CES might be over, but the 4G phones keep trickling in. As a part of its aggressive 4G plans, T-Mobile announced that the Samsung Galaxy 4G will launch in the first half of 2011. But will it have the specs of the hot next-gen Galaxy phones? It doesn't seem like it.
Specs for the Samsung Galaxy 4G on T-Mobile aren't clear, but we do know that it will have a Super AMOLED display -- not the newest Super AMOLED Plus display. At CES, Verizon unveiled an unnamed LTE phone with a 4.3-inch display as well as a phone on AT&T, the Infuse 4G, with a monstrous 4.5-inch display. According to Samsung, Super AMOLED Plus displays have an increased number of sub-pixels by 50 percent and perform even better in bright light than the first-gen Super AMOLED displays.
On the Samsung Mobile website, the company is trumpeting the arrival of "something big" on Feb. 13, which coincidentally is the week of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The rumor mill is buzzing about what sort of specs the next generation of Samsung Galaxy phones will boast. A dual-core processor, an 8-megapixel camera and built-in NFC support are just a few of the exciting features the next-gen phones could sport.
As much as I'd like the Galaxy 4G to have some of these features, I have a feeling it won't be too dissimilar from the Samsung Vibrant-just with HSPA+ support. All we know about the T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy 4G is that it will run Android 2.2 (Froyo). T-Mobile tells us that they will provide more details (and hopefully provide some images of this thing).
The moniker "4G" implies faster and T-Mobile's HSPA+ network is certainly faster than its 3G network but right now, it is quite uneven in terms of coverage. And T-Mobile's claims that its 4G devices can achieve "theoretical" download speeds of 21 mbps have yet to be proved in our own speed tests. When we tested the T-Mobile G2's data speeds in several neighborhoods in San Francisco, we found the "4G-like" speeds of T-Mobile's HSPA+ network (4 to 6 mbps on downloads and 1 to 2 mbps on uploads) in roughly half of them. The fastest speed PCWorld achieved was 14 mbps and that was with the T-Mobile webConnect Rocket USB modem.
T-Mobile today also announced at an investor event that it plans to heavily promote its "4G" wireless network, improve in-home device coverage, and by offer low-price options for smartphone newbies.
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