So there’s one phone that’s set to stand out at this years Mobile World Congress in Barcelona come late February: the Samsung Galaxy S III. What do we officially know about this device? Jack shi- all. But we don’t need Samsung to say anything when we have rumours swirling all around the internet and in this post I hope to lay out some of the more credible stuff.

The image you’re looking at above isn’t a render of the Galaxy S III like it was reported to be earlier, instead it’s just a cool concept made by a Samsung fan for some competition. Props to him/her on their creative skills — it looks really good, maybe Samsung can take a hint for future devices.

Most of the credible noise is coming from Russian tech wiz Eldar Murtazin (@eldarmurtazin) who has tweeted a few times referencing a new device he has his hands on and later gives greater hints that it is indeed the Galaxy S III. I tend to have belief towards Eldar as he did have his hands on the Galaxy S II along with the Xperia Arc months before they were ever announced. He starts with:

So we’re looking at a screen at or around 1280×720 (we think it’s a little higher and we’ll tell you why a little later); a 12MP camera that will obviously shoot 1080p; Software Tweaks which later relate to the CPU powering the device and battery consumption; and finally Android 4.0 which is expected. Eldar also says he can’t wait for an announcement at Barcelona which puts the icing on the cake for the annual launch taking place at MWC later next month.

Samsung announced a few weeks ago that all the devices they launch this year will run for a full day even with fairly heavy use, so the tweaks would allow the Galaxy S III to keep up with that promise. Now how about that CPU?

There’s really no context to this tweet at all, though once we put it against the next tweet it kind of makes more sense.

So there are two versions of the Galaxy S III floating around and Eldar confirms that he has some sort of contact with the device(s). So with this tweet in mind the previous tweet about a 1.5-1.6Ghz Quad-Core CPU makes the Galaxy S III sounds like an absolute monster. Samsung do have their own Exynos 4412 SoC that is quad-core and clocked at 1.5GHz, so it’s fairly clear that it will be the CPU behind the Galaxy S III. A conspiracy theory here could be that there will be two versions of the Galaxy S III — one for regular consumers, one for power users, however, that seems completely unlikely. Now to wrap things up.. how good is the screen on the Galaxy S III going to be?

A screen that’s better than the current Galaxy S II — that’s pretty easy, just bump up the resolution to 1280×720 and you’re good to go. A screen that’s better than the Galaxy Note — well.. I don’t know. Maybe it won’t be pentile. Maybe it will have a higher ppi. Who knows. Eldar does point out in another tweet that it won’t be 3D, so that’s one less piece of crap we don’t have to worry about.

LTE version for Australia

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’d know that Telstra have their 4G network up and running for smartphones with the introduction of the HTC Velocity 4G. Telstra have said that they’re currently testing 3-4 more devices to launch on the 4G network before the middle of the year. With the Galaxy S III expected to launch in April it’s fair to put two and two together and assume that it might be one of those devices. The Galaxy S II was (and still is) a huge success here in Australia and if Telstra wish to continue capitalising off of that success, they may as well put it on 4G for those extra bragging rights.

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