Samsung holds court with the Galaxy S III

AFTER months of speculation about the Galaxy S III smartphone, Samsung finally let the successor to the wildly popular Galaxy S II out the bag at a glitzy official launch event in London's Earls Court Exhibition Centre.Much of the rumours surrounding the specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S3 have largely turned out to be true.The phone sports a 4.8in Super AMOLED HD screen (720 x 1,280-pixels, 306ppi), which is a step up over its predecessor that had a 4.3in screen.Despite the increase in screen size, the Galaxy S III is only slightly larger at 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6mm compared to 125.3 x 66.1 x 8.5 mm of the S II.Samsung said that is due to an ultra-slim bezel design that the S III employs.The weight is now up to 133g from 116g of the S II but it still feels very light in the hand and is comparable to the HTC One X, which has a slightly smaller screen.Other highlights include an Exynos 4 Quad 1.4GHz quad-core processor, a larger 2,100mAh battery, 1GB RAM, Bluetooth 4.0, Android Ice Cream Sandwich and a mind-boggling host of features to enhance smartphone usability."The Galaxy S III is designed to be both effortlessly smart and intuitively simple and it has been created with our human needs and capabilities in mind," Samsung Electronics president and head of IT & mobile communications division JK Shin said in his opening presentation.