NikT:

ShinyChrome: Samsung NZ only has the 4g S20 as an option for preorder, do telcos/retailers get other NZ market options not available direct to the public?

At least the S20+ and ultra both have sub-6ghz and mmWave, for whenever the latter turns up.

As Hio notes, mmwave is not currently listed in the spec sheets for the Exynos 990 5G variants but is supported in hardware (at least at the modem level, can't speak for antennas and power amplifiers) so may come later. The old adage applies about not buying phones based on future availability of software or features, but Samsung do have a track record of issuing updates to enable additional network features as network support comes online.

On the ranging and SKU availability piece, I can shed a little light on this process as it pertains to my experience in the industry. I look after a chunk of the ranging process for a number of PB's distribution brands, including Xiaomi, Vivo, LG, and OnePlus. I would not pretend to speak for Samsung NZ or the telcos in any way.

To get a device from roadmap to physical retail product in NZ requires a bit more work than most realise. This is due to A. AU/NZ using a different charger than the rest of the world, and B. AU/NZ requiring quite strict electrical safety certification vs. the rest of the world (RCM, worth looking into if curious). This means you can't just take a product available in the EU or US or China and bring it to NZ - many do, and for the trade market this ends up being a technically-illegal-but-rarely-policed grey area, but the big players needfully and responsibly play it by the book. All of this plus NZ's CGA and market-standard 24 month warranty go into the "NZ tax" we see as the delta between, say, a US RRP that doesn't include sales tax, and the NZ RRP that does include GST and the above. Looking at other markets, NZ has done well on the S20 series pricing this year.

So the SKUs will be locked down fairly early on. All of this takes time. To some extent that's decided with input from key partners in telco and retail land and based off of sales projections, past performance, availability, time to market, propositions, and many other factors that the product manager for the given product needs to consider.

Each of the NZ telcos have their own preferences for software and need to certify each device and software build before it's sold on their network. This and the above mean that, generally speaking, there will not be any additional variants that are available to order in the backend but not ranged or sold, because the work required - and the cost + lead time of that work - mean that process won't even begin before ranging is 100% confirmed.

There are a few exceptions to this that I'm not at liberty to get into the details of. For the most part, if a product can be sold in NZ, it will be.