LTE not fast enough for you? Double-speed LTE is on the way …

Any early adopter has experienced the pain of buying the latest & greatest tech only to have it superseded within weeks. You could soon be experiencing just that if you recently bought the Samsung S4 as the company launches an LTE-Advanced version of the phone later this month offering more than twice the data speeds of standard 4G LTE – albeit initially only in South Korea (Reuters via Techmeme).

Samsung Electronics Co plans to sell a variation of its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone that will transmit data at nearly twice the normal speed, the head of its mobile business said on Monday.

J.K. Shin, also co-chief executive of the world’s biggest technology firm by revenue, said the phone would be sold in South Korea as early as this month …

If you’re not familiar with the controversy over the 4G label, LTE-A is what 4G was always meant to be, offering real-life download speeds of around 150Mbp. What is sold today as 4G was merely a stop-gap solution intended to give consumers speeds faster than 3G to tide them over until true 4G arrived. Current-generation LTE should, said the engineers, really be called 3.5G. The engineers and the marketeers argued for a while and, well, no need to tell you who won.

LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is likely to hit US shores before the end of the year, with other handset manufacturers likely to announce their own LTE-A phones in the coming weeks. We’ll of course keep you informed.