Samsung’s 2012 flagship, the Galaxy S III, is due to ship one week from today in Europe. That’s great for people like me, but what about you? A majority of IntoMobile readers are from the United States, and boy do I have some good news for you guys. According to Unwired View, Amazon has started taking preorders for what will undoubtedly be the best selling Android smartphone over the 6 to 12 months. It’s not cheap, coming in at $800, but for that kind of dough you’re getting an unlocked, unbranded, international Galaxy that will get updates faster than any variant from one of the four major operators.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the Galaxy S III, it has a 4.8 inch 720p display, quad core 1.4 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel camera, it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and there are a ton of software features in there, like S Voice, that have clearly been inspired by Apple’s iPhone. Now I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts featuring journalists talking about this device, and while most people, myself included, were negative about the Galaxy S III after it was announced, apparently once you see one in person you fall in love. We’ll have to wait for review hardware before saying that for sure.
So should you pony over $800 for the latest Galaxy? For that amount of cash you can get two Galaxy Nexus phones straight from Google. There’s also the “geek tax” to consider, meaning the price that nerds pay for a new piece of kit just to be the first to own something. Within a month the Galaxy S III will probably be at least $100 cheaper, if not more.
You owe it to yourself to wait just a little bit longer, until the end of next month, because that’s when Google I/O kicks off. We’ll hopefully hear more about the next version of Android, what’s going to be done to Motorola, and more.