Sprint Drops Galaxy S III Price Point – Jelly Bean 4.1 Coming?

The Samsung Galaxy S III 4G Android smartphone is now available from Sprint, Verizon and AT&T in the United States. Smartphone shoppers have to be happy that those three wireless service providers are all battling for market share and device sales concerning this high-performance smartphone. Most recently Sprint dropped the retail price of the GSIII on contract at select retailers, a price tag that is lower than both Verizon’s and AT&T’s. The handset launched on June 21 this year and delivers Android’s 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) operating system out-of-the-box.

Google announced they would be rolling out version 4.1 of their operating system, Jelly Bean, giving only a “very soon” launch date. Unofficial Jelly Bean versions and builds have already sprung up online, and the new rumors suggest that the Samsung Galaxy S III may begin to receive that over the air update from Samsung’s servers in late September or early October. That news was reported by Samsung mobile device watchdog Sam Mobile, a blog which recently stated that the Jelly Bean firmware for the GS III has already passed testing and is waiting for release. As is usually the case, Samsung would not confirm nor deny these rumors.

Delivered in either a pebble blue or marble white chassis, the Sprint Galaxy S III 4G Android smartphone runs on the brand-new 4G LTE system Sprint just recently launched in the US. The handset offers Near Field Communications (NFC) support out-of-the-box for wireless data share and retail payment processing applications like Android Beam and Google Wallet. It is designed similar to most other current smartphones, as a rectangular slab, and is exceedingly thin at 0.34 inches (8.6 mm), and lighter than most phones a 4.7 ounces (133 g). But that slim, light design houses one of the largest displays found on any smartphone at 4.80 inches. The Super AMOLED touchscreen is protected by a layer of Corning Gorilla Glass 2, and visuals are rendered in more than 16 million different colors and at a pixel density of 306 pixels per inch.

That gives the Sprint Galaxy S III an overall screen resolution of 720 x 1,280 pixels, and Samsung’s TouchWiz UI v5.0 Android overlay meshes with the ICS 4.0 operating system, accepting multitouch, capacitive gestures for device navigation. With 9.2 hours delivered from a single charge of its 2,100 mA battery, the Galaxy S III for Sprint delivers approximately 15% better talk time than the average 4G smartphone. A dual core 1.5 GHz central processor is on board and joins an Adreno 225 GPU in the Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon set of microchips. 2.0 GB of RAM system memory is on board as is 16 GB of built-in storage, and a microSD slot is present for storage expansion.  Learn the reduced price of the Spring Galaxy S III and prepare to be tempted.