The Samsung Galaxy S III is the most anticipated next Android phone, so it’s no surprise the buzz is building up as we near an official announcement. To date we have seen an anonymous 4chan description of the device, an alleged leaked slide, a fake teaser video and now a supposed hands-on report from an industry insider.
Earlier today, Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin started tweeting that he had received a Samsung Galaxy S III. We have covered some of Eldar’s rumors before and found he sometimes gets things wrong, but he is spot on other times. For example, Eldar was one of the first to confirm that the Galaxy S II had a dual-core processor back in 2010.
This time Eldar is claiming the Galaxy S III will run Android 4.0 with software tweaks (TouchWiz anyone?), be powered by a 1.5-1.6 GHz quad-core processor (likely the Exynos 4412), feature a HD Super AMOLED Plus display and include a 12 MP camera. When it comes to design, Eldar says the SGSIII is the “same in most aspects” to the SGSII.
Overall these specs sound pretty believable and match up almost exactly with what I speculated last year.
One interesting thing to note is that Eldar claims there are two versions of the phone – a quad-core model and a dual-core model. The quad-core model is almost certainly the Exynos 4412 that has previously leaked, and it’s possible the dual-core model could be the next-generation Exynos 5250.
A quad-core 1.5 GHz Exynos 4412 would likely put the Galaxy S III on par with other quad-core phones based on the ARM Cortex-A9 CPU core (like all the upcoming Tegra 3 phones). However, the dual-core 2 GHz Exynos 5250 would offer next-generation performance with its ARM Cortex-A15 CPU core and ARM Mali-T604 GPU core.
I’ve already seen the Exynos 5250 in action at CES, and I’ve speculated that Samsung could use this chip for their flagship Galaxy S III smartphone. The only flaw with that theory is the timing of the release. Most insiders still expect the Galaxy S III will be announced next month at Mobile World Congress and then be released around April (similar to the SGS2 path). Samsung doesn’t expect the Exynos 5250 to be available until the second half of 2012.
Whatever specs Samsung decides to go with, I’m sure it will be one of the best selling phones of 2012. Knowing Samsung’s never-ending battle to compete with Apple’s iPhone, I suspect we will see the quad-core Galaxy S III model sometime in Q2. Hopefully the dual-core 2 GHz model arrives in time for Christmas.
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