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Samsung’s new Galaxy Note 4 variant is the world’s first LTE-A Tri-Band CA phone

It was rumored earlier this month that Samsung had plans to introduce a new variation of the Galaxy Note 4, but it’s now been confirmed by the Korean company that this is indeed the case. While there are already two distinct models of the Note 4 available worldwide (sporting slightly different processors), today’s announcement adds a third to the mix, packing Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 and a claim of being the world’s “first commercially available LTE Advanced (LTE-A) Tri-Band Carrier Aggregation (CA) smartphone.”

The other two variants of the Note 4 pack either the 2.7 GHz quad core Snapdragon 805 or Samsung’s own Exynos 5433. Various comparison tests have been done to see which of the two is more powerful, with results showing that you’re going to have much the same experience no matter which you go with.

While this new variant does allegedly sport the Snapdragon 810 (at least according to the latest word on the street; there’s no mention of the chipset in the device’s official specs), the performance improvements overall will likely be just as marginal. But there’s at least one real difference here: the phone’s new cellular capabilities. Samsung says the phone is capable of peak download speed of 300 Mbps, far surpassing the speed of today’s 4G LTE networks.

The LTE-A Tri-Band CA enabled Samsung Galaxy Note 4 will provide the most innovative network experience currently available on the market by selecting optimally available bandwidths. The device receives three different frequency bands and aggregates them into a single connection, supporting Category 6 network service with speeds of up to 300 Mbps. Users can download a 700MB video in about 19 seconds or 10 songs with 40MB in about one second.

The device works by receiving signal from three separate frequency bands and aggregating them to one connection, with support for Category 6 with the super-crazy speeds mentioned above. Samsung also says that as technologies continue to evolve over the next couple of years, it expects this variant of the Galaxy Note 4 will be a LTE-A Category 9-ready device, supporting download speeds up to 450 Mbps.

Curiously, the official announcement doesn’t make any mention of release dates or locations (nor the Snapdragon 810), but based on the LTE-A functionality that the phone offers, it’s not likely we’ll ever see the phone outside of Korea. According to the latest information from SamMobile, the device will be launching in South Korea sometime in mid-January and will be coming to all four major Korean carriers.

And if the assumed is true of it packing the Snapdragon 810, this will most definitely be the first of many 2015 consumer phones to do so.

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Avatar for Stephen Hall Stephen Hall

Stephen is Growth Director at 9to5. If you want to get in touch, follow me on Twitter. Or, email at stephen (at) 9to5mac (dot) com, or an encrypted email at hallstephenj (at) protonmail (dot) com.