Samsung is finally ready to unveil the successor to their Samsung Galaxy S2 and has sent out invites for a London-based press event where it's expected the world’s technology journalists will get the first chance to lay eye's on the Galaxy S3.
The invites says that they want to invite us to “come meet the next Galaxy" on Thursday 3rd May.
It's sure to be the most important Android launch of 2012 - with many suggesting that this handset is the only real competion with the current and next-generation iPhone.
Handset of the Olympics
It’s thought that Samsung is planning a massive international rollout for the Galaxy S3 in the summer, and it will be the official device for the 2012 summer Olympics. This is why Samsung will unveil the device at an event held in London, but the company will also hold simultaneous events in New York, Dubai, and Seoul according to sources.
Storage & Specs
The current thinking is the Samsung Galaxy S3 will feature a 4.65-inch Super AMOLED screen with a 1280×720 resolution all packed into a new super-slim design – thought to be drastically different from the current S2. The powerhouse is thought to be a new Exynos quad-core processor clocking in as much as 1.8Ghz.
Ram-wise there’s obviously not much to go on here at the moment, but we’d be surprised if it comes with anything less than 1GB of RAM. This would be the bare minimum to comfortably run Android while maintaining solid performance, so that’s our best guess for the S3.
With regards to onboard storage it’s thought that Samsung will offer the same as they did with the Samsung Nexus which did away with SD card support and will offer the S3 in two storage flavours: 16GB and 32GB. Sources have suggested that the S3 will come in two colour options with one being white and the other blue or black
Design
Over the last couple of weeks there have daily leaks of what the handset will look like. What we do know is it's likely to be drastically different to any of the previous Galaxy handsets - this is because Samsung wants to move the look and design away from the iPhone and in the process avoid and future legal wrangling.
The latest shots offer up a handset quite different to what has been talked about thus far. It sports a peculiar S-shaped bend in the 4.6-inch 3D screen which looks to be highly un-ergonomic, and as if someone might have sat on it by accident - but hey who are we to argue with the future.
US Release date
The reason behind the MWC no show for the S3 was attributed to Samsung wanting to get the handset out in Asia, Europe and the US at the same time. The S2 suffered a US release delay which meant the handset didn’t arrive until several months after the rest of the world – it’s clear Sammy will look to avoid such a fractured release schedule this time.
The US market is likely to see a different variants of the Galaxy S3 handset which is set to be revealed on May 3, as Samsung will more than likely opt to launch a 4G enabled Galaxy S3’s in regions which currently support the high-speed network.
Price
Obviously we can only speculate about the price of the handset – but considering the last Nexus handset from Samsung sold for a eye-watering £520 – we’d expect the S3 to come in at around that price, may even more.
The Galaxy S2 was put on sale for £500 at launch, and contracts for a whopping £46 per month weren’t hard to find either. However, that price dropped very quickly, so we expect the same to happen again.
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One thing we’re almost certain on is the new handset will definitely be running on Ice Cream Sandwich – we’d be gobsmacked if the handset came with the old-hat Gingerbread a la Sony’s Xperia S.
Google has recently published the 4.0.3 code which it says should be considered the baseline of the Ice Cream Sandwich code, so expect that version to launch on the S3 at the very least.
We would also expect the Galaxy S3 to feature a version of Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface skin layered over the top of Android as well, which will help differentiate the phone from the competition.