5G Samsung Galaxy S10 will pack an even bigger battery than the Note 9

The forthcoming 5G Samsung Galaxy S10 will come packing a massive 5,000mAh battery. That dwarfs the batteries in the Note 9 and the Samsung Galaxy S9 Plus, which are 4,000mAH and 3,500mAh respectively.

It laughs in the face of the iPhone Max XS which has a 3,174mAh battery, and it's even bigger than the 4,200mAh powerhouse that's tucked inside the flagship Huawei Mate 20 Pro.

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The 5G Galaxy S10 battery size was revealed by Dutch site GalaxyClub, which did some sleuthing work on part numbers, determining that part number EB-BG977ABU is the 5,000mAh Galaxy S10 battery in question.

So will the new 5G Galaxy S10 smoke the current crop of big battery smartphones for battery life? That's probably wishful thinking. It's likely that Samsung is packing a monster battery into its 5G Galaxy not in an attempt to win a battery life war that Huawei is escalating with each new handset it releases, but because 5G phones are going to require some serious juice, both to power the hardware itself and because of the expected uses for such phones – streaming 4K movies, for instance, or using the phone as a mobile hotspot.

That means we can expect Huawei's 5G phone, Sony's 5G Xperia and the 5G OnePlus 7 to have equally capacious batteries.

As for when the 5G Galaxy S10 will be officially unveiled? That could be as early as 20 February at Galaxy Unpacked events in London San Francisco, if it gets announced alongside the Galaxy S10, S10 Plus and S10 Lite. That's a whole week earlier than the MWC 2019 reveal we were previously expecting.

Sadly for Europeans, GalaxyClub says that the 5G model of the S10 is currently only scheduled to launch in the US and South Korea, which echoes a tweet posted at the end of last year by reliable leaker Iceuniverse.

In the same report, GalaxyClub noted that the Samsung Galaxy X folding phone would come with two 3,100mAh batteries, bringing the total capacity to 6,200mAh. That tallies, more or less, with an earlier report out of South Korea which said that the handset would have two batteries offering a combined capacity of around 6,000mAh.