Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE will launch in Europe only in 2012. Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE – this December

Staska  By on 04 Sep 11

Samsung has recently announced that they will be upgrading their Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 8.9 devices with LTE chips. The flagship smartphone will also get a dual core CPU speed bump to 1.5GHz and a bigger 4.5” display.

That’s the good news. Now some bad news.

According to German T-Mobile reps, Samsung Galaxy S2 LTE won’t be launching on T-Mobile, and, most likely, with any other operator in Europe this year.

T-Mobile Germany will launch SGS 2 LTE only in the second quarter of 2012 (sometime between April and June). The main reason for this late launch is because T-Mobile’s LTE network is not equipped to handle voice calls yet, and won’t be ready for voice for at least half a year.

Another reason is that Samsung Galaxy SII LTE, currently displayed at T-Mobile IFA stand, is a prototype device and still needs quite a bit of work to be ready for mass market. Which makes sense. I would not call GS2 LTE a next generation Galaxy device. But, if we were talking about software versioning – next generation radio chip, faster CPU, bigger battery and display will certainly qualify this LTE smartphone as a 2.5 release.

The news about Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 LTE are somewhat better. Since it does not have to handle voice calls, T-Mobile Germany plans to launch Samsung’s tablet in December 2011… If Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 does not get banned from Germany at the behest of Apple. Which is a very real possibility, seeing how Apple already got German injunctions against Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 7.7 tablets.

But let’s hope that does not happen, or those injunctions get lifted after Samsung presents its side of the story to Dusseldorf court.

 

Follow Us on:   



If you liked the post, you might find these interesting too:

  • Admin

    Samsung has listed a series of Smartphones this month hope luck for the devices.

  • Warner

    It was at IFA in Berlin last week, and T-Mobile has shown on their booth that the device handles voice calls.
    Indeed, as the innovation leader in Germany they were the only exhibitor showing voice calls on that LTE device (using CSFB – Circuit Switched FallBack, http://lte-epc.blogspot.com/2011/03/circuit-switched-fallback-csfb.html), demonstrating that their infrastructure can handle that.

« »