Fourth-coming: the 4G phones that could be announced soon

If you’ve been hankering for a new phone and are keen to check out the high-speed 4G networks on offer by two of the three major Australian mobile carriers, your choices are about to get a whole lot wider.

Fourth-generation mobile networks offer better speeds for grabbing the information you want on the go, with faster than ADSL2 speeds from the middle of the city in the palm of your hand.

In Australia, two such networks are available, with Telstra’s 4G network available for both post-paid and pre-paid users, and the Optus 4G network becoming live for post-paid users across the country in September.

You’ll still need a 4G phone, though, if you’re to access the technology. We’ve checked some out in the past, including the HTC Velocity and One XL, but more are coming.

This week, Samsung added a new option to the 4G mobile range in Australia, announcing that a 4G variant of the popular Galaxy S3 would be hitting store shelves mid-September for Optus, with Telstra availability arriving in October.

But that’s not all we’ve got coming our way, with expectations that we’ll see at least four more 4G devices by the end of the year.

Here’s who we think will be launching next.

4G speeds can reach as high as 40-50Mbps, much faster than that of 3G. This means you can grab movies, pictures, files, tweets, Facebook posts, websites, and just about anything else web connected even faster when you're on the go.

Apple

Easily one of the most anticipated product launches of the year and certainly one of the more speculated products we’ve ever seen, the Apple iPhone 5 is rumoured to be a keg of cool tech.

While nothing is concrete yet – and won’t be until Apple makes an announcement within a few weeks – the rumour mill is on full alert, blowing things out and telling us all the possibilities that everyone thinks the next iPhone will have.

At the moment, the iPhone 5 sounds like it should have a slightly longer 4 inch screen, a new smaller docking connector, Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology, Bluetooth 4.0 functionality, and a new design sporting a slimmer build and a combination of glass and metal in the chassis.

Fourth-generation mobile network support is also expected here too, as Apple would be mad not to include the next generation of mobile connection in a flagship phone designed to stick around for the next year.

Apple has already experimented with including LTE technology in the new iPad, released earlier this year. That said, the technology Apple used wasn’t compatible with our own 4G networks and the iPad-maker was even taken to court over the use of the term “4G” by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

LG

Quite a few handsets were shown by LG this year at Mobile World Congress in Spain, but as of September, we’ve only seen the Prada and other various mid-range and budget handsets make their way out to consumers.

In fact, LG’s competitor to the Samsung Galaxy Note – the Optimus Vu – won’t even likely see a release locally, with the company telling GadgetGuy that “at this point in time Optimus Vu has not been ranged by any of the local operators and will not be released for sale in Australia.”

At IFA last week, however, LG announced the world’s first quad-core 4G handset in the Optimus G. This smartphone looks to be LG’s flagship, at least for the moment, and throws in a 4.7 inch IPS screen with the slightly unusual 15:9 aspect ratio, an impressive 318 pixels per inch, and 2GB RAM, 32GB storage, WiFi, DLNA, and NFC.

When LG announced the smartphone at IFA, representatives for the company said that “commercial release of Optimus G in Australia is currently under review.”

The big screen LG Optimus Vu will probably miss an Australian release.