Last week Google announced that it would be stocking a special version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 which will run a stock version of its Android OS, thus giving the handset the latest software whenever it is released. However, as we suspected at Google I/O, it now turns out that us folks in the UK and Europe won’t be getting the special edition model.
When the handset was launched last week at the Google I/O event, the “Google Edition” Galaxy S4 was at first an odd choice for Google, but with its own native Google Nexus One handset still only 6 months old it’s easy to see that Google wants a way of showing of its latest OS updates on the latest hardware, which is the S4.
Currently Google plans for the handset to be a US-only launch with no plans to send the handset worldwide, but we expect that in the months after the release Google and Samsung will bring the handset to other markets. Perhaps that’s mostly wishful thinking on our part, though.
The S4 Google Edition will see the 5-inch 1080p device and its 1.6GHz quad-core processor running the Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2 firmware with all future Android updates coming straight to the handset as and when they are released. This means instead of waiting for phone manufacturers such as Samsung to add their own user interfaces and apps on top of the Android OS, the pure version of the latest Android update will hit the phone as Google releases it.
With no official pricing there are also thoughts that the Google Edition of the Galaxy S4 will be cheaper than the regular version, but we will have to wait for confirmation from Samsung and Google to see if this is true.