There’s been a lot of buzz surrounding the Galaxy S IV and the device hasn’t even been announced yet. While we’ve only got a day to wait and see just what Samsung have put together for their latest flagship there’s always going to be some rumors right up until launch. This time around, we have something from Bloomberg, which might not be the most credible source for these sorts of things but, at least they carry a little more weight than certain others. Bloomberg are reporting that the Galaxy S IV will be shipping with a Qualcomm processor in the States – which would certainly explain those benchmarks with the Snapdragon 600 that we’ve been seeing. However, there’s also going to be a model with the Exynos 5 Octa in Europe, just like the Exynos 4 and Snapdragon S4 situation with last year’s Galaxy S III:
“The U.S. version will use Qualcomm Inc.’s quad-core chip, giving the phone more processing power to handle multiple tasks at the same time, they said. In other markets, it will rely on Samsung’s “octacore” eight-core chip, the people said.”
This is, of course, coming from people “familiar with the matter” so there’s no telling how credible Bloomberg’s sources are but, I wouldn’t be surprised if Samsung were going to do something like this in order to make sure demand holds up. There’s no word on whether or not this is down to LTE issues, as was the case last year but, Samsung did manage to launch the Galaxy Note II with the Exynos 4412 and LTE towards the end of last year so it might be something to do with Samsung’s ability to manufacture the Exynos 5 Octa.
Bloomberg seem to have some interesting sources when it comes to the upcoming flagship and they’ve got people speaking about features that could be launching with the phone tomorrow as well. We covered the leaks that hinted at the Galaxy S IV coming with a sort of eye scrolling feature, that would track your eyes and scroll the page as you read through it. It sounds like a pretty awesome idea and while it also sounds gimmicky, it’s totally Samsung. Again, sources “familiar” think this might not be happening:
“People familiar with the device disputed that idea this week, saying that eye scrolling won’t be in the Galaxy S4, though it may appear in future versions of the phone. There will be more simplified uses of eye-tracking technology, such as the ability to pause videos when the user’s eyes move away from the screen, the people said.”
It’d be interesting to see just how far Samsung have gone when it comes to piling on the features in the Galaxy S IV, they’ve been known to focus on features rather than improving the whole experience. I can see the video feature being of far more use than eye scrolling. Speaking of imaging, the 13 Megapixel camera that we know is coming to the Galaxy S IV was detailed as “a higher-density, 13-megapixel camera, up from 8 megapixels in the S3”, not only that but, it’d put Samsung’s latest above Apple’s iPhone 5 in megapixel terms. Will it be enough to hold off HTC’s “ultrapixel” camera though?
We’ve only got to wait until tomorrow to find out exactly what the phone is going to be shipping with but, a lot of the rumors we’ve been hearing so far are coming to shape. Let’s just hope that Samsung have something pretty brilliant to show us.