Samsung chief J.K. Shin “unpacking” the hyped-up Samsung Galaxy S III in London today.
Samsung today in London at last showed off its hyped up Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone. And our own Seth Heringer live blogged the event. You can read his reactions here.
It’s based on a 1.4 GHz quadcore Samsung Exynos processor and sports a gigantic 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen. It also includes 1080p video recording from a rear-facing camera and a 1.9mp camera on the front for face recognition and vid chatting.
As expected, Samsung rolled out a Siri-like technology it calls S-Voice. On stage, execs showed it controlling its camera.
The camera works with facial recognition technology, by the way, and that in turn is heavily tied in with social sharing. Take a picture and it will recognize who is in it, offering you the capability to share the photo.
That giant screen, plus wireless charging, a Samsung docking station and S-Beam technology appear to be the new Galaxy S III’s most compelling features. S-Beam lets you use NFC and WiFi Direct to transfer data at up to 400 Mbps via NFC (300 Mbps on WiFi).
Photo credit: Samsung
Our sources tell us that, late fall, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T all will be offering this smartphone, which our Seth Heringer calls the biggest release of the year until the Apple iPhone 5 comes out, also reportedly scheduled for later this year. Samsung didn’t release details on carriers or much at all about pricing.
Our associate editor, Kansas City-based +Shane Brady, said that it is “a pretty good improvement over the S2. I like that they added a 720p front facing camera. The two concerns I would have is some people really don’t like pentile displays — and the size is huge.” The average person might find the display too large, Shane told us.
An Oceanview, CA tech pro and aNewDomain.net community member +James Deasy, told me this: “I was decidedly underwhelmed. Nice evolution, but less than expected. Not excited about the pentile or size especially with the pixel density lower than the last few super phones. No LTE till late this year is a big miss.?” He is right with our Seth Heringer on this one.
Samsung did, interestingly, slip in some talk about enterprise features. What you’d expect: remote wipe, on-board encryption and more. We’ll be following this as more details emerge. The 8mp camera is a bit disappointing — we thought Samsung could do better, especially considering that it has played a role in the pixel-binning technology behind the 41mp cam-equipped Nokia PureView.
