone to a bit of glare. But the screen is what you look at and interact with on a smartphone non-stop, obviously, and the S23 FE screen is a darn good one that oozes value.

I'm going to fire off a few more things this phone has that might be enticing: an in-display fingerprint sensor—check. Dual speakers for solid out-of-body listening—it’s got them. 25-watt wired fast charging, 15-watt wireless charging, and reverse wireless charging—all the same power features and charging speeds as the flagship phone and with technically a larger battery than the regular S23 too, since, well, this is a bigger-sized phone. But something this phone doesn't have is expandable storage, unlike the A Series phones like the new A55. With just 128GB of onboard storage to utilize, I feel like you're going to be filling that up pretty quickly. You could opt for the 256GB model of this phone for $100 more, but that's really getting up there in price for a non-flagship device considering you can just pop a 1TB SD card into an A Series phone. That, to me, is way more valuable. But I don't think Samsung is bringing back the SD card slot on any of these S Series phones ever again.

Now, I've always felt that the cameras on these FEs are also one of their biggest value propositions simply because, for whatever reason, Samsung hasn't improved the A Series cameras enough to where they compete. And Samsung also didn't really change the camera setups too drastically on the S Series phones for a couple of years, so it also wasn't a big hassle or extra expense to just use the same hardware on the FE. I mean, on this phone, you get a nearly identical 50-megapixel main lens and 12-megapixel ultrawide as the flagship S23, and there's an 8-megapixel telephoto lens with three times optical zoom, which is nearly as good as the S23 flagship as well. There's also the over-the-top camera features that are usually reserved for the flagship phones, like 8K video recording, for example, which no one ever uses but it's there. And again, you've got those AI features to help you with photo editing and whatnot. So, although you don't get the 100x super zoom or whatever, this is a flagship camera setup through and through. It's probably the only thing I would specifically grab the S23 FE for over an A55, for example, and it's the one thing I wouldn't feel bad about as well in not opting for a flagship. You're just not really missing out on anything.

Overall, I feel like I've fired off a ton of reasons not to consider the S23 FE. I mean, I can understand why almost nobody bought this thing, and I'm sure you guys will toss in a bunch more reasons in the comments below, which I look forward to reading. But I really, really don't want Samsung to kill off this tier of smartphone because of the seemingly poor sales. Nowadays, not only do people not want to spend $1,000 or more on a device, they also don't really care about the 5% of features and specs that make a flagship or Ultra device that much more expensive for $500 or $600 and with 90% of the features of the high-end devices. That's what a vast majority of people are after, and that's why the FE and Samsung's A Series phones tend to sell so well. The problem with the FE specifically right now is that Samsung is just doing an awful job launching this phone, and the specs for this one in particular don't really align anymore. I think they should also just get down to a $500 price point somehow on launch, and then they wouldn't even need an A55 at all. Samsung could totally get away with like five phones in their lineup, and then they wouldn't need to play all these games with different region releases and weird spec overlaps and deflated launches.

But what do I know? Samsung never takes any of my suggestions, and I can't imagine they'd start now. But what do you guys think? Is there any reason to buy the S23 FE right now? Let me know in the comments down below. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Of course, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. Be sure to follow Tech Daily on Twitter and subscribe to the Tech Daily YouTube channel if you haven't already, and I'll see you guys later.