Samsung Galaxy S3 Coming To Contract-Free Carrier Ting On Sprint's 4G LTE Network

Tucows, a provider of domain names and other Internet services, announced Thursday that its mobile phone service, Ting, has made the new Samsung Galaxy S3 available for pre-order on its website.

According to the company, the handset will ship in the next three to six weeks and the price tags would be $529 and $579 for the 16GB and the 32GB version, respectively. Both the versions will come in Pebble Blue and Marble White.

"It's a killer device," said Scott Allan, Director of Ting. "We have a lot of potential customers who have been waiting for this. They won't have to wait much longer."

The company said that the Galaxy S3 will be the first phone it carries to use Sprint's 4G LTE network. The carrier also announced that it will pick two of the first 200 hundred pre-orders and will offer the device completely free of charge.

In the U.S., Samsung Galaxy S3 features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor. On the other hand, the international models of the smartphone are powered by the quad-core Exynos 4 chipset including the Korean version, which supports the 4G LTE technology.

Other significant features of the U.S. variants of Galaxy S3 include a 4.8-inch HD Super AMOLED display, surrounded by an ultra-thin bezel to maximize the viewing area of the handset, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, 4G LTE connectivity, 2GB of RAM, an 8 MP rear-facing camera, a 1.9MP front-facing camera and a 2100 mAh battery.

From the connectivity part, Galaxy S3 comes with NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, DLNA and WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n. It weighs 4.7 ounces (133.24 grams) and is 8.6 mm thin.

Samsung announced last month that the Galaxy S3 "has become a 10-million seller" since it was unveiled. While the company didn't give any exact numbers, the 10 million units sold until now roughly translate into 190,000 units of Galaxy S3 being sold every single day.

According to IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo, Samsung is expected to be the smartphone hero in the second quarter of this year.

"We are also expecting to see the biggest smartphone volumes ever shipped from one single vendor in one quarter, driven by strong demand of the Galaxy portfolio, particularly the Galaxy S II and S III," Reuters quoted Jeronimo saying.