The much awaited Galaxy S3 will not disappoint Americans, like it happened last year with the delays that marred the release of the Galaxy S2. According to a Samsung official statement, the Galaxy S3 will arrive in the US in a few weeks, with details to be revealed in the coming days. As we suspected, the device will launch on five carriers: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and US Cellular.
This is a big improvement over last year, when US customers had to wait not only for the Galaxy S2 to arrive in US, but also had to wait many weeks for the device to hit their carrier. Samsung has clearly learned from the past, and now that they’ve become the world’s phone king and smartphone king, they’re taking their position very seriously. The Koreans seem to be strengthening their relationships with carriers all around the world and, this time, they have more negotiation power against the powerful US carriers.
I believe there will be several versions of the Galaxy S3 in the US (that is, if carriers decide to have their own design and such, like with the One X). However, all the carriers will get a Galaxy S3 with the Qualcomm S4 processor, with its integrated LTE radio. Although it would have been possible for them to adopt the Exynos 4 Quad SoC and combine it with a separate baseband chip, that would have taken a lot of time to implement.
That is why we’re seeing everyone adopting Qualcomm’s S4 chip. Using Qualcomm’s solution dramatically reduces time to market, thanks to the integration of LTE in the SoC. Samsung official press release only mentions the Snapdragon chip, which contradicts some pundits that speculated that T-Mobile and other non-LTE carriers might get the quad-core Exynos chip found in the international version.
The American Galaxy S3 will come with 2GB of RAM, just like the Canadian and the Japanese version, which should appease some of the worries of spec geeks. Besides the proc and the RAM amount, the other specs and, at least in TMo’s case, the appearance of the Galaxy S3 will remain the same as those of the international version.
Samsung revealed that the Galaxy S3 will go from $199, although it did not provide more details on specs and availability - “Exact pricing and retail availability will be announced by each of the five carriers in the coming weeks.” The press release does reveal that Samsung device will hit the markets “almost simultaneously”, so a synced launch across all carriers is excluded. As far as we can tell, the presumptive launch date of June 20 still stands, and fits nicely with Samsung’s statements.
Even though the Galaxy S3 is a highly controversial device (not unlike the iPhone 4S), because of its “non-iconic” design, plastic build materials, and Pentile screen, I still think it will easily break the sales records of the Galaxy S2. The smartphone should sell up to 20 million units by the end of the year, and from 30 to 40 million by the time the next Galaxy flagship arrives.
What do you guys make of Samsung’s announcement? Full press release is below.
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