CTIA 2012: Samsung Galaxy S III hands-on

We just spent some time with the Samsung Galaxy S III here at CTIA in New Orleans and wanted to share some hands on pictures (and soon to be video) with our readers. Here are just a few short initial impression.

From the little time we had with the device, we walked away pretty impressed, even without seeing all of the new features. And there are a lot. The device itself is easy on the eyes and the massive 4.8 inch Super AMOLED HD display is significantly more manageable than you might think. Samsung reduced the size of the bezel surrounding the screen, which allowed Samsung to add more screen real estate and nearly retain the same size of the Galaxy S II.

We didn’t get a chance to get a feel of how powerful the new quad-core Exynos processor was but lag certainly wasn’t an issue at any point. TouchWiz was buttery smooth and it seems like the processor will be able to handle anything you throw at it without breaking a sweat.

While we could imagine that it may change by the time it hits the US market, the Galaxy S III has kept the physical home button and has two capacitive buttons for menu and back. It’s and interesting choice and we’re not sure what we think of it but we’re going to need some more time with it before we get any final opinions.

There are enough new bells and whistles on the Galaxy S III to shake a stick at and we’ll cover most of them in the official review. That said, the handset ships with the newest version of TouchWiz, which looks pretty slick. Like the new version of Sense, the new TouchWiz has been refined for the better but is still very much TouchWiz.

We’ll soon be putting the handset through its paces when we get some more time with it but check out the pictures and video below!