Samsung Project KQ may be the premium Galaxy S5

We've long heard of a more premium version of the Galaxy S5. Newly leaked source code suggests that there is indeed such smartphone and it's in advanced stages of development. The evidence, obtained by SamMobile suggests the project is named "Project KQ", while the S5 had been known internally as merely "Project K". The development process however has been hindered by component shortages.

Project KQ, which may also very well encompass the Galaxy F-line of products, sports a QHD (2560 x 1440 pixels) resolution on a 5.2" display. There's currently no information if it's going to be Super AMOLED.

In a traditional Samsung fashion, Project KQ is set to launch with a couple of different versions, each sporting a different chipset. The model destined for South Korea is going to pack the company's latest octa-core Exynos 5430 chipset. The new silicon features quad 2.1GHz Cortex-A15 and quad 1.5GHz Cortex-A7 cores in addition to an 600MHz ARM Mali GPU. There's also a new display controller to handle the QHD display.

A new HEVC video decoder is going to make 8K UHD playback possible, while a dedicated new audio co-processor, called the Samsung "Seiren", will handle sound encoding and decoding.

If that wasn't enough, the Exynos-based Project KQ will for the very first time utilize an Intel LTE modem (XMM7620). It packs quite a punch supporting speeds of up to 300Mbit/s down and 150Mbit/s up. Only the European version will get this LTE chip, while the Korean market will make do with a Samsung-made LTE modem codenamed Shannon 300 (SS300).

There's no word about the US market, but there is evidence that Samsung will utilize the quad-core Snapdragon 805 chipset in at least one version of the upcoming phone (G906S).

An interesting piece of information is that Samsung developed ten revisions of the Galaxy S5 until it was given the green light to enter production. The source of the information reveals that the first two packed QHD displays, which explains the rumors that were floating around before the actual announcement of the Galaxy S5.

Source