Will there be a Samsung Galaxy S21 FE? While we still don’t have an official answer yet, we’ve got the next best thing, as Samsung is reportedly removing references to the phone from its websites.
According to SamMobile, support pages for the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE in Hong Kong, South Africa, Singapore and elsewhere are being removed, which certainly suggests the phone has been canceled.
This comes just days after a Samsung official reportedly said that a mid-October launch for the phone had been canceled, with the company apparently reviewing whether to even launch it at all.
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Prior to that we’d heard conflicting reports on whether the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE would ever see the light of day, with the phone following a similar pattern to the Samsung Galaxy Note 21 – a handset that itself was ultimately canceled earlier this year.
It could make sense for Samsung to ditch the S21 FE too, since given the ongoing chipset shortage it might want to reserve more chipsets for its new foldables – the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3.
The latter in particular is said to be selling well, and these two phones both use the Snapdragon 888 chipset that we’d been expecting to see in the Galaxy S21 FE.
Analysis: removing support pages is a bad sign, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the phone is dead
While Samsung’s removal of support pages for the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE certainly makes it look like the company is trying to abandon the project, there are other possible explanations.
For one thing, having support pages up for an unannounced phone isn’t ideal and may not have been intentional, so there’s a chance Samsung is just rectifying a mistake, and will reinstate them when the phone actually launches.
Another possibility is that the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE could get a limited launch, and that the regions the support pages are being removed from might not see it. Given the ongoing chipset shortage that could be a way for Samsung to still launch the phone, and it wouldn’t be alone in doing that – the Google Pixel 5a for example was only made available in the US and Japan.
Still, we’re not optimistic about these possibilities, especially given the previous uncertainty around the Galaxy S21 FE’s future. So at this point we’d be surprised if the Samsung Galaxy S21 FE did launch.
That’s sure to disappoint some, as between that and the absence of a new Note model, the second half of this year has lacked a conventional Samsung flagship. But hope might be around the corner, as the Samsung Galaxy S22 range probably isn’t too far off, with one leaker suggesting it could launch as soon as December.
Via SlashGear
