The Samsung Galaxy S8 is a powerful smartphone, one of the best in the flagship market by a large margin, and anyone who picked one up at launch is hopefully more than happy with their purchase. Then again, you might've heard about that special variant of the Galaxy S8+ that exists out there in the world. The one that made its debut in South Korea, and, eventually, will land in Hong Kong.
This model is a device that boasts a couple of important changes: 6GB of RAM on board, instead of the 4GB of RAM that's available in the standard Galaxy S8/Galaxy S8+. The other key difference is 128GB of built-in storage, rather than the 64GB models that are available everywhere else.
Both of these changes aren't huge, but, depending on the person wanting to buy a new smartphone, they might be important.
Samsung has taken flack in the past for launching too many phones, as have the majority of manufacturers out there, but they've started to limit themselves quite a bit. While they still launch cheap handsets, or mid-range devices, their main focus is clearly on high-end smartphones. With that being said, I don't think it would be egregious of them to launch a 64GB and 128GB Galaxy S8/Galaxy S8+ at the same time for multiple markets.
Instead, the 6GB RAM/128GB storage variant is available locked to carriers in South Korea. Or, if you want to wait a bit longer, you'll see an unlocked model show up in Hong Kong, which means it's possible you could import that handset if you really want to get your hands on a Galaxy S8+ with more RAM and storage.
Importing phones isn't as big a deal as it used to be. I can remember several years ago when some phones were just simply not available, in any variant, here in the United States (at least at launch), but were readily available in places like Europe. So while network technologies made it difficult in most cases, it was at least possible to get a phone you wanted, only if you were willing to pay a little extra to ship it across the pond.
This special version of the Galaxy S8+ got me thinking about importing a phone again, or at least the last time I did it. Way back when the original HTC Hero was around -- and before its State-side variants cropped up. I loved that phone and I was glad to have paid what I did to get it over into my hands. But I haven't imported a phone since.
So I'm wondering, when is the last time you imported a device, and which one was it? How was the experience? Let me know!
When is the last time you imported a phone? originally posted at http://phonedog.com
No comments:
Post a Comment