After launching the Galaxy S20 early in the year, the next big flagship for Samsung is the Galaxy Note 20, which is expected to launch in an online-only event sometime in August. For an early look at the phone, we have CAD-based renders from Pigtou and xleaks7.

The design is exactly what you would expect from Samsung: a device that is very close to the Galaxy S20 Ultra, but a bit more blocky. Xleaks7 warns the design isn’t completely finalized yet, but the front design doesn’t really change at all, with an all-screen front and a center camera hole punch in the top of the display. The back adopts the S20 Ultra’s giant camera block design, with several lenses.

The Galaxy S20 Ultra talked a big talk with a “100x” camera zoom, but in reality, it only had a 5x optical zoom camera. It took cropping, AI upscaling, and a boatload of shameless marking hype to hit “100x.” As you can probably imagine, turning a 5x zoom lens into 100x did not work very well, and if you got anywhere close to max zoom level, it turned your photos into unrecognizable mush. For the Note 20, the word from plugged-in Samsung leaker IceUniverse is that the 100x zoom will be axed from the Note 20. All the Android manufacturers pick from the same parts bins, and most companies with the same zoom camera setup as Samsung have only called it a “30x” zoom.

The industry’s fanatical push for 5G and its power-hungry components has led to smartphones getting bigger and more expensive than ever. This year it seems even the Note line—the standard-bearer for the giant smartphone—will need more space, with Pigtou saying the smaller Note 20 “will be significantly bigger than the Note 10 and closer to the Note 10 Plus’ size.”

The report says the display will be 6.7 inches on the smaller Note 20, a big jump from the 6.3 inches of the Note 10. That is absolutely huge for a smaller model, and it makes you wonder if the Note 20 Plus display will crack 7 inches. The report has dimensions of 161.8×75.3×8.5mm for the smaller Note, which, yeah, will dwarf the Note 10’s 151×71.8×7.9mm body.

So you’ve got until August to stretch those hand muscles, shop for pants with bigger pockets, and get in shape to start hauling around Samsung’s latest behemoth.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1678195