Owners of the Samsung Galaxy Note have been waiting in the wings to get the Jelly Bean software update, whereas so far all the attention has been lavished on the company's flagship Galaxy S3. The official Jelly Bean update for the original Galaxy Note may have been pending for a while now, but now the owners of the device are in for some good news as the Android 4.1.2 firmware has been leaked for the international model.

The test firmware "N7000XXLSA" has been leaked by SamMobile, and the site asserts that it's the "first ever Jelly Bean leak for the Galaxy Note which is based on Android 4.1.2."

SamMobile also disclosed that this firmware too lacks some S Pen features, which is possibly owing to Samsung not implementing them into the Jelly Bean source code yet. The Web site's sources also let on that the update is nearly ready for the Galaxy S2; however, the Galaxy Note "still requires a lot of work" before the company pushes out the final updates to end users.

Per the report, Samsung is expected to release the official Android 4.1.2 Jelly bean update for the Galaxy Note in either December this year or January next year.

"We know N7000XXLSA was leaked few days ago on XDA-Developers but that was not the complete firmware as that firmware was dumped from a person's device. Later that day, We of SamMobile contacted our insider and requested the N7000XXLSA firmware. Today our insider managed to get us the proper N7000XXLSA Firmware directly from Samsung's Servers," reported SamMobile.

The build is JZO54K (dated Nov. 20, 2012) and since it is a pre-release firmware some minor bugs can be expected. Some of the new features that the new firmware will bring include multi-view (can be disabled), smart rotation, new widgets, customizable notification panel, page buddy, two home screen modes, Google Now, and more.

The folks at SamMobile have "fully tested" this firmware and aver that it works "perfectly as any other official firmware." What's more, like any other official firmware, interested isers will just need to flash this test firmware with Odin and that should suffice. There should be no need to flash any fixes later.

Interested users can check here for the instructions and downloadable files.