Week 1 in review: Galaxy S21 FE is here, CES 2022 in the books

Welcome back and Happy New Year! It may only have been seven days in but 2022 started off with a slew of announcements so let’s recap the most noteworthy ones.

Samsung finally unveiled the long-anticipated Galaxy S21 FE and it wasn’t that big of a surprise. It boasts a Galaxy S21 series-inspired design, Snapdragon 888 chipset in most regions (Australia being one of the exceptions) and One UI 4 with Android 12 out the box. The camera setup looks to be recycled from last year’s FE model as is the 4,500 mAh battery and 25W charging. Pricing is a bit of head-scratcher at €750/£700 but we’ll have to wait and see if it can come close to matching the sales results of last year’s FE model.

CES 2022 passed us by with a multitude of announcements from Intel, AMD, HMD and TCL among others. Another pair of new phones came from vivo which announced its V23 and V23 Pro with their color-changing backs. We got review units of both and were impressed with the Pro model’s design - head over to our in for review articles to read more about it.

Realme and its GT2 series also went official. The pair bring a newly developed bio-based polymer back design with a paper-like feel. The Pro model gets the fancy new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset while the vanilla relies on last year’s Snapdragon 888.

Xiaomi brought its 11i HyperCharge to India with 120W charging while OnePlus confirmed its launching the 10 Pro flagship on January 11. The iQOO 9 series also debuted with Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chips and BMW M styling.

That’s all the important bits from the first week of 2022, tune in exactly seven days from now to see what came to be in week 2.