Samsung is expected to launch the Galaxy S3 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of February. The finished hardware is expected to start to appear on sale at the end of March and into April.

However, the Galaxy S2 took many months to appear in the U.S., as Samsung had rearranged the design and changed features to please the U.S. networks and their customers. Given that the S2 is therefore still quite new to America, it can be expected that the S3 American launch will be several months after the UK arrival once again.

In November last year details of a next generation Samsung Exynos 4412 chipset were uncovered, describing it as a quad-core unit said to be clocked at 1.5GHz. The S3 is expected to have this processor.

Also the S3 is expected to arrive with a version of the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich release. In addition, it is expected that the Galaxy S3 handset is set to go 3-D.