A forum user has reported to have spotted the Galaxy Note 3 “Developer Edition” for Verizon while registering his own Note 3. Above is the screenshot that he said he took. We can’t confirm it, but given that Samsung does produce a number of developer edition smartphones, it seems completely plausible. A developer edition is typically network-unlocked, and has a bootloader (code executed before the OS is loaded) which is unlocked as well.
This gives developers an easier way to modify their phone’s software and test their apps in various networks. Normally, unlocking the bootloader would void the warranty, so that’s potentially one less hassle that developers would have to deal with.
At the moment, there is no official word on it, but if somehow this made it to an official website, it can’t be that far away, can it? It’s hard to tell if it will come in weeks or much longer to appear, but for instance, we published our Galaxy Note 2 Review in late October 2012 and the Developer Edition arrived at Verizon on December 19, so you can take that as a frame of reference and hope that things will be faster this time around.
Another one that you can look at is that the Galaxy S4 Developer edition arrived on June 25 2013, but it was spotted exactly one month earlier. We don’t know how much this device would cost, but the price could easily fluctuate from $650 to $800.
Filed in . Read more about Galaxy Note 3, Samsung and Verizon.