During my recent trips to Korea, I'd seen my friend's SK Telecom Galaxy S II, which was truly awesome, and I have been patiently waiting for this device for Verizon.
Though not exactly Samsung Electronics, I do have a family background with Samsung and know quite some insiders at Electronics even without going through my father's connections. I have been begging to an insider in mobile division to update me on the launch status for VZW specifically and s/he finally got back to me today telling me below:
1. As announced, the plan is to release in mid-August, but VZW is STILL giving Samsung some hard time (s/he didn't specify what it was) and Samsung may have to push the release date to late August or early September. This may only apply for VZW variant, meaning that ATT or Sprint would possibly launch ahead of VZW.
2. LTE unlikely. S/he saying unlikely would probably mean NO, since development must have been done by now and chance is very slim that Samsung will change the phone's specification a month prior to release.
3. S/he will update me further once s/he gets more information.
I regret I cannot provide more hopeful information but it is what it is and we will just have to cross fingers to get it earlier than September. Verizon seriously sucks.
LTE would be good, but I don't really care. I live in NYC and technology-unfriendly NYC subways will not have cell phone reception at least for next five years or so, hence I cannot use internet during my commute anyways.
Take my word as a grain of salt, but the person who told me this is very associated with GS2 development.
You do know that Samsung practices localization of development. Their main mobile development center is in fact in London, not in South Korea. Most of the work regarding their US releases (for better or worse) is from their facilities in Texas. While their general strategies come out of South Korea, their development, not so much...
I will take this with a grain of salt, since their aren't any other LTE enabled Galaxy series (other than Q which won't drop before holidays) that are planned...While I see it coming late August, probably the 25th. Next week we will probably see it pass the FCC.
Lastly, if it wasn't going to include LTE, why wouldn't it have passed through the FCC? If it were going to be a basic CDMA phone it would have been the first through.
and for your reading pleasure
Intel Mobile Communications, a leading vendor of advanced mobile semiconductors solutions for handheld devices, today announced the compact multimode (LTE/3G/2G) platform XMM? 7060.
The latest enhancement of the company`s comprehensive slim modem portfolio consists of the highly integrated multimode baseband processor X-GOLDTM 706 and the associated multimode RF transceiver SMARTiTM 4G. The chipset is complemented by a robust, full-featured and comprehensively validated 3GPP Release 8 triple mode protocol stack with Inter-Rat features. The new space saving platform is suitable for integration in LTE-enabled portable devices such as mobile handsets, data cards/dongles and other embedded solutions.
LTE is a fast growing market driven by the increasing demand for such mobile broadband services as multimedia broadcasting, music and video streaming and high-speed mobile Internet. It is expected to become the worldwide mobile standard for high-speed Internet due to its high data throughput and high spectral efficiency. However, LTE is faced with the challenge of a strongly fragmented regional frequency landscape. This calls for major RF innovation to create a low-power modem platform that can cover all the diverse frequency plans fitting to portable devices. Intel Mobile Communications is leveraging its proven leadership in RF and meets this challenge by offering the XMM 7060 platform.
?It is our intention to serve this growing market with a compact multimode solution equal to today?s 3G PCB footprint?, says Prof. Dr. Hermann Eul, president of Intel Mobile Communications. ?The slim modem is optimized for low-power operation and has the flexibility to serve up to five LTE bands concurrently with five 3G and four 2G bands, making the dream of a real world-phone come true.?
The X-GOLD 706 baseband processor, manufactured in 40nm process technology, is based on the proven 2G/3G X-GOLD? 626 with an integrated low power LTE L1 subsystem. Therefore smart phones and tablets based on the XMM? 6260 2G/3G platform using the X-GOLD 626 can be easily migrated to LTE ensuring the customers a high degree of reuse of their hardware and software investment. The new baseband processor is accompanied with the SMARTi?4G, incorporating optimized building blocks of the leading-edge 2G/3G SMARTi? UE2 and SMARTi? LU RF transceiver -- the world?s first commercially available LTE transceiver. The 65nm CMOS RF transceiver employs a proven digital architecture that significantly reduces the number of external RF components such as power amplifiers and filters, and, hence, reduces board space, BOM and power consumption.
The XMM 7060 slim modem platform fits in less than 700mm? PCB (Printed Circuit Board) area including all necessary system components for quad band LTE, penta band 3G and quad band EDGE applications. It supports LTE category 3 (CAT-3) throughputs (100Mbps/50Mbps download/upload respectively) and is compliant to LTE Release 8 standard supporting FDD and TDD mode for all bandwidth up to 20MHz. In addition Inter-RAT handover features with 3G and 2G systems are naturally included.
This is only speculation though based on tidbits of info floating around. I'm assuming based on a comment I read a while back that this is whats going into Verizons Galaxy S II/Function/Fascinate II
"Korea Telecom and Samsung move forward with Intel architecure to deliver services faster and cost effectively expand network capacity with demand"
First samples of the platform will be available by the third quarter of 2011 (Verizons GS2?) with broad market availability for devices in the second half of 2012.
Makes sense to me seeing that Verizon is the only LTE network up and running at this time. Thoughts?
This is only speculation though based on tidbits of info floating around. I'm assuming based on a comment I read a while back that this is whats going into Verizons Galaxy S II/Function/Fascinate II
"Korea Telecom and Samsung move forward with Intel architecure to deliver services faster and cost effectively expand network capacity with demand"
First samples of the platform will be available by the third quarter of 2011 (Verizons GS2?) with broad market availability for devices in the second half of 2012.
Makes sense to me seeing that Verizon is the only LTE network up and running at this time. Thoughts?
Chip they are using is for HSPA+ and LTE capabilities. Intel manufactures it if I'm not mistaken.
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Neo the chip is ready for sampling Q3 andfrom my understanding that means they use it in 1 or 2 handsets before it rolls into mass production and makes it into other handsets. I'm out of my league on this aspect so I'd rather defer to those in the know. I only have a remedial understanding of this whole thing.
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