There’s an argument to be made that Samsung’s Galaxy S III is the best Android phone on the market today, but that doesn’t mean that its formula can’t be improved upon.
Case in point: now the Galaxy S III has wormed its way around the globe, Samsung is preparing to launch a version of its flagship handset that outshines the both the international and U.S. models, thanks to some craftily combined hardware.
The new version of Samsung’s LTE-friendly Galaxy S III — which is expected to land in Korea on July 9 — sports both a quad-core Exynos processor and support for LTE service from carriers SK Telecom, LG U+, and KT. To round out the package, Samsung has also thrown in 2GB of RAM to match the “future-proof” U.S. model. The remainder of the new S III’s spec sheet is the same as that of the original, so I won’t rehash those little details here.
In short, this version of the Galaxy S III is the one to covet — just don’t expect it to make an appearance in our neck of the woods for a little while.
Combining quad-core processors and high-speed LTE radios may seem like the next logical step in the way for smartphone spec supremacy (and you’d be right to think so), but making it happen is a process that’s easier said than done. You see, quad-core devices like the HTC One X and the Galaxy S III tend to get futzed with as they jump from market to market. One of the major concessions that HTC and Samsung had to make when they brought their respective phones to the U.S. is that they couldn’t have both a quad-core chipset and an LTE radio onboard because of compatibility issues.
Both companies ended up swapping into dual-core chipsets instead of sacrificing high-speed data support, and their choice has paid off — neither dual-core device is significantly slower than its quad-core counterpart, and we consumers get to watch cat videos on YouTube that much faster. That said though, companies like Samsung and NVIDIA (purveyors of the popular Tegra series chipsets) aren’t going to stop pushing their quad-core offerings, and now that they’re figuring out how to make them jibe with LTE, the competition among top-tier handsets is poised to heat up even more.
