Samsung Galaxy S III To Hit U.S. Shores Ahead Of iPhone 5

The arrival of Galaxy S III ahead of iPhone 5 should give enough leverage for Samsung in its smartphone battle against Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) as Galaxy line up is popular among consumers. Korea's Samsung sold over 20 million Galaxy S II units around the world.

The Samsung Galaxy S III runs on the Android Ice Cream OS and is powered by Samsung's 1.4 GHz Exynos quad-core processor that was announced last week. The Galaxy S III has a 4.8" HD AMOLED screen and comes in an 8.6 mm slim case. The device has two cameras, one 8 MP and another 1.9 MP front-facing camera.

Some of the other salient features are voice-recognition based features, S Beam, NFC and a smaller bezel.

The GALAXY S III features ‘S Voice,' the advanced natural language user interface, to listen and respond to your words. In addition to allowing information search and basic device-user communication, S Voice presents powerful functions in regards to device control and commands.

A user use S Voice to play your favorite songs, turn the volume up or down, send text messages and emails, organize schedules, or automatically launch the camera and capture a photo. When iPhone 4S was launched last October, voice assistant Siri was its strongest selling point.

Samsung also introduced multiple content sharing platforms such as SocialTag for keeping track of social media streams, AllShare for sharing content on multiple devices and SPebble, a multimedia player.

With content and apps in the ecosystem increasingly becoming a key differentiating factor, Samsung's focus on additional content services such as the Game Hub, Video Hub (available in 7 countries) and Music Hub (17 million songs available, initially available in 6 countries) will also benefit the platform.

However, Samsung may have to reconfigure the device to accommodate the LTE baseband chip for the U.S. launch.

"From what we have seen, it's ( Galaxy S III) somewhat of an evolutionary device with enough new features to enable the #1 smartphone vendor (~30% global market share) to continue its share gains," RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue wrote in a note to clients.

The HSPA+ version of the Galaxy S III will be available on May 29 in Europe, Asia and Latin America. The LTE version of the device will follow with a launch in North America, Japan and in Korea slated for the summer, potentially ahead of the next generation of the iPhone

Samsung is the market leader in the Android smartphone market with a strong feature phone and Galaxy S II smartphone customer base. In the highly competitive smartphone arena, Samsung and Apple continue to gain market share at the expense of competitors such as RIM, Nokia, Motorola, LG and Sony, who are all donating market share.

Samsung has overtaken Nokia to become the global leader in handset shipments. Research firm Strategy Analytics said Samsung captured a 25 percent global cellphone market share versus Nokia's 22 percent. Brokerage Oppenheimer estimates Samsung shipped 94.5 million handsets/smartphones in the first quarter of 2012, above consensus of around 88 million.

Following are the technical specifications of Samsung Galaxy S III: