Remember a few days ago when I said that Samsung is working was a variant of the Galaxy S4 called the GT-i9506 that uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800 and will make its way to international markets? Well, I’m super excited to report that my buddy Lars from All About Samsung can confirm that the phone is indeed real. Even better than that, he’s benchmarked it. It hits nearly 28,000 in AnTuTu, which is a bit lower than I was expecting, but whatever, it’s early days.
Now the two important questions: When will it come out and how much will it cost? Lars says it’s going to be announced a few weeks before IFA, which to me means it’s likely going to be announced in August. It makes sense when you think about it from the perspective of the competition, which in this case is LG. They’re going to announce the G2 on August 7th in New York. What better way to steal attention away from that then to announce a refreshed GS4?
And as for the price, he doesn’t know, but assumes it’ll be significantly higher than 500 Euros.