UPDATE: As it turns out, the Galaxy XCover Pro wasn’t supposed to go official in Finland while CES 2020 was taking place in Vegas, properly making its debut in Samsung’s homeland of Korea after the Consumer Electronics Show wrapped up. We don’t have anything new to report on the specifications of the chaebol’s latest rugged smartphone, but the tech giant is indirectly confirming the handset will be making its way to North America at some point by saying dual SIM functionality will be supported around those parts. 

With the Galaxy S20 (or S11) family launch event still a little over a month away and the ink barely dry on the recent press release previewing the upcoming S10 Lite and Note 10 Lite, no one expected Samsung to announce any other new smartphones at the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. 

What’s interesting is that the XCover Pro undeniably looks sleeker and cooler than the XCover FieldPro on the outside while downgrading a bunch of key specs and features.

Is this the closest we’ll ever get to a Galaxy S20 Active?

Worse still, the FieldPro caters exclusively to Samsung’s enterprise customers, never actually going on sale for the masses. For now, all we know about the availability of the Galaxy XCover Pro is that official sales will be underway in Finland on January 31 at a fairly reasonable price of €499. But clearly, this is a more “mainstream” rugged effort, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung decides to roll the muscular bad boy out across the old continent and maybe even the US.

Naturally, its design is nowhere near as stylish as what we expect from the Galaxy S20 lineup or what the S10 series has going for it. But we applaud Samsung for integrating the modern hole punch into an otherwise conventional build capable of taking a beating thanks to military-grade endurance. The screen bezels are pretty darn thin, at least for a rugged handset with a built-in bumper designed to absorb shocks and reduce the damage caused by drops on hard surfaces.

The textured back is probably made from plastic for the exact same reason, housing two cameras instead of the single rear shooter on the XCover FieldPro, and the fingerprint sensor is moved from the back to the side, doubling as a power button.

The Galaxy XCover Pro comes with respectable but unimpressive specs

Due to its thicker screen borders, strengthened metal frame, and reinforced corners, the Galaxy XCover Pro is significantly taller, wider, and thicker overall, as well as heavier, at no less than 217 grams. But that’s actually a solid improvement over the 256 grams weighed in by the XCover FieldPro. 

On the not so bright side of things, the XCover Pro packs a smaller 4,050mAh battery, although the 6.3-incher also borrows the 15W fast charging technology from the non-rugged A51. Perhaps more importantly for road warriors concerned about that unremarkable cell size, the battery is user-removable, which means you can easily replace it with a fresh one on the fly.

The Galaxy XCover Pro doesn’t look like a very impressive cameraphone on paper, combining 25 and 8MP rear-facing imaging sensors and featuring a single 13MP selfie shooter. Disappointingly, the handset also runs Android 9.0 Pie out the box, but when taking its 4GB RAM count and 64 gigs of internal storage space into consideration as well, the value for money feels pretty great. Let’s just hope Samsung is indeed planning a global rollout in the near future.