In the coming weeks, an updated version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 will come out in South Korea. In the words of Samsung head J.K. Shin, "the updated device could prop sales of [our] flagship up as Apple and other competitors bring new smartphones to the market." J.K. Shin also confirmed Samsung were in talks with "several overseas carriers" to sell the new phone, but refused to confirm where and when the device would go on sale outside of Korea.

As the company plans rolling out the new technology, it remains to be seen if the device will see carrier adoption in the United States due to the network upgrades it would require. Basically, this new upgrade is from conventional 4G called LTE or Long-Term Evolution. The updated LTE-Advanced transfers data up to twice the normal 4G Speed. The new phones will be powered by Qualcomm chips.

Both Sprint and T-Mobile have only just begun to cover a significant amount of users with LTE. Though both Verizon and AT&T already have large LTE networks, Verizon has already announced plans to introduce LTE-A sometime in 2014. By then Samsung may already have another flagship phone up for release.

The report adds that is unsure how long it would take for Samsung to bring the improved device to North American and European markets, but we cannot imagine it will happen until carrier demand has ramped up, which likely will not happen until the carriers actually begin their LTE-A rollouts. LTE-Advanced offers data throughput of up to two times faster than current deployments. For some carriers, this means a significant increase in speeds.

According to the reports, the new LTE-Advanced phone will provide another profit margin. That is interesting, since analysts had lowered their forecasts for sales of the Galaxy S4 on the speculation that the high-end smartphone market had begun to approach the point of market saturation.

Once a market becomes saturated, it is theorized that Samsung will have a harder time performing sales as it would have to rely more heavily on the upgrade cycles of users, rather than attracting new smartphone converts.