Give me 4G over octa-core in my Galaxy S4 any day

Today the earth shattering realisation hit us: the UK won't, repeat WON'T, be getting the octa-core (yes, eight processing chips) Samsung Galaxy S4, with the Korean firm deeming us suitable for only four cores.

But you know what Samsung? Good. As instead of a stupidly overpowered handset which may swiftly see you from one homescreen to another and back again, you're still going to be stuck with a crummy 3G data connection.

While the quad-core Galaxy S4 may not seem quite as fancy it holds a key trump card - 4G.

Now 4G itself is still a bit of a moot point in the UK, what with the service only being available via one network, and at substantial cost, but by the end of this year every carrier will offer the superfast service and everyone will want a slice of the action.

You can keep your cores

When the 4G network does kick in fully the last thing you'll want is to be stuck with a handset which forces you to miss out until your contract is up in 18 months time, or makes you pay a hefty fee to upgrade to a capable handset.

So if anything Samsung has done us a favour by not dangling the octa-core handset in front of our greedy eyes as lets be honest, we'd so plump for that over the quad-core version out of sheer lust.

We're yet to hear a convincing argument as to why a smartphone even needs an octa-core processor, it's not like we're going to be running a small empire off the back of it and that many chips makes us fear for the battery's life.

All your battery are belong to us

Of course people will point towards ARM's new big.LITTLE technology but we still don't know for sure just how much of a difference it will make. It could mean an improvement, thanks to being able to efficiently manage tasks between high and low power, but we're a long way from seeing apps optimised for such things.

We seriously worry about the battery life in the eight-core toting Galaxy S4, especially when you consider the 5-inch full HD display it's got to power alongside the processor.

Samsung has stuck a larger, 2,600mAh battery into the S4 to compensate (up from 2,100mAh on the decently lasting Galaxy S3), but we're not sold just yet.

In short the octa-core Galaxy S4 doesn't need to exist, just give us all the 4G, quad-core version and be done with it - and if you even consider throwing such temptation our way in the future there will be hell to pay.

That said, nothing would give us a bigger feeling of smug satisfaction then asking our friends, "so how many cores does your phone have?" only to hear them mutter "four" while we casually shrug our shoulders and go "well, mine has eight..."

Damn.