We’ve seen this before: a highly-anticipated flagship phone that gets slightly different internals for the US market. LAst time it was the HTC One X, which gets a dual-core Snapdragon S4 on AT&T instead of the NVIDIA Tegra 3 found on the international version. Now a Samsung source has indicated a similar situation for the Galaxy S III. The Korea Times reports that an unnamed Samsung executive claimed that while the European version of the Galaxy S III will get the Exynos 4 Quad, US versions of the phone will go with a Qualcomm processor instead.
The reasoning is the same one given for the HTC One X and LTE models of ASUS’ latter Transformer tablets: the high-performance quad-core chips aren’t yet compatible with LTE networks. Samsung didn’t say what the problem was. With three out of the four major US carriers already operating LTE networks or planning to do so within the year, it makes sense that the American version would go for a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4.
Not that that’s a major issue: the dual-core 1.5Ghz S4 in the HTC One S has been putting up some great numbers, even beating the quad-core One X in some benchmarks. But the LTE limitation begs the question, what will happen to the T-Mobile version? T-Mobile released customized variants of both the Galaxy S and Galaxy S II, so they’d seem to be a shoe-in for the Galaxy S III. Since T-Mobile is still a long way from implementing LTE, will Magenta get an Exynos version of the next Galaxy? Keep an eye on Android Community during Samsung’s May 3rd announcement to find out.
[via SlashGear]
If they can’t deliver Quad core, why should I bother upgrading?
Don’t forget quad core isn’t everything. A while back qualcomm announced that dual core adreno 320 chipsets would be in products by the second half of 2012. Plus they can always increase the cpu speed up to 2ghz to match exynos.
Because you’ll be upgrading from ARM A9s to Krait which is roughly equivalent of next-generation A15s. You’ll be getting a chip built on 28nm versus 32nm for quad core Exynos. Combined with the built in, top of the line 4G radio, that gives you much better battery life.
Better battery life, better performance, what more could you want?
Better battery life and performance is merely speculation. Die size is only part of the story.
Yeah. The question then becomes – why should I bother waiting for Samsung when I can have the One X or the new EVO much sooner?
It doesn’t make much sense from a marketing perspective in the United States. Of course, there’s the rest of the world to consider …
Of course it’s still only a rumor.
Qualcomm sleeps.
nVidia sleeps.
Carriers build different LTE networks.
What?
SAMSUNG, HTC and Apple are forced to deal with all this mess.
But I can’t get who said that SAMSUNG’s brand new Exynos quad-core processor doesn’t support LTE or has other tech limitations and should be replaced by dual-core Snapdragon S4 manufactured by sleeping Qualcomm?
Maybe, some financials or already signed big deals cause geo-chip-change?
Exynos 4412 doesn’t have a problem with supporting LTE in Korea. Why would it differ in US? I mean verizon’s LTE. I don’t know about at&t and t-mobile.
Why even call it the S3? Let’s just call it the S3s. Another useless product. People would be stupid to put up with it. Why do we have to suffer for another companies’ fault.
Well this is all happening just in time, Verizon raising data prices again to rob their customers, hello Sprint glad you have this phone Im coming over to you guys