ITWire

On top of an expected AUD $5.7 billion in “operating profit” for the second quarter of 2012, Samsung has announced intergalactic levels of sales performance for its flagship Galaxy SIII handset.

The head of Samsung’s mobile comms division, J.K. Shin, spoke of sales “appearing” to “exceed 10 million units” as reported by AFP.  

The SIII has certainly managed to provide solid competition to HTC’s own range of One-series smartphones, also designed to not only outclass the iPhone 4S, but take on whatever Apple has planned for the iPhone 5, due within the next three months, too.

The SIII of S3 has a 4.8-inch screen compared with the much smaller 3.5-inches of the current iPhone, an S-Voice feature to take on Siri, a quad-core processor to two-up the dual-cores in the 4S, 1GB of RAM compared to the 512MB in the 4S, and even an intelligent camera that can be set to “watch” your facial movements, so if your eyes are fixed onto the screen, the screen power saving feature can be postponed.

Samsung’s SIII is a large phone that, at least for some functions, works better when two hands are used rather than one – it really is a large phone, and one that, like with the iPhone, you’ll want to immediately purchase a protective case for.

While non-4G models of the SIII are equipped with a quad-core processor, and the first 4G models in the US were equipped with a dual-core processor because of difficulties in getting a quad-core chip with 4G capabilities at that time, that limitation has now been overcome.

Samsung very recently introduced a quad-core, 4G-class Galaxy SIII model in South Korea, going one further and beefing up the RAM to a whopping 2GB.

We last took a good look at the Samsung Galaxy SIII in our recent article, “Let’s face it, Galaxy SIII designed to beat iPhone 5 not just 4S”, while others have been busy X-raying and “tearing down” the SIII to research its innards.

Given the incredibly litigious goings-on between Apple and Samsung at the moment, and given Samsung’s status at top Android OEM maker with the most profits (after Apple), Samsung must be very pleased its SIII model has done so well, with still so upwards of around 12 weeks to go before the iPhone 5 is expected to arrive in “the fourth quarter” of 2012.

So, with 10+ million Galaxy SIII models now sold, and millions more to come, Samsung’s status as genuine Apple challenger is more set in stone than ever before, presumably putting under ever higher pressure the level of “co-opetition” going on between Apple and Samsung.

Apple will clearly go absolutely gangbusters all its own when the iPhone 5 is released, but with the SIII designed as much as possible to counter both the 4S and iPhone 5 threats, the smartphone wars and game of phone thrones is only hotting up to ever more intense levels.