Samsung Galaxy S III

The Samsung Galaxy S III is a multi-touch, slate-format smartphone designed, developed, and marketed by Samsung Electronics that runs the Android operating system. It has additional software features, expanded hardware, and a redesigned physique from its predecessor, the Samsung Galaxy S II. The S III employs an intelligent personal assistant(S Voice), eye-tracking ability, and increased storage. Although a wireless charging option was announced, it never came to fruition. Depending on country, the 4.8-inch (120 mm) smartphone comes with different processors and RAMcapacity, and 4G LTE support.^[12] The device was launched with Android 4.0.4 "Ice Cream Sandwich", was updated toAndroid 4.3 "Jelly Bean", and can be updated to Android 4.4 "KitKat" on variants with 2 GB of RAM. The phone's successor, the Samsung Galaxy S4, was announced on 14 March 2013 and was released the following month.

Following an 18-month development phase, Samsung unveiled the S III on 3 May 2012.^[13] The device was released in 28 European and Middle Eastern countries on 29 May 2012, before being progressively released in other major markets in June 2012. Prior to release, 9 million pre-orders were placed by more than 100 carriers globally.^[14] The S III was released by approximately 300 carriers in nearly 150 countries at the end of July 2012.^[4] More than 20 million units of the S III were sold within the first 100 days of release.^[15] Samsung has since sold more than 50 million units.^[5]

Due to overwhelming demand and a manufacturing problem with the blue version of the phone,^[16] there was an extensive shortage of the S III, especially in the United States. Nevertheless, the S III was well-received commercially and critically, with some technology commentators touting it as the "iPhone killer". In September 2012, TechRadarranked it as the No. 1 handset in its constantly updated list of the 20 best mobile phones,^[17] while Stuff magazine likewise ranked it at No. 1 in its list of 10 best smartphones in May 2012.^[18] The handset also won the "European Mobile Phone of 2012–13" award from the European Imaging and Sound Association,^[19] as well as T3 magazine's "Phone of the Year" award for 2012.^[20] It played a major role in boosting Samsung's record operating profit during the second quarter of 2012.^[21] As of November 2012, the S III is part of a high-profile lawsuit between Samsung and Apple.^[22] In November 2012, research firm Strategy Analytics announced that the S III had overtaken the Apple iPhone 4S to become the world's best-selling smartphone model in Q3 2012.^[23] In June 2014, Samsung also released the "Galaxy S3 Neo" which has a Quad core processor clocked either at 1.2 or 1.4 GHz. It has 1.5 GB of RAM and ships with Android 4.4.4 KitKa

Software and services

The S III is powered by Android, a Linux-based, open source mobile operating system developed by Google and introduced commercially in 2008.^[61][62] Among other features, the software allows users to maintain customized home screens which can contain shortcuts to applications and widgets for displaying information. Four shortcuts to frequently used applications can be stored on a dock at the bottom of the screen; the button in the center of the dock opens the application drawer, which displays a menu containing all of the apps installed on the device. A tray accessed by dragging from the top of the screen allows users to view notifications received from other apps, and contains toggle switches for commonly used functions. Pre-loaded apps also provide access to Google's various services. The S III uses Samsung's proprietary TouchWiz graphical user interface (GUI). The "Nature" version used by the S III has a more "organic" feel than previous versions, and contains more interactive elements such as a water ripple effect on the lock screen.^[24] To complement the TouchWiz interface, and as a response to Apple's Siri, the phone introduces S Voice, Samsung's intelligent personal assistant. S Voice can recognize eight languages including English, Korean, Italian andFrench.^[63] Based on Vlingo, S Voice enables the user to verbally control 20 functions such as playing a song, setting the alarm, or activating driving mode; it relies on Wolfram Alpha for online searches.^[50]

The S III initially shipped with Android version 4.0.4, named "Ice Cream Sandwich", which became commercially available in March 2012 with the Nexus S and Galaxy Nexus.^[64] Ice Cream Sandwich has a refined user interface, expanded camera capabilities, security features and connectivity.^[65]In mid-June 2012, Google unveiled Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean", which employs Google Now, a voice-assistant similar to S Voice, and incorporates other software changes. Samsung accommodated Jelly Bean in the S III by making last-minute hardware changes to the phone in some markets.^[66] Jelly Bean updates began rolling out to S IIIs in selected European countries, and to the T-Mobile in the United States in November 2012.^[67][68] Samsung started pushing Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean to the international version of the S III in December 2012.^[69] In December 2013, Samsung began rolling out Android 4.3 for the S III, adding user interface features back ported from the Galaxy S4, and support for the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch.^[8] In March 2014, Samsung started the rollout of 4.4.2 KitKat for the 2 GB variant of the S III.

The S III comes with a multitude of pre-installed applications, including standard Android ones like YouTube, Google+, Voice Search, Google Play, Gmail, Map, and Calendar, in addition to Samsung-specific apps such as ChatON, Game Hub, Music Hub, Video Hub, Social Hub and Navigation.^[54][56] To address the fact that iPhone users are reluctant to switch to Android because the OS is not compatible with iTunes, from June 2012 Samsung offered customers of its Galaxy series the Easy Phone Sync app to enable the transfer of music, photos, videos, podcasts, and text messages from an iPhone to a Galaxy device.^[70] The user is able to access Google Play, a digital-distribution multimedia-content service exclusive to Android, to download applications, movies, music, TV programs, games, books, and magazines.

Apart from S Voice, Samsung has directed the bulk of the S III's marketing campaign towards the device's "smart" features, which facilitate improved human-device interactivity. These features include: "Direct Call", or the handset's ability to recognise when a user wants to talk to somebody instead of messaging them, if they bring the phone to their head; "Social Tag", a function that identifies and tags people in a photo and shares photos with them; and "Pop Up Play", which allows a video and other applications to occupy the screen at the same time.^[71] In addition, the S III can beam its screen to a TV or be used as a remote controller (AllShare Cast and Play) and share photos with people who are tagged in them (Buddy Photo Share).^[71][71]

The S III can access and play traditional media formats such as music, movies, TV programs, audiobooks, and podcasts, and can sort its media library alphabetically by song title, artist, album, playlist, folder, and genre. One notable feature of the S III's music player is Music Square, which analyses a song's intensity and ranks the song by mood so that the user can play songs according to their current emotional state.^[48] The device also introduced Music Hub, an online music store powered by 7digital with a catalogue of over 19 million songs.^[72]

The S III was the first smartphone to support Voice Over LTE with the introduction of HD Voice service in South Korea.^[73] The phone enables video calling with its 1.9 MP front-facing camera, and with support for the aptX codec, improves Bluetooth-headset connectivity.^[74] Texting on the S III does not embody any new significant features from the S II. Speech-to-text is aided by the Vlingo and Google's voice-recognition assistant. Not unlike other Android devices, there are a multitude of third-party typing applications available that could complement the S III's stock keyboard.^[75]

On 18 June 2012, Samsung announced that the S III would have a version with enterprise software under the company's Samsung Approved For Enterprise (SAFE) program, an initiative facilitating the use of its devices for "bring your own device" scenarios in workplace environments.^[76] The enterprise S III version would support AES-256 bit encryption, VPN and Mobile Device Management functionality, and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.^[77] It was scheduled to be released in the United States in July 2012. The enterprise version was expected to penetrate the business market dominated by Research in Motion's BlackBerry, following the release of similar enterprise versions of the Galaxy Note, Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab line of tablet computers.^[77][78]

A separate "Developer Edition" of the S III was made available from Samsung's Developer Portal. It came with an unlockable bootloader to allow the user to modify the phone's software