14 DAY TRIAL // Orange France has just introduced the so-called Samsung Galaxy S4 Advance for €690 ($940) outright or for €70 ($95) upfront with a new two-year agreement for the Origami plan at €80 ($110).
Telecompaper reports that the Galaxy S4 Advance is available in France beginning today via Orange online and the carrier’s brick and mortar stores.
For those wondering why we never heard about a Samsung Galaxy S4 Advance, it’s because this is in fact the Galaxy S4 LTE-A, also known as Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9506 or GalaxY S4 LTE+.
The smartphone was confirmed to arrive in Europe back in September at IFA 2013 and hit shelves in Germany several weeks ago.
It looks like Android fans in France will now be able to grab the upgraded version of Samsung Galaxy S4, if they can afford it.
Aside from the fact that it offers LTE Cat4 connectivity, allowing for up to 150Mbps download speeds, Galaxy S4 Advance also comes with a better chipset inside.
Unlike the original model that packs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 inside, the enhanced version is equipped with a Qualcomm MSM8974 Snapdragon 800 chipset that accommodates a quad-core processor clocked at 2.3GHz and an Adreno 330 graphics processing unit.
Other than that, Samsung Galaxy S4 Advance is similar to the original flagship smartphone when it comes to hardware configuration.
Software-wise, there might be a slight problem, as Galaxy S4 LTE-A has been released in Germany with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean platform onboard and Samsung has already released Android 4.3 for the standard model.
For the time being, it’s unclear whether or not Orange is shipping the Galaxy S4 Advance with the same Android 4.2.2 operating system or Samsung decided to bring in a newer version. For more details on the smartphone’s features and capabilities, check out our database for Samsung Galaxy S4 full specs sheet.