The Galaxy S III in US is now available via Amazon, for a price tag of $410 which is seen in one of the listings right now. What we are seeing right now is 20 phones available through Amazon for that price, but the actual price could be $600 and this device is an unlocked one, this being one of the advantages because you won’t be bound to any contracts with any network providers. The Galaxy S III Mini is compatible with the networks of AT&T and T-Mobile so you could use one of their SIM cards, but as the phone doesn’t have an LTE connectivity, you would be limited to 3G connectivity.
Oct 11, 2012
Does every high-end smartphone need to have a Mini version? Samsung thinks so. Rumors have been running around about the mini version of the latest best smartphone of Samsung, the Galaxy S III and that became the truth when Samsung launched it officially. The Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini version would come with a 4-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen, with a WVGA resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. Going with the specifications, it seems Samsung has just replicated the internal system of the Galaxy S and just shrunk the design of the Galaxy S III.
The entire design of the S3 is repeated, and the camera is of 5-megapixel lens added with a dedicated flash on the rear side. On the front side above the screen on the left side is the VGA camera, good enough for the video conferencing. The screen resolution of 480 x 800 pixels has got the picture density to 233 PPI from the 306 of the original Galaxy S III. The processor of the S3 Mini is 1GHz one, and this is a serious downgrade one might not like because there was a quad-core processor with speeds clocking at 1.5GHz in the international version of the S3. Samsung had attracted a lot of sales with the “Inspired by Nature” theme of its in the Galaxy S III, and that seems to one of the major reasons again why people would want to have the Mini version in hands, if they hadn’t tried out the costlier larger device.
Easily fitting into the pockets, and far more comfortable in the hands, is why Samsung claims as the reason why they wanted to come up with the S3 Mini. Keeping the specs low had a reason, that they didn’t want this device to match the larger sibling in any aspect, and users do get a choice now to select based on their budget, getting the same design and interface too. The Galaxy S III mini is going to come with the Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean operating system, the latest and current one in the market. Additional benefit with the special interface touched up with the TouchWiz UI includes the multi-screen option, and a few intuitive features that the dual-core processor at 1GHz could easily handle.
The S 3 Mini won’t surely be any competitive device to the high-end phones of other brands, but is quite better in a few factors when compared to the iPhone 4S too, as it has got a removable battery (this is a factor frequently stated by many users), NFC, an SD card slot for extended storage and these all won’t easily come into any iOS device any soon. The current users of Galaxy S3 won’t be too happy to hear the news, because Samsung marketed the large device with the Nature theme, and the same is now coming for quite lesser price, keep aside the external specs. To further disappointment, all the ‘awesome’ features like Smart Stay, Direct Call etc. are going to be replicated in the Mini.
Other features that the S3 mini would come with, includes S Beam which helps in transferring files between two NFC enabled devices within seconds. The other devices with the option are the Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy Note II.
There is no official word on the pricing and availability but every eye would be keen to keep a check on that. The less exciting announcement of the S3 Mini would still have many fans in anticipation about the pricing, especially when most of them have a budget set, and the larger S3 seems out of it.