The long-awaited day has come, and I must say that Samsung has most certainly not disappointed with its announcement of “the next Galaxy.” Unless, of course, you loathe and despise the phablet trend, in which case this is pretty much the worst day ever. The Galaxy S III has a 4.8-inch 720p Super AMOLED screen, a 1.4GHz quad-core processor—just as we surmised recently—1GB of RAM, and 16, 32, or 64GB of storage.

“Samsung Mobile is planning a U.S. version of Galaxy S III, optimized for the fastest LTE and HSPA+ networks in the U.S., which will be available in the summer of 2012. Exact timing and retail channel availability is not being announced at this time. We believe the Galaxy S III is the most anticipated product in the 20-year history of Samsung Mobile; therefore, we will continue to share information as it becomes available.” – Samsung

In a bit of a surprise, Samsung has included S Voice, which is a step or two up from Voice Actions, clearly aimed at Siri. And facial recognition, including the ability to automatically share with recognized friends and to automatically dim or not dim the screen, depending on whether or not you are looking at it.

Since this is the year of NFC, Samsung was practically obligated to include its take on the usefulness of the wireless format, and has done so with S Beam, which uses both NFC and WiFi Direct to move data—I’ll waive judgment on this for now. All the goodies are on board, including every sensor known to man, Bluetooth 4.0, microUSB with MHL-HDMI—1080p output, of course—the battery is a 2,100 mAh Li-Ion piece, the device measures 136mm x 70mm x 8.6mm, and weights 133g.

The rear camera is 8MP and can shoot 1080p, with a 1.7MP camera in front. Both have a whole host of special features, mostly revolving around facial recognition. The recognition tech is used to tag friends, share photos with contacts, and zoom in on people’s faces, instead of that random light-post. Oh, and did I mention that the microSD port can support up to 64GB? Yes, this means that you can have a grand total of 128GB of storage on your 1.4GHz phone—Samsung apologizes for any blown minds. Somehow, I have a feeling that even the most trigger happy shutterbugs will be OK with this one.

Samsung has worked very hard on its software for this phone, as we’ve already discussed. A special app for DNLA sharing has been provided, along with a free 50GB of Dropbox storage, and the yet-to-be-released social aggregator, Flipboard. There’s a picture-in-picture option for video viewing on the phone, and the app for the camera has too many specialties to count. This phone is, in a word, awesome. Truly Samsung has nailed it with this one, from awesome hardware to awesome software, it is really the whole—large—package. No release date has been announced so far, but Europe is rumored to be getting it by June, follow closely by Asia and the US, in that order.

[The Next Web | Slash Gear]