Samsung Galaxy S III Will Be a Mobile World Congress No-Show

The Samsung Galaxy S III will not, as hoped, make its grand debut at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress 2012 event in February, according to Samsung. Instead, the smartphone will receive its own party.
“The successor to the Galaxy S2 smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product,” a Samsung spokesperson told TechRadar.
The timing is keeping with remarks from Samsung Mobile President J.K. Shin, who in May 2011 told the Wall Street Journal that, while the recently launched Galaxy II was busying zooming past every sales record in Korea, the company was already readying a Galaxy III for launch in early 2012.
The spokesperson added that Samsung still has plenty of its sleeves, and is “looking forward to introducing and demonstrating exciting mobile products at Mobile World Congress 2012.”
PCMag speculated that these other products could include a huge, “dinner-plate-like” Galaxy Tab running Samsung’s quad-core Exynos 5250 processor.
Or, possibly, a Tizen-powered tablet.
Samsung officials told Forbes at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January that the company is in the process of merging its Bada mobile operating system with Tizen, an HTML5-based OS that the Linux Foundation introduced in September 2011. At the time, the Foundation said it hoped to introduce the first Tizen-based products-which could include tablets, smartphones, smart televisions and in-vehicle systems-in the first quarter of 2012.
PCMag’s Sascha Segan added that Intel’s Mark Miller told him at CES that Intel was “looking to showcase Tizen-based tablet devices sometime soon.”
Adding to the speculations, The Verge reported that it has heard a Galaxy S II successor will arrive “before the summer,” and that Samsung’s big reveals may include a Galaxy Tab refresh and an LTE Windows Phone. The site reported in late December that a Samsung device, code-named Mandel, will feature 4G LTE, a screen even larger than the Samsung Focus S’ 4.3 incher and be offered alongside Nokia’s LTE Windows Phone, which could have a nice launch platform in the Mobile World Congress event.
That Samsung is keeping the introduction of its newest Galaxy phone close to its launch date, wrote TechRadar, could suggest manufacturing problems-or that Samsung, Apple’s biggest Android-supporting rival, wants to keep it closer to the launch of the iPhone 5, rumored to take place in July.
Samsung was the biggest global smartphone vendor in 2011, posting 278 percent year-over-year growth, thanks to its considerable selection of smartphones at various price points and with various features, IHS iSuppli reported Jan. 27.
Apple, however, following the introduction of its iPhone 4S in October, took top honors for the fourth quarter, taking back the top-seller title that Samsung took from it during the third quarter. All told, Apple shipped 93 million smartphones in 2011, to Samsung’s 95 million.
Regarding Samsung’s next big smartphone announcement, the company’s spokesperson added only that, “Samsung stays committed to providing the best possible mobile experiences for customers around the world.”