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In just a week’s time — that’s seven long days if you’re an Android fan — Samsung will take the stage in London to unveil the next Galaxy smartphone.
If you ask me, the May 3 event isn’t a moment too soon. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a constant stream of purported specs, rumored details, and conjecture. In fact, when I look back over the history of Android, I can’t think of another smartphone that has garnered this level of prerelease hysteria.
Today brought yet another round of hardware rumors landing online, this time from unofficial Samsung blog SamMobile. Not only does this leak offer a fresh set of details, but also it spills official-looking renderings from the user manual.
While the specs don’t exactly mirror other reports from the past, they fall in line with the general consensus. The display is listed as being a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen, the camera is pegged at 8 megapixels, and on the processor front, SamMobile advises that the GT-I9300 offers a 1.5GHz quad-core CPU.
If you’ve been paying close attention lately then you already know that these specs don’t match up with what Samsung tells us. According to the manufacturer, the next Galaxy will boast a 1.4GHz quad-core processor, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, HSPA+ 21Mbps, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), and 1080p HD video recording and playback.
Given that no two leaks have been the same for the Galaxy S III, I wonder which of the rumors is right. Watching the blogs and fandroids whip themselves into a frenzy, I am reminded of how Apple fanatics must feel each cycle.
Indeed, given that so many things about the handset could be amazing, each of the leaks feels at least partially legitimate. Of course, we could be looking at multiple iterations of the same family of devices, each being tested by various partners.
On that note, I seriously hope that next week Samsung will address models for the U.S. market. Considering that LTE variants may have dual-core Snapdragon S4 CPUs inside instead of the quad-core stuff, I have to wonder what else might differ in my local counterparts.
Will one carrier buck the trend and offer a sliding QWERTY keyboard? Will one decide to skip this generation in favor of something else? I don’t know about you, but I can’t take much more of this!
