Google did something insane at I/O earlier this month. They announced that they would start selling Samsung’s Galaxy S4 running stock Android in the United States in June. It’s going to cost you $649, which falls in line with what a high end smartphone should cost, but the first immediate question after that thing was announced was when will it be sold in another country?
According to C|Net UK, it looks like us foreigners are going to have to hit the grey market. Google didn’t exactly say they’d never sell the GS4 outside the U.S, they just said there’s nothing to say at the present time.
The best case scenario is Samsung gets overloaded with orders for the stock GS4 and realizes that there’s a huge market for Samsung phones running stock Google software. They then make another SKU of the GS4, call it GT-i9506 or something, and sell that to people for a premium price. Trust me when I say you’ll find no shortage of geeks willing to pay an extra 50 EUR or even an extra 100 EUR to get a “Nexus” version of Samsung’s hottest smartphone.
Maybe I’m crazy, but what I’d love to see happen is for Samsung to release an application for the PC and Mac that literally has just one button: “transform to stock”. Since it’s a Samsung app, you can’t screw things up, and the whole thing takes less than a few minutes to work its magic.
