Written by Jonny Williamson
After months of anticipation, Samsung finally unveiled the latest edition to its Galaxy family at an event taking more than a little glitz and glamour from Apple’s equivalent presentations for its iPhone and iPad ranges.
The S3 is the follow up to Samsung’s Galaxy S2, officially the best-selling phone in the world, and will clearly be seen as the benchmark for future smartphones running an Android operating system.
With an Super AMOLED screen size of 4.8” the S3 is by no means small, but being very slim as well as light, a mere 133grams, the phone won’t become cumbersome. The phone runs Google’s Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) and powered by a quad-core processor more commonly found in many laptops, far surpassing the dual-core powered iPhones. More powerful and energy efficient, the upgraded processor can easily accommodate HD video on its 1280x720p resolution screen, with no blurring or stuttering.
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The S3 features an impressive 8 megapixel rear camera, the same as the iPhone 4S and earlier S2, with a 1.9mp front camera, able to sense what the user is doing, such as not going to ‘sleep’ as long as the user is looking at it.
The voice control system, ‘S Voice’, is very similar to the latest iPhone’s Siri equivalent, but is no less impressive for it enabling the phone to perform searches and tasks on command.
With the minimum accepted size for a tablet 5”, at 4.8” the S3 really does seem to straddle both the smartphone and tablet market. However Samsung have slimmed down the casing for its latest model to make it only marginally larger than the previous S2, whose size obviously wasn’t a problem for the millions of people around the world who bought one.
Launching in Europe at the end of May, with other regions swiftly following, Samsung haven’t disclosed the final price as yet, however it has stated the S3 will be available in ‘pebble blue’ or ‘marble white’ with either a 16GB or 32GB capacity.
The S3 is sure to be a huge hit upon release, but the true test for Samsung will come later on in the year when Apple launches its latest improved model, the iPhone 5.
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