Today sees renewed rumourmongering and speculation about the possible existence of a Google Play Edition of Samsung‘s 2014 flagship phone, the Galaxy S5.
The speculation all points back to TK Tech News, which claims its editor met with a Samsung “source” who showed them the phone.
What we’ve actually got, as you can see above, appears to be a screenshot of an extremely blurry photo showing a Galaxy S5 with the simple black “Google” bootup screen commonly seen on Nexus and Google Play Edition devices. This could be easily faked – the phone could have just been showing a photo full screen, and seeing a screenshot instead of the actual photo is a little suspicious – so take the rumour with a grain of salt.
It does however seem likely that there will be a Google Play Edition of the Galaxy S5 – the original was revealed on-stage at Google I/O in 2013, and with the 2014 event approaching it seems reasonable to expect an update. HTC kept pace last year with the HTC One Google Play Edition soon after Google I/O, and has already released a Google Play Edition of its HTC One (M8) phone.
Ausdroid hasn’t reported much on the Google Play Edition program of late, because we’ve yet to see any intent from Google to bring the program to Australia. You should be aware that if you buy a US Google Play Edition device it likely won’t work on Australian LTE networks and for us, that’s a deal-breaker. We have however seen ROMs distributed that bring the Google Play Edition software to Australian hardware, so this might happen again if this rumour pans out.
Have you installed a Google Play Edition ROM? Would you use it on your Galaxy S5? Let us know in the comments!
I would like to flash a google play edition rom onto my s5 once it’s realesed.
Sounds cool in principle, but useless if they don’t release Global 4g variants…