KOREA: Samsung has announced the world’s first Tri-Band LTE Advanced smartphone with Carrier Aggregation (CA) today in the latest variant of the Galaxy Note 4 flagship phablet. The new Note 4 variant will be going on sale in Samsung’s home market of South Korea before the end of next month. The LTE-A Tri-Band CA allows the Galaxy Note 4 variant to provide peak download speeds of 300Mbps and a theoretical maximum 450Mbps download speeds ince the telecommunication infrastructure is ready to be commercialized by the end of next year as the new Note 4 variant comes with LTE Cat.9 network support.
We had heard rumors about this variant of the Galaxy Note 4 earlier this month when a Galaxy Note 4 variant with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset had leaked in the GeekBench benchmark database and more details were provided on the device by SamMobile shortly. SamMobile’s report claimed that the device would be launching in Spring 2015 for the Korean Market but this surprise announcement definitely has shocked everyone. Although Samsung is yet to confirm it officially, the device is likely powered by the next-gen Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 octa-core chipset with the new Adreno 430 GPU. Rest of the specs remain similar to other Galaxy Note 4 variants that are already on sale worldwide. The device runs on Android 4.4 KitKat apparently, but we expect Samsung to roll out the Android 5.0 Lollipop update to the device before it launches on South Korea’s SK Telecom and Olleh carriers.
With this new Galaxy Note 4 variant, Samsung has once again set the benchmark among Android OEMs in releasing the latest hardware before anyone else. Earlier this year, Samsung had launched the Galaxy S5 LTE-A variant in Korea that was the first smartphone to come with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 chipset and LTE Cat.6 network support. And now the Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A Tri-Band is the first smartphone in the world to come with LTE Cat.9 connectivity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Samsung had any plans of making this variant available in any other market outside South Korea. So for all those of you in other regions of the world, the first Samsung Galaxy smartphone with Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 chipset that you will be able to buy is likely to be the Galaxy S6 that is rumored to arrive very soon.
