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[Rumor] Samsung Galaxy S3 to revisit April launch date
The Korean electronics powerhouse mentioned earlier that its new flagship device would be introduced in the first half of 2012 at a dedicated launch event. Suggestions that the device would make its entrance in April were shot down and the Samsung loyal were left only to be looking at a May launch. On the contrary, an official word from Samsung’s Greater China President Kim Young-Ha has made us retrain our eyes on a possible April launch after he spoke with Chinese media about the company’s plans for the Chinese market.
Reports from Korea have stated that Samsung is considering moving the launch up to April for a reason we are unsure about. While that may be, our folks over at TheNextWeb have speculated that Samsung is looking for a way to finalise plans for the flagship product to be the Official Olympic handset as Samsung is heavily involved in the London Olympics which will be held in July. To make sure capitalization is optimum on the global event, Samsung would have to plan and execute the launch of the S3 to perfect to ensure the worldwide event boosts the sales of the handset.
This information is the latest of many rumors that have encircled the much awaited device as we saw earlier this week that Samsung would be outfitting the handset with its own Exynos quad-core processor instead of relying on Qualcomm. While all this speculation can only be good for the company, it also offers many people hope as a large number of them see the upcoming S3 as the only real contender to Apple’s dominance in smartphone market shares.
The Fairphone 2 was first unveiled in June earlier this year, where this particular handset carried a modular design while featuring majority of its components that have been sourced from conflict-free mines. It seems that this particular handset that you can purchase with a clear conscience has begun to ship to those who happen to live across Europe.
Fairphone announced in a blog post, “It’s been almost two years in the making, and some of the earliest buyers have been patiently waiting since July to receive their new phones. As community manager, I want to personally welcome the new batch of Fairphone owners to our community.” The initial 1,000 units are tipped to ship this month, before the other pre-orders follow in January 2016.
In terms of hardware specifications, the Fairphone 2 will run on a Snapdragon 801 chipset, has a 5″ 1080p screen with Gorilla Glass 3 protection, 2GB of RAM, an 8MP camera, with Android 5.1 Lollipop in tow. It will be a dual SIM capable handset with a microSD memory card slot and plays nice with 4G LTE networks, retailing for approximately €525 a pop.
It looks like the upcoming flagship model from Xiaomi will feature NFC support, at least based on a document that was released by China UnionPay. Just in case you are scratching your head and wondering who China UnionPay is, they happen to be the only domestic payment gateway supplier and card organization, and hence, to see them offer detailed support concerning the newly released NFC-based payment system points to the very real possibility of the upcoming Xiaomi Mi 5 featuring NFC capability.
After all, the Xiaomi Mi 3 was also mentioned on the list, which so happens to feature NFC, and there is no mention of the Xiaomi Mi 4 which does not come with NFC. Still, such a new payment system would be the ideal tool to see the reintroduction of NFC to the flagship model.
OnePlus did make an announcement in the previous month that the Ceramic variant of the OnePlus X will be released on November 24. True to their word, they did exactly that – although only a pitiful number of units were made available, and not only that, this was through a charity auction. Thankfully for the rest of the masses who are on the lookout for this device, it has gone on sale officially already.
Needless to say, this particular variant is available only by an invitation, although do bear in mind that standard OnePlus X invites are not good here – you will still need to snag yourself a specific Ceramic variant invite before you make a purchase. OnePlus is also on the lookout to offer additional methods of picking up this smartphone, although no further details were revealed.
The OnePlus X Ceramic will be available only in select markets, where among them include Europe, India, and Hong Kong. To date, we do know that OnePlus had made only 10,000 units of the handset available. A case of the early bird getting the proverbial worm here?