Samsung Galaxy S 4 (GSM)

Blackmitch1 said:
I was kind of wondering. I hope sprint does not take the GSM chip out of the Samsung 4 like the S3. If they do it would not make it a world like Samsung meant it to to be, Big Red has a GSM chip in there Samsung 3. Take note Sprint.

You are misinformed.

First, it is not a "GSM chip." The same Qualcomm MSM8960 chipset, which supports GSM/W-CDMA/CDMA1X/EV-DO/LTE, is present in both the VZW and Sprint variants of the Galaxy S3. Sprint did not "take the GSM chip out."

Now, Sprint did not choose to have the GSM/W-CDMA capabilities enabled. That very well may have been due to technical reasons, as handsets can incorporate only so many bands/band classes, and the Sprint variant has to s...
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Blackmitch1 said:
I hope sprint does not take the GSM chip out of the Samsung 4 like the S3.

WiWavelength is correct. That's not quite how it works.

Verizon Wireless clearly has a requirement that most of their high-end phones support world roaming. That's not surprising given that they are half-owned by Vodafone, an international carrier.

That world roaming doesn't require a whole extra chip (at least not a major one.) Most of the support is built right into the main Qualcomm chipset. But it does require some extra circuitry (usually very tiny parts, which may or may not be built into larger parts that would be there anyway.) The big deal is more the antenna tuning, engineering, and testing to ...
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The Sprint version will have global roaming, at least according to the FCC approval that cleared today.