And when I say "nearly all," I mean it. The S10e comes clad in the same colorful finishes as the regular S10 (plus a few extras in certain markets), and rocks the same slightly squarish design. There's a USB-C port and a classic headphone jack on the phone's bottom, plus a SIM tray on top that also takes microSD cards as large as 512GB. For better or worse, the physical Bixby button still lives on the phone's left side so you can talk to Samsung's slightly improved virtual assistant. Even the wireless PowerShare system found in the S10 and S10+ is here, you can wirelessly charge the phone charge other devices wirelessly with the phone. Granted, you won't be charging your friend's phone or smartwatch terribly quickly, but the fact that Samsung even bothered to carry it over to the S10e remains a pleasant surprise.

Most importantly, though, the S10e uses the exact same Snapdragon 855 chipset you'll find in every other premium smartphone this year. I'll dig into performance a little later, but suffice to say that even with the 6GB of RAM found in the base model S10e, you're still getting full flagship power at a significant discount. Oh, and in case it wasn't clear, you're getting it in a smaller package, too.

With rare exception, smartphone makers rarely produce small, high-end devices. (Sony is the only company that readily springs to mind, but c'mon: No one really buys their phones.) Because of that, the S10e can't help but feel a little refreshing. It slides in and out of pockets with minimal fuss, and despite the learning curve that comes with using a smaller screen after years of using phablets, I've really enjoyed living with the S10e. That's partially due to how nice the fit and finish of this cheaper phone is, but it's also because of how its design differs slightly from the S10 and S10+. See, those phones have sides that terminate in slightly flat edges, and whenever I use them, it feels like the edges are all I'm ever really holding onto. The metal frame on the S10e has slightly wider sides, however, which makes this smaller phone noticeably easier to grip than either of the bigger models.