Samsung is going to announce the Galaxy S IV on March 14 at an event in New York, but there is a lot trickling out already. We’re hearing that Samsung might be prepping two variants of the next flagship, one with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and the other with the homegrown Exynos 5 octa.
The variants, reportedly include a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 in the US or Exynos 5 Octa for areas where LTE networks are not present and is based on a note to investors from a Teipei based branch of JPMorgan. We’ve already been hearing that Samsung might be readying variants of their next flagship based on processors, but this definitely adds to the previous rumours.
The Exynos 5 Octa is a an 8 core processor from Samsung, running 1.8 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 and 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 along with Tricore PoverVR GPU. The Snapdragon 600 on the other hand runs a quad-core Krait 300 CPU clocking at 1.9 GHz along with the Adreno 320 GPU. Qualcomm claims that the new SoC delivers 40% better performance than the existing S4 Pro chips.
If Samsung is going to be dividing the Galaxy S IV based on LTE and non-LTE based countires, it would be interesting to see which variant Samsung would launch in India, where we expect LTE connectivity to be going mainstream quite soon. Would we get the non LTE version with the octa core processor or the quad core version with the Snapdragon 600?
The announcement of the actual phone is still some time away, so currently, we recommend taking this talk of multiple variants only with a pinch of salt. Once Samsung is done with its big unveil in New York, we will know for sure what exactly the Korean Giant has in store for its consumers. Till then, we wait with bated breath.