Samsung Galaxy M44 benchmarked with Snapdragon 888, a surprising choice for the mid-range phone.

The new smartphone that Samsung is developing to enter the already congested mid-range market has been discovered in today's Geekbench internet results database. That's not unusual; a Samsung employee has a prototype in their possession and is conducting benchmark tests on it.

More intriguing than the fact that prototypes are being tested is the possibility that this one is based on Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 SoC. The Snapdragon 888 is almost three years old, making it surprising for Samsung to employ a Qualcomm chip rather than one of its own Exynos components.

It was undoubtedly king of its domain when it was in its heyday, but that was in late 2020 or early 2021. Although those times are long gone, perhaps Qualcomm still had a large number of unused 888s in its warehouses, and Samsung received a wonderful deal.

 According to benchmarks, the Galaxy M44 will have the model number SM-M446K and will have 6GB of RAM in one configuration, though there may be further options. The final product, barring a delay until next year, will also ship with Android 13, which was used in the prototype. India is anticipating the arrival of the M44.