Samsung’s launching the Galaxy S III in Sydney tomorrow — or if it doesn’t, there will be a lot of disappointed Galaxy fans and some very confused vendor partners. We already know a lot about the Galaxy S III, but are you still feverishly waiting for it?
There was a lot of disappointment when, immediately following the London launch of the Galaxy S III, Samsung Australia issued a statement that there were “no plans to make any announcements at this time“.
It looks as though it’s just about statement time, however, with Ausdroid noting that there’s a number of Galaxy S III posters being plastered all over Sydney, and Vodafone said to be live-streaming an event tomorrow morning that pretty much every tech journalist (including yours truly) has been invited to. Not exactly subtle, in other words, although the speedy nature of the launch does give me some hope that we might see actual Galaxy S III units on store shelves sooner rather than later; again that’s something I’ve written about before. The flip side of that is that a launch event doesn’t always mean that a product will be immediately available right after the event.
There’s no doubt that the Galaxy S III will sit in the upper pantheon of smartphones this year, but it’s hardly alone in this. Just yesterday, Telstra confirmed its 4G version of the HTC One XL with 32GB of onboard memory, making it in effect a faster version of the One X you can already get on Vodafone and Optus. On the Windows Phone side of the fence, there’s the Lumia 800, the Titan 4G, and soon the Lumia 900 to contend with. Apple, as ever, is lurking in the wings, and rumour mills are working overtime trying to work out if Tim Cook will announce the next iPhone at this year’s WWDC.
That’s the high-end market the Galaxy S III faces even if it launches tomorrow. It doesn’t discount its interesting proposition, but it’s solidly a challenge. Now that the hype has died down, are you still hyper-keen on the Galaxy S III?