Samsung Galaxy S3 (Review)

Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy S3 May 3rd, 2012, ending a 15-month wait for a successor to the mobile market-slaying, 20 million-selling S2.

The South Korean phone-maker is set to tear the wrapping off its 2012 flagship phone at 7pm at a press call in London’s Earls’ Court. If you haven’t got an invite to that, though, or if yours appears to be lost in the post, a livestream of the event will be available via the Samsung Unpacked app.

Alternatively, if you’re in the vicinity of London’s, ahem, glamorous West End, you can head to the Phones4U store in Oxford Street where they’ll also be showing Sammy’s official stream.

Without doubt the year’s most anticipated Android phone, the S3 features an Exynos quad-core processor and 4.8-inches of Super AMOLED Plus HD display real estate.

Tech-world rumours also suggest that the Android Ice Cream Sandwich-toting smartie will sport a 12 megapixel camera and a waterproof coating.

But....

Uh-oh. It seems Samsung’s imminent launch of the Galaxy S3 is getting off to a bumpy start, as stock shortages and huge demand means many customers may face a wait of up to three weeks to receive their handsets.

Several major UK networks and vendors have officially confirmed reports of delays, mainly due to not having enough pebble blue units to go around to meet an unprecedented number of pre-orders.

Turns out the "special hyperglaze material" used in the pebble blue edition is causing the phone-maker a bit of a manufacturing headache.

Samsung said in a statment: "In order to meet the highest internal quality standards and to provide the best quality Galaxy S 3 to customers, a short supply of pebble blue version is expected in some regions in the next two to three weeks."

Vodafone has cited “shipping delays” as the cause of the shortages, but said “all customers who have pre-ordered the white 16GB version of the Samsung Galaxy S3 should expect to receive their new phone on the UK launch date, 30 May”.

O2, meanwhile, said it has temporarily suspended pre-orders for pebble blue model to manage demand, but did not provide specifics as to how long existing pre-orders might take to be fulfilled.

Three has told us that the blue S3 will be delayed following Samsung’s announcement. At the time of writing, the model is ‘out of stock’ on the network’s website.

We’re still awaiting word from Orange and T-Mobile on the status of their shipments. But the likely answer is they are in the same boat as everyone else and are hamstrung by limited supply.

Recently, we revealed that some 600,000 backplates for the blue edition of the S3 have been discarded due to unnamed manufacturing issues. We’re guessing the special paint Samsung used to achieve the brushed-metal effect on the blue variant is the problem.

Surprisingly, Samsung’s UK customer service has told uSwitch reader @Adamjft96 that it is manufacturing units as normal and has already shipped the launch batch to retailers. So the shortages are likely being exacerbated by excessive demand.