On Thursday, Oct. 18, Samsung announced at an event in Cape Town that the LTE model of its Galaxy Note 2 phablet would hit the South African shelves by the end of this year.

Samsung is targeting emerging markets with the launch of its Note 2 in Cape Town, and the move will further give a fillip to the Korean company's position as the smartphone market leader.

"We've already shipped devices to the South African space, and I can tell you now that there are excess of 30 000 that we've already moved into the South African market," said Craige Fleischer, director of Mobile Communications Samsung Electronics South Africa.

Reports indicate that the launch of the phablet has created much buzz and anticipation in the African countries, especially since a substantial percentage of consumers access the Internet via their mobile devices.

"There is already demand in the market Kenya. Apparently two of the operators and one retails chain is already marshalling stock in the country. Between now and the end of the year - by the end of December - they project they will change the tablet share and will take 10% of the global share," said Robert Ngeru, Samsung's commercial director for East and Central Africa.

The Galaxy Note 2 is a follow-up to its hugely successful Galaxy Note phablet, which sold over 10 million units worldwide. The Note 2 improves on its processor and packs in a bumped up 5.5-inch display. The phablet also has a faster quad-core processor that clocks in at 1.6GHz and 2GB of RAM. What's more, the Note 2 is narrower than the original Note.

George Ferreira, VP and chief operating officer at Samsung Electronics Africa, averred that the demand for the Note 2 was three times higher than that the original Galaxy Note.

Additionally, Samsung has been working on a Build For Africa program, whereby the company produces devices that specifically cater to the content, keeping in mind the social and lack of infrastructure problems.

Ferreira noted that the Galaxy Pocket phone was originally built only for Africa and not for "anywhere else in the world." However, the worldwide demand for the device was so huge, especially emerging markets, that the company took the decision to launch the Galaxy Pocket for the global consumer market.

Despite many parts of Africa being economically depressed, Samsung is focusing its attention on the more economically active zones to market its devices.

"We know that probably the top 20 cities on the African continent contribute probably 80% of the GDP. So we've looked at these cities and Accra is right there. In fact, in the last two months I've been there twice," said Ferreira.

Samsung hopes that it will continue to expand its reach beyond the "economic hubs on the continent" in the long term.