Galaxy S5 Release Date Announced for Feb. 23

By Vincent Funaro, Christian Post Reporter Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Galaxy S5 release date and unveiling could take place on Feb. 23 at this year's Mobile World Congress.

Elder Murtazin, a blogger familiar with Samsung products took to Twitter to announce the news.

"Samsung Galaxy S5 launch- 18.00. Barcelona. 23 February. Price the same. Launch- end of April. Specs- I know them :) new touchwiz ;)," he wrote.

He says the handset will be announced and unveiled on that date and will officially begin shipping by the end of April. Eldar Murtazin accurately predicted the launch of the Galaxy S4 last year so his Galaxy S5 information should be somewhat accurate.

Other recent news points to the device featuring a fingerprint scanner instead of the rumored iris recognition technology.

Samsung will go with fingerprint scanning because iris detection technology is not mature enough at this time, according to a report from the Korea Herald.

"Among the different types of biometric sensors that Samsung is testing for its Galaxy S5, the tech giant will go for fingerprint authentication rather than unintuitive user experience of iris recognition," said an unnamed source to the publication.

The Iris detection technology was mentioned by Samsung's Lee Young Hee in a recent Bloomberg report. He said the company was "considering the possibility" of equipping the S5 with it.

The Galaxy S5 is also expected to be offered in both plastic and metal options.

An earlier report from Sam Mobile gives details on Samsung's plans for the next-gen flagship and states that the company will offer a cheaper plastic model and a premium metal version.

The plastic S5 will be priced around $887 and will feature the same Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU in all markets which is rumored to be the 805 chip. It will come with an AMOLED display with a resolution of 2560x1440 and will have a 16-megapixel rear shooter. It will run Android 4.4 KitKat.

The metal Galaxy S5 will have more impressive specs that include a 64-bit Exynos 6 CPU which will have the ability to run all eight cores at once. This chip will be used on all versions of the metal S5, even in LTE markets.