Samsung Galaxy S27 Pro: What we know so far

Early leaks for the upcoming Galaxy S27 series are starting to make news, and they point to a brand-new addition to the family - the Galaxy S27 Pro. If these rumors are to be true, this could easily be Samsung's most exciting upgrade in years.

For a long time, if you wanted Samsung's absolute best specs, you were forced to carry around a 6.9-inch massive phone with an S Pen you might not even use. The S27 Pro is set to change all of that. Think of it as a 'Mini Ultra'. All the raw power and top-tier features you actually want, packed into a much more comfortable, pocket-friendly design.

Display and Design

In terms of design, the S27 Pro is expected to look quite similar to the new S27 Ultra, just in a smaller, much more comfortable form factor. The display is said to be a 6.47-inch panel that sits right between the smaller base S27 (6.3 inches) and the larger S27 Plus (6.7 inches), making it the perfect middle ground if you want a screen that feels big enough but still fits easily in your pocket.

On the back, both the Pro and Ultra are rumored to adopt the same new horizontal camera layout, stepping away from the vertical setup Samsung has used for years. And while the Pro feels like a smaller Ultra in almost every way, it won't include an S Pen.

As for the display itself, the S27 Pro is tipped to feature a 6.47-inch 2K LTPO OLED panel. Since it's an LTPO panel, it supports a variable 120Hz refresh rate that drops all the way down to 1Hz on static screens (like photos or text) and ramps back up to 120Hz when scrolling, maximizing battery efficiency without sacrificing smoothness.

The S27 Pro is also rumored to get the 2nd-gen Privacy Display. This feature lets you block side-angle viewing at the tap of a button, turning the screen dark for onlookers while keeping everything fully visible to you. This updated second-gen version reportedly improves on the original with wider viewing angle control and less of a brightness hit when enabled.

Performance

Processor

Starting with the processor, the S27 Pro is expected to have Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 Pro. Built on a cutting-edge 2nm architecture, it is rumored to be the first mobile chip in history to cross the 5GHz barrier. But there is a catch. Rumors suggest the Snapdragon variant will only be available in the North American market. If you buy the phone anywhere else in the world, it will likely ship with Samsung's own brand-new Exynos 2700, which is also built on a 2nm process. This means the exact performance you get will heavily depend on where you live.

If you're wondering which processor will come out on top, the straight forward answer is Snapdragon. While Samsung is making massive strides with its own hardware, Exynos chips traditionally struggle to match Qualcomm's raw gaming performance and overall efficiency when pushed to the limit.

GPU

On the GPU side, if you get the Snapdragon model, it's expected to feature the all-new Adreno 850 GPU based on the 2nm node. Compared to the previous-gen Adreno 840 used on the S26 Ultra, it's expected to deliver a 20-25% increase in performance. This increase is largely driven by a massive 18MB of on-chip graphics memory (GMEM) which acts like a super fast expressway for loading game textures paired with support for ultra-fast LPDDR6 RAM to keep everything running smoothly.

For the Exynos model, it's expected to be the brand new Xclipse 970 GPU made with AMD partnership. While early testing benchmarks have surfaced online showing decent raw graphics scores, this chip is still in its initial stages. Historically, AMD-powered Xclipse GPUs excel at hardware-accelerated ray tracing, but they sometimes struggle with overall game optimization compared to Snapdragon's Adreno series.

Memory

RAM should stay at 12GB and 16GB, the same as the S26 series, but with faster LPDDR6 this time instead of the LPDDR5X used previously. It's slated to be 33% to 50% faster than the previous generation in terms of raw data rates, reaching top speeds of up to 14.4 Gbps compared to 10.7 Gbps on LPDDR5X. It's also said to be roughly 20% more power-efficient.

Storage

Storage options aren't changing either, staying at 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB, but they'll be running UFS 5.0 instead of UFS 4.0. This means read and write speeds will be roughly twice as fast. Specifically, UFS 5.0 reaches up to 10.8 GB/s in sequential reads compared to UFS 4.0's ceiling of 4.2 GB/s. On the write side, UFS 5.0 hits up to 9.5 GB/s compared to UFS 4.0's roughly 2.8 GB/s. You also get a 40% boost in power efficiency with the new standard.

Cameras

The camera layout is probably the biggest visual change coming this year. Samsung's stuck with the vertical layout for a while now, but leaks suggest it's finally switching to a horizontal layout, closer to what the S10 had, or what Pixel phones have been doing for years.

Rear Camera

The S27 Pro is expected to share the same 200MP main camera and 50MP ultrawide as the S27 Ultra. For the telephoto lens, it's rumored to be a 50MP sensor with 3.5x optical zoom, using a new tech called ALoP (All Lenses on Prism). Normally, camera lenses sit between the prism and the sensor, but ALoP puts them right on top of the prism instead. This keeps the camera bump much smaller while letting in more light for brighter zoomed shots.

Selfie Camera

There's also a rumored change on the front, a new 16MP selfie camera with a square sensor. The idea is that a square sensor makes it easy to switch between portrait and landscape without losing quality, since Samsung can just crop out a 12MP 4:3 image either way. It's a small change, but a genuinely useful one if you switch orientations a lot for selfies or video calls.

Battery

When it comes to the battery, the S27 Pro is expected to pack a 5,000 mAh cell that matches the capacity of the previous S26 Ultra, but in a much smaller frame.

Fitting a battery that big into a smaller phone is possible thanks to a few key changes. Ditching the internal S Pen frees up a lot of room, while shifting to a horizontal camera layout clears out even more space inside. On top of that, Samsung might use silicon-carbon battery tech, which lets them fit higher capacity into a smaller physical size.

Charging is getting a nice upgrade too. It is rumored to feature 60W wired fast charging and could also support 25W Qi2 wireless charging. The built-in magnetic rings needed for Qi2 are another clever feature made possible by that same internal redesign.

My Take

Out of the entire S27 lineup, the S27 Pro is definitely the phone I'm most excited about. Getting Ultra-level performance in a smaller, compact size is exactly what I've wanted from Samsung for a while. If the Pro really delivers on that, it could easily be the smarter pick over the Ultra for a lot of people, myself included

The camera layout change is another big reason for the hype. I've always preferred horizontal camera modules like the ones on the Pixel series. They give the back of the phone a much more symmetric, balanced look compared to the usual vertical stack. If Samsung is actually moving in that direction for the Pro and Ultra, I really hope this leak holds up.

Sources

• Reliance Digital - Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6
• Beebom - Exynos 2700
• Acemagic - LPDDR6 memory
• Samsung news - UFS 5 storage
• Samsung news - ALoP