Talk about trying to cover bases. Korean news outlet ETNews reports that Samsung’s Galaxy Note III isn’t going to be an only child when it launches later this year — instead, it will be joined by up to three siblings that will apparently debut at the same time.
The Google translation makes it bit tricky to discern what’s going on, but ETNews claims that while the four devices will feature the same applications, processors, and hardware platforms, they’ll sport different configurations of displays, cameras, and cases in a bid to appeal to certain sorts of computers. As the report goes, the most premium of these Note IIIs will feature a flexible display and a metal chassis, components that won’t appear in the more cost-conscious variants meant for different markets. What’s more, the size of the display will vary slightly between those different versions — they’ll reportedly range between 5.68 and 5.7 inches.
At this stage though, the Note III itself is still a wild card — techies and pundits expect Samsung to officially reveal the device at the IFA trade show in Berlin like it did with the Galaxy Note II. Earlier rumors also alleged that the Note III would have a 5.9-inch display (which doesn’t jibe with this new report) — either way the device will definitely strain some pockets, but thankfully not as much as Sony’s gargantuan 6.4-inch Xperia Z Ultra. Rounding out the purported spec list is a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.3GHz and 3GB of RAM, which would propel the phone to the top of the heap in terms of horsepower (though LG’s Optimus G2 may be right up there with it).
As always, you should take all this with a hefty grain of salt, but this is nothing if not a well-worn strategy for Samsung — the company has made a habit of crafting what they imagine will be a popular new smartphone, and then pushing out spin-offs based on that original design meant to appeal to different niches. We saw it with the Galaxy S III and its little brother the S III Mini, and Samsung saw fit to expand the Galaxy S4 family in a big way with three curious variants revealed over the past few months. So far the Note series of phablets haven’t been subjected to Samsung’s desire to endlessly tinker, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see if that wasn’t the case for very much longer.