The Samsung Galaxy S III 4G Android mobile handset was the best-selling smartphone in the world in the third quarter of 2012. Samsung recently confirmed in a press release that 30 million units have been sold the first five months of availability, and the handset even outsold the Apple iPhone 4S, the first time a non-Apple smartphone registered global best-selling status for an extended period of time. Strategy Analytics says that Samsung shipped 18 million Galaxy S III smartphones for a full 11% of the overall smartphone marketplace, with Apple just behind at 16.2 million iPhone 4S handsets.
The Galaxy S III was first unveiled during a London press event back in May, and launched in Europe later that month. The handset arrived on July 12 on the Verizon Wireless 4G LTE network in the United States, a system which RootMetrics tested as the fastest and most reliable 4G LTE network in the United States. The handset is offered in Pebble Blue, Marble White, Amber Brown and Black in the 16 GB model, and Pebble Blue or Marble White in the 32 Gb version.
The handset offers the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) 4.0 Android operating system out-of-the-box, but back in October Samsung announced that they would be upgrading that handset to Jelly Bean 4.1 “in the coming months.” Another unofficial Jelly Bean 4.1 operating system build arrived on the Internet yesterday, version VRBLJ1. As is usually the case, Samsung and Verizon do not recommend downloading the unofficial version, but this is a good sign that the official Jelly Bean 4.1 is probably just around the corner.
Skinny at 0.34 inches (8.6 mm), the handset is relatively light for a 4G LTE smartphone at 4.70 ounces (133 g). The 4.80 inch display is one of the largest you will find on any smartphone, with a high-end pixel density of 306 pixels per inch. That gives the Super AMOLED screen a resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels, and standard capacitive, multitouch gestures are supported. A layer of scratch resistant Corning Gorilla Glass 2 protects the screen.
The handset delivers 15.0 hours of talk time from a single charge, with a dual core 1.5 GHz Krait central processor and Adreno 225 chip for graphics processing. The handset delivers twice the average RAM system memory at 2.0 GB, and the microSD slot supports additional memory cards up to 64 GB in size. The 8.0 megapixel camcorder provides simultaneous HD video and image capture in 1,080P HD resolution, and the front facing chat cam provides video call support.
