Samsung is about to release a high-performance variant of its Galaxy S4 smartphone. This one steals a march on Apple (AAPL -0.23%) as well as on other Android vendors by being the fastest. In fact, Samsung is walking down a road that hasn't even been built yet.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE-A sports one important upgrade on top of the standard Galaxy S4 design. The Qualcomm (QCOM -0.24%) Snapdragon 800 chip brings two benefits to the table. First, it can perform with the best of them. This chip beats Apple's latest A6 processor in the graphics department while crushing it in terms of raw number-crunching, and is comparable to the high-end NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor in every way. These are rare feats, but not the main point (unless you're a Qualcomm investor or worried about your NVIDIA shares, of course).
In the video below, Fool contributor Anders Bylund explains who the Snapdragon 800's LTE Advanced wireless networking chops changes the game as soon as your favorite network operator upgrades its equipment. The basic 4G LTE rollout started three years ago and is still going on, but the next upgrade should happen much faster.
