Samsung Galaxy Note II U.S. Launch Details Revealed

There are many questions about the Samsung Galaxy Note II U.S. launch, and now we know the answer to some of them, sort of. Samsung will introduce this super-size smartphone "by mid-November" on five "major" carriers, including a mix of LTE and HSPA+ networks, according to the company. Those carriers are Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular.

Also confirmed is that the U.S. Samsung Galaxy Note II will have a quad-core 1.6GHz Samsung Exynos processor... even the LTE version. It will be the same model Brighthand previewed in a recent Galaxy Note II hands-on report. This is notable because the LTE and U.S. versions of recent high-end Android smartphones, like the HTC One X, have had dual-core chipsets, while the international versions, often running on an HSPA network, had quad-core chips.

Unfortunately, those are the only details Samsung disclosed. Pricing and exact ship date information is being left to the carriers.

The Samsung Galaxy Note II will have a 5.5-inch Super AMOLED Plus display with a 16:9 aspect ratio, which has earned the Note the title of "phablet" (smartphone/tablet) and is larger than the previous Galaxy Note's 5.3-inch display. It will also have 2GB of RAM, expandable storage via microSD, and will be the first Samsung smartphone to ship with Android Jelly Bean 4.1.

Of course, the defining Galaxy Note features will be the Samsung S Pen and Wacom display technology. For the Note II, Samsung updated the pen to support 1,024 pressure points, and the Note II will automatically launch user-specified applications when the S Pen is undocked from the device. The Note II will also sound an alarm should the user walk away and accidentally leave the S Pen behind.

For more information on the Galaxy Note II, check out the full coverage, including a report from the Note II unveiling at IFA in August.