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After a lavish global launch in New York back in March, Samsung announced that the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available to Australian consumers from this Saturday, 27 April.
(Credit: Sarah Tew/CNET)
Speaking to CNET Australia, Tyler McGee, vice president of telecommunications for Samsung Electronics Australia, confirmed that the S4 will be available for $899 outright. Locally, the phone will carry a quad-core Snapdragon CPU running at 1.9GHz, not the so-called “octa-core” Exynos 5 processor.
The Australian version will also be LTE compatible and have 16GB of memory, with a microSD slot capable of expanding that by a further 64GB.
Additionally, customers can “pre-purchase” from the Samsung Experience stores in Sydney and Melbourne from 24 April, which they can then pick up on Saturday. A third “pop up” store will be opened at the Sydney Opera House, as part of Samsung’s new role as its first principal partner.
The phone will also be available from Telstra, Optus, Vodafone and Virgin, all of which are expected to announce plan details tomorrow.
The Galaxy S4 will come in black or white, with no special “exclusives” in place with any telcos.
McGee pointed out that there will be some new Australian content deals available on the S4, including the Watch On app, a free-to-air EPG app launching at the end of May. Watch On will integrate all 34 free-to-air channels, and users will be able to set reminders for favourite shows and explore social media talk about a specific show.
The app will also sync with the Samsung smart TV, allowing phone owners to use the app as a remote control via infrared.
An enhanced offering for video-on-demand via the S4 is also planned for June. This will include local catch-up TV services in addition to movies and TV series, although full details of the functionality were not available at the time of writing.
As previously seen, the Galaxy S4 will have new features, such as Smart Pause, which can pause a video when you look away; Smart Scroll, which tracks your eye movements to scroll web pages; and even gesture controls, letting you control the phone without touching the screen.
You can read our full hands on preview from the New York event here, and we’ll have a full review of the Galaxy S4 when review units become available.
