Published in Mobiles

Galaxy 4 Note is the first Snapdragon 810 phone

by on30 December 2014


Carrier aggregation gets you 300Mbps

The Galaxy Note 4 is Samsung’s latest flagship phablet and it comes in two flavours, one of which offers the fastest mobile broadband around.

The official Galaxy Note 4 website says that it comes with a 2.7GHz quad-core processor or 1.9GHz octa-core “(1.9GHz Quad + 1.3GHz Quad Core) Process” (yes ‘Process’ and not processor or SoC. Ed)

In reality, most Galaxy Note 4 units are coming with the LTE-A capable Snapdragon 805 SoC based on 2.7GHz Krait 450 cores, the same one that you find in the Nexus 6. The remaining Galaxy Note 4 processors are coming with the Exynos 5433, an octa-core with four A57 and four A53 cores, in 20nm.

There will be a third variety that is based on the latest and greatest Snapdragon 810, a 20nm SoC that supports LTE-A Tri-Band (CA). CA stands for Carrier Aggregation and can provide download peak speed of 300 Mbps or twice as fast as the LTE-A 150Mbits that you can find today.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A will be Samsung's first LTE-A Tri-Band CA enabled phone with many others to follow. In 2013 we were speaking about Category 4 capable modems from Qualcomm, Intel, Nvidia, MediaTek and as of this moment the latest standard is Category 6 with LTE-A Tri-Band (CA). Samsung is making a bold statement that it will take only 19 seconds to download 700 MB video or 10 songs with total bandwidth of about 40MB in one second. This is of course the best case scenario that will be impossible to achieve outside network testing labs.

This is not all as Samsung claims that the LTE-A Tri-Band CA Galaxy Note 4 will be LTE-A Category 9 service ready in the latter half of 2015. This will enable download speeds of up to 450Mbps, making it three times faster than the current LTE-A that you see deployed trough the USA and in most parts of Europe. To get the benefit of this nice download feature, your local mobile carrier will have to install some very expensive equipment at its end and needless to say that you have no control over it.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A supports 3xCA (LTE): 20 / 20 / 20 MHz or 40MHz, a has 5.7- Quad HD Super AMOLED (2560 x 1440) display as well as Android 4.4 KitKat, with a good chance that Android 5.0 will come soon. (And be ruined by Samsung in the process. Ed)

The company didn’t specify which market is getting the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A, what will be the price and when will they ship them, but they were the first to announce an LTE-A device, just days ahead of CES 2015. The competition may announce similar products at the show. We expect to see Samsung Galaxy Note 4 LTE-A devices shipping in Q1 2015 at best.

Last modified on 30 December 2014
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