Samsung Galaxy S5 launch at Mobile World Congress?

Samsung just announced its first Unpacked event for 2014, and it looks like we’ll be starting off with the Samsung Galaxy S5 launch on February 24 at Mobile World Congress.

The invitation says the probably Galaxy S5 launch event will take place in Barcelona at 8 p.m. local time, which translates to 2 p.m. ET and 11 a.m. PT. Like all other Samsung Unpacked events, this one will be streamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel so those of us who can’t make the trip out to MWC can watch the announcement as it happens.

There’s no real teaser image for the next Samsung flagship in the invitation, but there are a couple conspicuous “5”s in the invite. If that’s not a hint at the coming of the Galaxy S5, we don’t know what is. The S5 is the next major device we’re expecting from Samsung, so it only makes sense that it would launch at the company’s next big event. And the timing is just about a year after the launch of the Galaxy S4.

Recent rumors for the Galaxy S5 say the phone will come in two models, one with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 and 2GB of RAM, and one with an eight-core Samsung Exynos 5430 and 3GB of RAM. The phone is expected to have a 5.2-inch WQHD (2560 x 1440 pixels) display, a 2MP front-facing camera, and a 16MP rear-facing camera. There’s also a strong possibility that Samsung will include a fingerprint scanner to better compete with Apple’s iPhone 5s.

What we don’t know is how the Galaxy S5 will play into Samsung’s recent agreement with Google to scale back its Android customizations. Several screenshots have leaked of the new UI that will replace TouchWiz, but they came before the agreement. Samsung may change the UI from those images to look more like stock Android, which many Android fans would no doubt like.

Are you ready for the Galaxy S5?