I finally got my Samsung Galaxy S4 today, thanks to Adam for following it up. Basically here are some things I’ve learnt:
- There are two models, i9500 and i9505
- The i9505 is the one released in Australia (one you can buy from Telstra, Optus and Vodafone and other major phone outlets) this is a Quad Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 1.9GHz. It has full 4G and LTE support
- The i9500 is the latest release which is an Octo-Core (yes, 8 core!) it uses the Exynos 5 Octa chipset (1.6GHz Quad + 1.2GHz Quad) and a dedicated PowerVR GPU. We bought this from Kogan which imports direct from Samsung in Korea. It is around $80 more expensive than the i9500 however it doesn’t have 4G LTE support. It has a better battery life than the i9505 as well.
Who would have thought Samsung would make things so confusing for us end-users. I’m going to have to put up without 4G LTE support until the latest release which basically is the octo-core but also has 4G LTE support (this won’t get to Australia until next year as there is huge demand in Korea alone and they have already said that production cannot make the demands right now unless another new chip is used) I must admit it is the very best handset I’ve used. On the NextG network I am still averaging around 8mb download and I’m mainly use doing email and Google Maps so I think 4G won’t be that useful and I do enjoy the speed and responsiveness of the phone.
