Grey imports can be useful at times for customers who either don’t want to wait for a particular product to arrive in their market, or if the product is not even offered in their market to begin with, or sometimes it could merely be the difference in hardware that would make it enticing to import it from another country.
An example would the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 which comes in Qualcomm or Exynos options, depending on which region you are in, but it seems that if you were planning on getting your Galaxy Note 3 from a country not within your region, i.e. Europe, Americas, Asia Pacific, you might find yourself with a device that will not work with your local SIM card.
Thanks to a sighting of a sticker found on the European version of the Galaxy Note 3 (pictured above), it seems that European models will only play nicely with European SIM cards. A similar sticker was discovered for the Americas, and presumably this will apply to Asia Pacific as well. While this could affect grey imports of the Galaxy Note 3, what this could also mean is that taking your phone with you to a different country could pose a problem.
Usually when traveling overseas it’s cheaper to purchase a local SIM card rather than enable roaming with your carrier back home, but if the Galaxy Note 3 will only play nicely with regional SIM cards, a Galaxy Note 3 purchased in Europe will not be able to accept American or Asian Pacific SIM cards.
It is unclear if this is a hardware restriction or a software one that can be circumvented with an update issued by Samsung, or a tweak by developers, but either way this could affect one’s decision to purchase the device. What do you guys think? Has this restriction made you rethink your decision to purchase the Galaxy Note 3?
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