The price of the Samsung Galaxy S9 will be another £100 more expensive than last year's Galaxy S8. That's according to a TechRadar source in the UK mobile phone deals industry.
Given that last year's Galaxy S8 launched at £689, that would mean you'll need to fork out £789 for this year's phone - a price that will be hard for many to stomach given that only 24 months ago the flagship Galaxy S7 launched for just £569.
If you assume the US price will be inflated by the same amount, that means the US S9 price will be around $850.
"You can expect the S9 to cost £100 more than the Galaxy S8 when it was released last year," said our exclusive source. "The truth is that last year's massively inflated smartphone prices on handsets like the S8, Note 8 and iPhone X have shown that there are plenty of people out there willing to pay these higher prices."
Samsung Galaxy S9 deals revealed
In truth we're not massively surprised by this news. This year's flagship phones were always going to be a bit more expensive but £100 more is asking a lot, and pretty much guarantees that this year's iPhone X follow-up will be the first mainstream phone to land well north of the £1,000 / $1,000 barrier.
"It's a disappointing trend and likely the result of an industry that's changing quite quickly," says TechRadar's editor in chief for eCommerce, James Rivington.
"With handsets these days lasting longer, more people are holding onto their phones and opting to go SIM only as a cheaper option. Instead of making phones cheaper to incentivise upgrades, the trend is to simply make flagship phones more pricey. So if you bought a new phone in the last year, you effectively paid a tax on behalf of everyone else who didn't. The upshot of this is that Apple and Samsung's profits are at record breaking highs, despite the fact that total handset sales are down - such is their dominance of the smartphone industry."
Get the best Samsung Galaxy
So given sky high SIM-free prices, how much can you expect to pay for the Samsung Galaxy S9 on contract? We've been doing this for a few years now so we think we can make an educated guess in terms of what to expect when Samsung Galaxy S9 deals go live to pre-order on contract later in the month.
TechRadar has built its own price comparison tools so you can easily find your way to the very best phone deals. We aggregate all of the best value deals from all of the UK's biggest networks and resellers - to check out our price comparison tools, take a look at some of our deals pages:
Price comparison: Samsung Galaxy S8 deals | Samsung Galaxy Note 8 deals | iPhone X deals | iPhone 8 deals | Best mobile phone deals
When can I buy the Samsung Galaxy S9?
Unlike the shroud of mystery that always surrounds iPhone launches (the iPhone X and 8 unveiling from last September being a case in point), Samsung has already told us when to expect the unveiling of the Samsung Galaxy S9 - we'll get our first glimpse in Barcelona at the MWC 2018 event on Sunday February 25.
Unless Samsung throws us a curveball, pre-orders will be available to snap up immediately afterwards. The company tends to leave a few weeks in between launch and release dates and likes to stock the shelves on a Friday, so our best guess at the moment is that you could be clutching your brand new Samsung on or around March 16 2018.
Samsung Galaxy S9: how much will it cost?
In case you missed our big reveal above, we've been told that the Galaxy S9 will cost around £100 more than the S8 did when it launched in 2017. That means you should expect to pay £789 if you want to get the handset immediately.
That makes sense in the context of other Galaxy handsets over the last 12 months. It's pretty much slap bang in the middle between the starting cost of Galaxy S8 deals last year and the £869 RRP of the Galaxy Note 8 when it became available in the autumn.
Over the last year, the most cost-effective way of purchasing a newly launched phone has been to buy it outright and then combine it with a cheap SIM only deal. You can get 3.5GB for £8pm at the moment, for example. Combine it for 24 months with the assumed £789 purchase price and the total (£981) shaves some cash off what we're expecting to see from contract deals - but only just.
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