Samsung Galaxy S24 FE And Watch FE LTE – Key Details You'll Want To Know

Techtember is ramping up into Techtober, and as such you can expect the announcements to start to fly. Today, Samsung launched a few devices — the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE, the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE LTE, and the Samsung Galaxy Tab S10 series. SlashGear was invited to the event to go hands on with the devices, and we came away impressed with what they had to offer.

The devices that you'll use every day — the Samsung Galaxy S24 FE and the Samsung Galaxy Watch FE — were needed follow-ups to the flagship versions of themselves that launched earlier in the year. The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra and the Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 are both pretty great, but they come with a price tag to match. The FE or "Fan Edition" versions of the mobile devices are designed to represent the flagships they emulate, with a few minor corners cut here and there in order to bring the price down to a more affordable level.

The FE editions of Samsung phones have always been very solid offerings with compelling price tags. The last version, the Galaxy S23 FE, compared favorably to the S23 in most ways. Meanwhile, the Watch FE LTE is the same watch that launched earlier this year, now with 100% more LTE. Here are our first impressions.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE is a large beast, with a 6.7-inch 120Hz display. It runs on Samsung's own Exynos 2400e chipset and has a 4,700 mAh battery. All variants come with 8GB of RAM and 128, 256, or 512 GB of storage. On the back, you have a 50-megapixel primary camera, a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera, and an 8-megapixel telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom. On the front, you get a 10-megapixel selfie camera. The phone comes in four colors — blue, mint, graphite, and gray.

Those are all pretty standard specifications for a fan edition phone. The exciting parts of that are arguably the 50-megapixel main camera, which will likely be pretty good, based on past experience with Samsung phones. The ultrawide and telephoto cameras are there. It's the same camera setup as the S23 FE, which was certainly good, but not great. I think most people will be excited by the Galaxy FE's large, excellent display and corresponding battery. This is a phone that will consume content with the best of them.

The Samsung Galaxy S24 FE starts at $650, which is not a huge discount over the S24, but it's a nice middle ground between the S Series of phones and the A Series of phones. You can preorder it today from Samsung.com, and it ships on October 3.

Of course, Samsung brought the AI, which is nice to see in a midrange offering like this. We've already seen what a lot of these AI tricks can do, including Generative Edit, Portrait Studio, Interpreter, Live translate, and the like. One fun addition was Instant Slow-mo, which was of course available before in Samsung flagship phones.

The trick here is, I'll be interested to see how well the AI works running on Samsung's silicon. I've only experienced these features on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 for Galaxy processor, which was designed with AI in mind. I'm positive Samsung also designed the latest Exynos processors with AI on the brain, but traditionally, Exynos processors have struggled to keep up with their Qualcomm counterparts. Considering the Exynos 2400e is itself a slightly less impressive processor, that's going to require some long-haul testing. What I tried in the demo area seemed ok, but there's only so much a demo will show you.

Samsung also updated its Galaxy Watch FE to include LTE bands, which is a nice upgrade. The Watch FE launched in June originally, with a 40-millimeter casing, 1.2 Super AMOLED display, 1.5GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage, all running with Samsung's Exynos W920 processor. The Watch FE originally launched for $200.

The Watch FE comes with most of the features found on the flagship lineup, with the major exception of Sleep Apnea monitoring. That's not too bad a corner to cut, since my own testing with the Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra found Sleep Apnea monitoring to be inconsistent. You also have to compromise with a smaller battery than the flagship variants, which could be problematic once you factor in LTE connectivity, which tends to be a drain on watch batteries.

Still, it's affordable at $250, which is just $50 more than the non-LTE version. That's a nice deal. Preorders start today, and it will be available on October 3.