Describing its new flagship smartphone as “a human product that understands you,” Samsung today launched the Galaxy S III. The new phone will be available through 296 carriers in 145 countries.
Samsung says its new phone, which features a huge 4.8 inch screen, will “see, listen, respond and predict our intentions,” and do all of this in 8 different languages. The phone “sees” with its front facing camera, registering whether a user is present or not. It keeps the screen active when it “sees” the user and its voice recognition software allows a user to verbally ask the phone for specific information, such as the weather forecast for a certain city.
Samsung, recently crowned the world’s largest mobile phone vendor and leading smartphone maker, is beating Apple’s anticipated iPhone 5 to market by several months. So far the Korean company has yet to produce an iconic device that can capture the public imagination the way the iPhone has, but Samsung is clearly hoping that Galaxy S III will change that.
All the major U.S. carriers except for Verizon Wireless carried the Galaxy S II, and it looks like the nation’s largest service provider has decided not to miss the boat this time. BGR is reporting that Verizon will definitely have the Galaxy S III, although it could end up marketing the phone under a different name. Samsung recently registered three new names in trademark filings: the Galaxy Metrix, Galaxy Legend and Galaxy Velvet.
Samsung’s Galaxy S3 will actually be several different phones with different chipsets. The company’s recently announced quad-core Exynos 4412 will power the European 3G models, while Qualcomm’s dual-core Snapdragon S4 Krait is expected in the 4G LTE models. And of course there will be different cellular modems in different phones so that they can connect to the various LTE networks of the different carriers.
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