Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE-A announced as world's first LTE-Advanced Smartphone

The new device could run on some of the world's fastest networks, which remain overseas for the time being.

Get ready to drool, folks. A version of Samsung's Galaxy S4 has been spotted that reportedly supports LTE-Advanced, a mobile broadband standard that could finally deliver on the true promise of 4G networks.

LTE-Advanced is designed to deliver higher capacity and peak data rates of as much as 3Gbps for downloading and 1.5Gbps for uploads. While carriers here in America are still working on blanketing our significantly more vast landscape with regular old LTE coverage, South Korea's SK Telecom claims to already be hard at work on its first LTE-Advanced network.

Such a hot, fast network deserves an equally sought-after and nimble phone, it would seem. Enter these shots of a Galaxy S4 that's apparently ready to run on an LTE-Advanced network. The unboxing snaps have been leaking out all over Korean and Samsung-obsessed sites worldwide.

There's no way to verify what we're looking at here at the moment -- images leaked out with a list of purported specs including a quad-core 2.3GHz processor, 2GB RAM and a 1,920x1,080 HD display -- but it does line up with recent reports.

So there's a good chance we're looking at the future. Unfortunately for those of us in the United States, it's not exactly the near future.