If it was a certification issue it would affect every mobile device by every device manufacturer. My guess is that this may be an attempt by Samsung to crack down on grey market imports of their devices. The author suggests it might be a requirement buy carriers, but again that would affect more than just one manufacturer. At the moment we're all just speculating.
No, it wouldn't have to hold for every device, only those that have different SKUs for different regions. Maybe the EU Note3s have some tweaks for the LTE bands in use there or vice versa.
Either way it might also be a purely legal thing, by having the sticker they indemnify themselves from the FCC saying you can't sell this for use in the US because it isn't certified.
People always jump to crazy conclusions when there are much simpler explanations that don't involve companies shooting themselves in the foot. Samsung as a brand is killing it in the world in general, they have no incentive to do something like this.
"The author suggests it might be a requirement buy carriers, but again that would affect more than just one manufacturer."
It would only if the other manufacturers caved in to carrier demands. If this is true, more might well do so shortly, but it kind of makes sense -- Samsung is likely looking for every angle to gain share over the iPhone. One could imagine that a sweet deal with carriers could gain them more promotions, greater subsidies (yielding cheaper phones), etc. etc.
My guess is that this may be an attempt by Samsung to crack down on grey market imports of their devices.
Why would they want to do this? I could understand it in the case of a low-priced device intended for poor regions of the world, but this is a high-end phone that is presumably a similar (high) price everywhere it's sold.
Not really. I can either buy phone from local distribution or pay 10-20% less and get an imported one (wouldn't be surprised if it were from richer region, such as NA). That is the shop is still making money after they moved it half a globe and paid import taxes on it.
Because of that local distributors make much less money - they have to price lower and they don't sell as much. And probably forced this onto Samsung, which couldn't care less I guess since they still sold the phone in the end.
It seems to me that Samsung should care because there's a significant correlation between people who engage in regular intercontinental travel and people who buy expensive smartphones.
