Samsung Galaxy S III on sale in India today, likely to cost Rs 42500 - Firstpost

Samsung’s much awaited smartphone, the Galaxy S III is all set to be released in India today at 1.30 pm IST. Samsung will be broadcasting a live webcast of the event. You can click here for the web-cast.

The world’s largest smartphone maker has not yet announced the final price which will only be revealed at the launch today. However media reports quoting ‘sources’ have said that it will cost Rs 42500 which will put it in direct competition with Apples iPhone 4S. The cost of pre-booking the phone via Samsung’s online store is Rs 2,000. The phone is available in two colours, White Marble and Pebble blue.

The S III was released in Europe on Monday with a music service, MusicHub which is seen as a rival to Apple’s  iTunes. The phone has received rave reviews already and Samsung had nearly 9 million pre-order bookings for the phone before its launch.

The Galaxy S III has 3 versions: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Other key technical specifications of the phone are :

Samsung's much awaited smartphone, the Galaxy SIII is all set to be released for sale in India today at 1.30 pm IST. AP

• A 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels.

• An 8 megapixel rear camera with flash and zero shutter lag and a 1.9 megapixel front camera with face recognition related options.

• The device is super light as it weighs 133g and is only 8.6 mm thick.

• It has a Samsung’s quad-core microprocessor and has 1GB RAM.

• S beam which allows users to transport files upto 1GB to another S III without using Wi-fi or data Internet.

In addition Dropbox has promised every consumer who registers the phone free 50GB cloud storage space.

The phone also comes with S Voice command, which is touted as Samsung’s rival to Apple’s Siri. The S III runs on Android 4.0 or Ice Cream Sandwich.

Are you planning to get one?

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Samsung, Qualcomm Team to Advance Wireless Charging - PCWorld

Wireless heavyweights Samsung and Qualcomm have joined forces with five other firms to form a coalition that will work to address an array of issues surrounding wireless power chargers.

The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) is seeking to develop a new wireless charging technology that will enable users repower a broad range of devices in cars, on tabletops or in airports, for instance, and to charge multiple devices at once.

The group is looking to develop a global industry specification for the technology that will win the blessing of standards bodies and certification and testing groups.

"Samsung has spent more than five years on this technology," Joonho Park, a senior vice president at Samsung who oversees the company's standards team, said at a launch event for the A4WP here at CTIA's Wireless 2012 conference. "Wireless power truly brings the product differentiation that is the focus [of why] Samsung's really going after this technology."

In addition to Samsung and Qulacomm, the A4WP also counts Ever Win Industries, Gill Industries, Peiker Acustic, Powermat Technologies and SK Telecom as founding members.

Park said the alliance will work to develop a certification for the wireless charging technology by the end of this year or early 2013.

Wireless chargers have already seen considerable interest both from established players like Samsung and upstarts looking to carve out a niche, with Powermat among the most prominent. But like most young technologies, the wireless charging segment does not have a set of specifications that are broadly agreed upon across the industry.

From a user's perspective, the idea is alluring, particularly at a time when people are juggling a growing number of mobile devices. Users could simultaneously charge their smartphones, tablets, e-readers or other devices simply by laying them on a desktop enabled with a charging transmitter, for instance.

The advent of wireless chargers "follows a very natural trend that we've been witnessing in the past decade or so to increase the wireless capabilities of devices," said Jason dePreaux, a research manager at IMS Research. "The power cord is really the last remaining aspect that is physically tethered to the device."

Edward Tiedemann, senior vice president of engineering and a fellow at Qualcomm, emphasized that the new alliance is hoping to attract broad industry participation and engagement in what he said will be an open process of developing the wireless charging standard.

"The key aspect of this is to develop the ecosystem," he said.

Tiedemann said that the new group will be organized around three core missions. The first will focus on developing the technical standards for wireless charging devices, including work with domestic, regional and international standards bodies. Then the group will also reach out to the testing certification and regulatory authorities, Tiedemann said, noting that those groups are commonly different from the standards-setting bodies. Finally, the A4WP will work to gin up industry adoption of its wireless charging specification through a technical marketing and communications program.

The standard will set parameters for features such as the signaling protocol, modes of operation and minimum requirements for minimum power delivery, Tiedemann said. But he insisted that the group will not seek to micromanage the ecosystem, affirming that the standard will not define aspects such as the form factor of the chargers, battery requirements or antenna specifications.

Kenneth Corbin is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who covers government and regulatory issues for CIO.com.

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Read more about mobile/wireless in CIO's Mobile/Wireless Drilldown.

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iPhone 5 challenger? Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone to compete with future ... - WPTV

LONDON (CNN) -- Samsung has launched its Galaxy S III smartphone, which it hopes will help solidify the company as the leading challenger to Apple and its iPhone 4S.

The new handset, with a whopping 4.8-inch screen and an 8-megapixel camera, was unveiled at a slick launch party in London on Thursday, complete with a backing orchestra.

Billed by Samsung as having been "designed for humans," the phone features voice and eye-recognition technology that the company hopes will set the handset ahead of its rivals in the crowded smartphone market.

Samsung has overtaken Nokia as the world's best-selling mobile phone maker, and Juniper Research reported Tuesday that Samsung also overtook Apple in smartphone sales in the first quarter, in what it described as "increasingly a two-horse race."

The new Galaxy handset, which runs the most up-to-date version of Google's mobile operating system -- Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich -- recognizes when a user is looking at it, and ensures the screen doesn't go dark while it has eye contact.

S Voice technology -- Samsung's equivalent of Apple's Siri -- enables users to wake up their phone with a simple voice command. And voice recognition goes further -- saying: "Hi Galaxy ... picture," for example, opens the phone's camera app, and saying "cheese" takes a picture. Face-recognition software then identifies Facebook friends within images, and prompts the user to share them.

Samsung -- a sponsor of the Olympics -- revealed it will be sending devices enabled with mobile payment technology to the 2012 games in London.

Chris Hall, editor of technology website Pocket-lint, said he was "pleasantly surprised" by the new phone.

"When you compare it to the nearest rival it feels like they have pulled off a bit of a trick," he said. "They have put some effort into software innovations, particularly the eye recognition. The voice recognition feels like a reaction to Siri on the iPhone, but I don't know many people who actually talk to their phones."

"I think the success of the Galaxy S II proves people want something different that isn't an iPhone, and I think the S III is a valid successor to the S II." Samsung said the phone will be available in Europe on May 29, followed by launches in Asia, Africa and Latin America. A 4G version will go on sale in North America, Japan and South Korea in the summer.

Samsung did not announce what prices on the phone are expected to be.

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