The Samsung Galaxy S4 was launched over 18 months ago, nevertheless it will get a taste of Android 5.0 Lollipop.
This news isn’t official, but comes from SamMobile, who have been accurate in the past.
Samsung hasn’t announced it’s update plans for it’s devices, unlike Sony or Motorola or HTC, who publicly acknowledged that they will be providing updates for a some of their devices. It isn’t really surprising considering that Samsung failed to update popular devices such as the Galaxy S3 to Android 4.4 KitKat, citing the most absurd of reasons, the device’s RAM which the company termed insufficient to run TouchWiz UI smoothly.
The following video is a preview from SamMobile, which shows the Galaxy S5 running the latest firmware.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AU3H1t0kIrQ
Now coming back to the S4’s Lollipop update, the Exynos Variant of the device, the GT-I9500 will be receiving the update early next year. When the update would be available for the Snapdragon variant of the phone, is unclear at the moment. The S4 was launched with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, and was updated to 4.3, and later to 4.4 KitKat, the 5.0 update will be it’s fourth major one, possibly the first device from the company to get such treatment. In spite of that, the performance of the firmware will remain the number one factor under speculation, no thanks to TouchWiz UI.