We know that Samsung Galaxy S10 5G is coming to the U.S. very soon. Although not official from Samsung, we’ve heard that pre-orders of the phone will begin on April 18 while in-store availability kicks off on May 16.
At the moment, it is understood that the Galaxy S10 5G will arrive in the U.S. as a Verizon Wireless exclusive. For how long this exclusivity will last is beyond our knowledge, but history tells us that other carriers could wait for a month or two before they begin selling the phone.
While Samsung has yet to confirm the full list of U.S. telcos that will join Verizon in carrying the S10 5G, the Wi-Fi Alliance has cleared multiple variants of the device with model numbers that we can easily associate with some major carriers in the country.
The listing has models SM-G977P for Sprint, SM-G977T for T-Mobile, and SM-G977U as the U.S. unlocked model. The same listing also has models SM-G977N, SM-G977XN, and SM-G977B, although these are targeting markets outside the U.S.
Interestingly, there is still no room for what would be Verizon and AT&T variants of the S10 5G. Going by the above naming scheme, we should have had models SM-G977V for Verizon and SM-G977A for AT&T. Hopefully, it’s only a matter of time and they’ll also receive a thumbs up from the WFA.
It’s been a while since Samsung included carrier identifiers in the model numbers of flagship phones sold in the U.S. To be more precise, the last time this happened was with the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, but beginning with the S8 going forward, all U.S. carrier models had U at the end of the model number and U1 for the unlocked model.
For instance, the S8 has model number SM-G950U (SM-G950U1 for U.S. unlocked), the S9 comes in with number SM-G960U (SM-G960U1 for U.S. unlocked) while the S10 has model number SM-G973U (SM-G973U1 for U.S. unlocked) regardless of the carrier.
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