14 DAY TRIAL // With only two weeks left until Galaxy S III is expected to hit shelves in Europe, the smartphone has been spotted at Bluetooth SIG and FCC (Federal Communication Commission), which indicates that a North American launch is closer than we might think.
We reported yesterday on two Galaxy S III variants that popped up at Bluetooth SIG, possibly heading to AT&T and T-Mobile. They are known as Samsung SGH-I747 and SGH-T999, respectively.
Today, T-Mobile's variant has been spotted at FCC with the 1700 MHz AWS band, along with HSPA+ support for 850 MHz and 1900 MHz WCDMA bands.
It has also been confirmed that the smartphone will be launched in Canada as SGH-T999V, though we're not yet sure which carriers will pick up this model.
Although Samsung failed to unveil details on the Galaxy S III exact availability in North America, it did mention the smarpthone will be available through multiple carriers “this summer.”
There's a high chance that T-Mobile's Galaxy S III will be the closest to the international version in terms of hardware configuration. Even if the European variant will be shipped with Samsung's Exynos 4212 Quad SoC, we expect AT&T's model to come with LTE support.
That means Samsung will have to replace its own chipset with Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 solution, which embeds LTE support. However, Samsung's Exynos chipset sports a quad-core processor clocked at 1.5 GHz, the S4 packs “only” a 1.5 GHz dual core CPU.
Anyway, these details have yet to be confirmed by Samsung within the next few weeks, along with the smartphone's release date.
Samsung Galaxy S III will be available for purchase in two color options: Marble White and Pebble Blue. Three models will be launched this year, each with a different amount of storage: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Stay tuned for more updates on the matter.