All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
Samsung's next flagship phone, the Galaxy S III, is heading to five carriers in the U.S. -- AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and U.S. Cellular. But when it gets here, the most anticipated Android phone of 2012 won't include a quad-core processor like the model being sold in European markets.
Specific U.S. arrival dates will vary carrier by carrier. On Monday, Sprint said it will begin taking S III pre-orders on June 5 for a June 21 hardware launch. T-Mobile announced it will also begin selling the S III on June 21, but so far, it's not offering the the phone for pre-order.
Verizon announced Monday that it will begin taking pre-orders for the S III on June 6, and that the new phone would arrive in the "coming weeks." U.S. Cellular will begin taking pre-orders on June 12, and stated the S III would arrive sometime in July.
AT&T said it will begin taking pre-orders for the S III on June 6, but the carrier hasn't yet said when its launch date will be. While every carrier will sell the S III in its Ceramic White and Pebble Blue colors, AT&T will also sell an exclusive red variant of the handset.
Sprint and Verizon will sell the S III at the same price: $200 for 16GB of storage and $250 for 32GB of storage, on respective two-year contracts. AT&T said it will sell the 16GB model at $200 and offer a $39 16GB microSD card for those looking for more storage. T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular haven't yet announced pricing, but it should be about the same as what AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have laid out.
One of the S III's major rivals is undoubtably the HTC One X, our current favorite Android smartphone. And, like the One X, the U.S. version of the S III will ditch a highly touted quad-core processor in favor of a dual-core CPU.
Last month, we asked, "Does the S III need a quad-core CPU?" Evidently, the answer is no, it doesn't. While most of the world will receive an S III with Samsung's own Exynos 4 Quad CPU, the U.S. version will pack a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4.
The Snapdragon S4 chip found in the S III is the same processor found in the HTC One S and the U.S. version of the One X. In comparing the quad-core One X, which uses an Nvidia Tegra 3 CPU, and the dual-core One X, we noticed no significant performance loss and it's entirely possible the dual-core S III will be blazing fast as well. We'll let you know as soon as we get our hands on a review unit, which should be soon.
Had the S III arrived in the U.S. with a quad-core processor, it would have been the first smartphone to do so. While there are plenty of quad-core tablets stateside, there isn't yet a single four-core phone here.
