Leak: Is this the Samsung Galaxy S III? No, though it’s pretty close to the final design

There’s an image floating around the internets that many websites are claiming to be the final representation of what the hugely anticipated Samsung Galaxy S III will look like. The funny thing is that the image was originally posted by Eldar Murtazin, Editor in Chief of Mobile-Review. Love him or hate him, he’s right most of the time when it comes to leaks. His original tweet said: “SGS3 or not ” and then had a link to the photograph you see below. Less than 20 minutes later he tweeted: “thats not final design as far as i know “. Excessive use of smiley faces aside, that second tweet apparently fell on deaf ears.

Ignoring the issue of how the device will look for a second, there are far more important questions that have yet to be answered. First, when is this damn thing going to be announced? Samsung said they’d unveil the Galaxy S III during the first half of the year, but that’s anytime between now and the last day of June. Second, what sort of spec sheet is it going to have? Now earlier today we filed a report that said this thing would have a quad core 32 nanometer Exynos chip that has built-in 4G LTE, but we’re not satisfied with rumors, we want official spec sheets. Third, what’s Samsung going to do to Android? It’s not that TouchWiz is bad, we’d go so far as to say it’s one of the least offense skins, but still, is Samsung going to try and offer a radically different experience than the one Google designed or will they let Android run as close to stock as possible?

As always, when we highlight rumors on the web we’re left incredibly frustrated. We’d rather leaks not happen, because when you think about what’s so fun about knowing about a device that you’re not going to be able to purchase for another six months?

That’s a whole other topic of discussion however.