The phone that might end up called Samsung Galaxy S5 (Galaxy SV) will come with a high-end Snapdragon processor from Snapdragon 800 generation. There might be a version based on Samsung’s Exynos processor with eight cores and no LTE, but the US version of the phone is locked down to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800. The Snapdragon 805 with better GPU might just not be ready in time launch. We expect to see this phone launched in late Q1 2014 or early Q2 2014, between March and May would be our best bet.
The key is of course LTE support that Qualcomm has to offer.
In the US market it becomes almost impossible to sell a phone without LTE, especially in the high end, and the trend is slowly catching on in Europe. China, the world’ biggest mobile market, is slowly staring its LTE deployment, but it will take at least one year for LTE to become a must-have feature for phone manufactures in the Chinese market.
Intel and Nvidia do have discrete LTE but they are slow in nailing key phone designs, while MediaTek as a good chance of getting least some major design wins this year, but the Samsung Galaxy 5 won’t be one of them.
