HK Gadgets News

Rumors Say New Galaxy S4 May Come Out in April with S-Pen

A new Samsung Galaxy S4 rumour claimed that the device will be equipped with S-Pen stylus like the Samsung Galaxy Note and Note 2.

Korean website Enuri reported that Samsung Galaxy S3’s successor would merge some of Galaxy S3 and Note 2’s features and capabilities.

The report said that the Galaxy S4 will have a 5-inch AMOLED HD display that featureds 1080p resolution and 441 pixels-per-inch. That lines up with previous rumors that indicated that that would be the Galaxy S4′s resolution, size and PPI count. It also suggests that the Galaxy S4 will come with a 13 mega-pixel rear camera and a Samsung Exynos 5440 quad-core processor.

The report is looking forward in April for the launching of the new smartphone, which is a month earlier when the Galaxy S2 and Galaxy S3 were released in the previous years. There are also reports that the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be released in mid-2013 in line with the release of the rumored Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie OS.

Obviously, we expect Android to be the main mobile OS for Samsung’s 2013 smartphones, although other operating systems such as Windows Phone and TIZEN will also equip some of them.

Sam Mobile seems to have confirmed a model number for the next flagship Samsung smartphone, the GT-I9500, which will run either Android or TIZEN.

According to the online publication, the GT-I9500 could very well be the Galaxy S4 because the number 4 is apparently unlucky in South Korea – the Galaxy S3’s model number is I9300 – and therefore Samsung would skip I9400 in favor of I9500 (I9505 for the LTE version). It also seems that Samsung hasn’t used the number 4 in high-end devices.

FutureHandling has also learned that the Japanese operator NTT-Docomo is planning to release smartphones with TIZEN OS in the beginning of 2013. DoCoMo is the only firm among Japan’s three top mobile operators that does not sell iPhones, which has caused it to lose a substantial amount of subscribers over the last four years.

At the same time, we could be looking at Samsung’s first TIZEN handset here, even though that may not sound as interesting to Android fans.

No matter what handset model we’d be looking at, it’s worth mentioning that Samsung is reportedly testing software for the two handset versions, GT-I9500 and GT-I9505, as follows:

Model: GT-I9500
I9500XXALL1/I9500OXAALL1/I9500XXALK3
Model: GT-I9505 (Probably LTE version)
I9505XXALL1/I9505OXAALL1/I9505XXALK7

Will you buy a Samsung smartphone next year, or are you interested in trying out something else?

About the author

Alan Chiu Tsang

Alan is a freelancer photographer and author for FutureHandling.com.
He graduated from Hong Kong university in 2005.