No surprises here, the Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone is official. The Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich device will now happily take the throne as Samsung’s flagship smartphone and it has been donned with some amazing hardware and software features.
First-off it features a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display with a 720p resolution. This is unfortunately not an AMOLED Plus RGB screen but rather it features the same PenTile Matrix RGBG technology as the Galaxy Nexus. You’ll find a new 1.4GHz quad-core Samsung Exynos 4412 SoC inside that should keep things speedy and a relatively large 2,100mAh battery to power it, and yeah that’s actually a removable one. The Galaxy S III can also do wireless charging.
The Galaxy S III will be offered in three storage capacities, 16, 32GB and 64GB and the ability to add more via the microSD card slot. It has 8-megapixel rear and 1.9-megapixel front-facing cameras with the a 990ms start-up time (they could have just said 1 second), 3.3 frames-per-second burst shooting ability and will also happily pick the best shot out of eight for you.
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Why have support for just one satellite navigation system when you can have two. Qualcomm announced support for GPS and GLONASS for its Snapdragon S2 and S3 SoCs last month and now Sony has just posted on its developers blog that it would enable GLONASS support on a bunch of its current Xperia devices and the upcoming Xperia S and Xperia Ion.
We’ve seen support for GLONASS increasing since the Russian satellite system was completed in October 2011, but here is a quick intro first. GLONASS is a radio-based satellite navigation system and the Russian equivalent to the US developed GPS. The first GLONASS satellites were launched during Soviet times but the system has had a bumpy ride since then. Following a number of upgrades it can now rival GPS – because of the positioning of its satellites, GLONASS is more accurate than GPS in northern latitudes.
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Sony announced its latest Xperia S Android handset at CES this week and we now have UK pricing and availability. The Xperia S (a.k.a. Nozomi) will be released on March 5th in the UK for £468 ($719 and €560) for the 32GB version, at least according to mobile device online retailer Clove.
The Xperia S has a 4.3-inch 1280 x 720 gap-less optically laminated display, 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and a impressive 12-megapixel Exmor back-lit sensor rear camera.
It will be sold in both white and black, though initially the white Xperia S will be a Phones4U UK exclusive. The Xperia S includes NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and HDMI, together with GPS and GLONASS navigation support. There is no external microSD card slot — so it would probably mean no mass storage support — and it will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Sony however promised that it will be updated to Ice Cream Sandwich in the second quarter of the year. Did we mentioned it’s also PlayStation certified.
So no surprises here, we got what we expected. Motorola announced its latest flagship handset the Droid RAZR. It will be available in North America, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa starting November. Verizon will carry the phone under its Droid line in the U.S. for $299 under contract — the phone will be known as simply RAZR elsewhere in the world.
As rumored, the Motorola Droid RAZR flaunts a 4.3-inch 960×540 qHD Super AMOLED Gorilla glass display and a 1.2GHz dual-core processor. It’s an LTE 4G device on Verizon and HSPA elsewhere in the world. It’s wrapped in Kevlar no less, while the phone has received a special nanotech splash-guard coating, so it should be able to take a beating (and splashing) despite its super-thin profile. Motorola is claiming “world thinnest smartphone” at just 7.1mm. Other features include 1GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in storage, Bluetooth 4.0 no less, GLONASS support on top of GPS, 1780mAh battery and it will weight 127g. Oh, it will run Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread on launch.
You can find the full specs and pictures after the break.
The RAZR can become friends with a bunch of accessories and docks, such as two lapdocks the 100 and 500 Pro, HD dock and wireless keyboard.
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So, here is something we missed when we initially looked at the new Galaxy Note; when we had another look at the official mini-site we noticed that Samsung has included support for GLONASS in addition to GPS.
GLONASS is a radio-based satellite navigation system, the Russian equivalent to the U.S.’s GPS. GLONASS was initiated during Soviet Union times but had then fallen into disrepair, it has since then been upgraded in various stages and can now begin to rival GPS — GLONASS is actually more accurate than GPS in northern latitudes.
The biggest benefits, however, come when you combine both systems together, GLONASS and GPS; this allows a device to get more accurate positioning and/or faster fix particularly in deep urban environments.
Now, the specifications for the Galaxy Note mention “A-GPS, Glonass”, so there is good possibility that Samsung can enable the device to use both, for better positioning. Well, we shall see soon, when the Note finally lands later this year.
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