The handset could become official at the MWC show in Barcelona

Feb 2, 2012 11:41 GMT  ·  By

In addition to the already confirmed successor to Samsung’s Galaxy S II, the one that the South Korean mobile phone maker is set to unveil to the world in the first half of the year, we might see another handset launched in the series, one that has yet to receive a formal confirmation.

Supposedly dubbed Galaxy S II Plus, the smartphone was already spotted on benchmarking websites, featuring hardware specs that place it above the flagship Galaxy S II model.

While the Galaxy S III, supposedly the actual successor of Galaxy S II, won’t be unveiled this month at the Mobile World Congress, the Galaxy S II Plus should make an official appearance at the event in Barcelona.

The guys over at Pocketnow claim that the handset has already been seen in the An3DBenchXL’s benchmark database, and that it indeed featured the Galaxy S 2+ moniker.

Courtesy of the speed-testing tool, we also learn some of the hardware specifications the device will arrive on shelves with, such as the better 1.5GHz dual-core application processor, compared to what Galaxy S II had to offer.

However, the device would feature a display capable of the same 480 x 800 WVGA resolution as the predecessor (Samsung even launched upgraded Galaxy S II models in the US, packing them with faster CPUs).

It would not be the first time that Samsung chose to launch an upgraded flavor of a flagship device. Galaxy S received a similar treatment when the handset vendor launched Galaxy S Plus, a device packing a 1.4GHz single-core processor, up from the 1GHz CPU inside the original.

Galaxy S II Plus has made an appearance online a few days ago, when it was rumored to have been set for launch in the first half of the year, along with the aforementioned Galaxy S III and with Galaxy Note S, the successor of world’s largest Android smartphone.