Samsung confirmed well in advance of the Galaxy S III’s official announcement that their new flagship Android handset would sport the company’s new Exynos 4 Quad chipset, but it seems even clearer now that we Stateside phone geeks may have to live without it.
Droid-Life reported over the weekend that a benchmark entry for the Verizon-bound Samsung SCH-i535 appeared on Nenamark, and it seems to confirm rumors that Big Red’s Galaxy S III will indeed sport a dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor.
Nenamark’s site doesn’t specifically call out the Snapdragon S4 as the processor in question, but the evidence is nothing to sneeze at — the entry makes reference to the chipset’s 1.5GHz clock speed and the inclusion of the Adreno 225 GPU.
That means for all the nature-inspired polish that Samsung has poured into the device’s industrial design and UI, the Verizon-bound Galaxy S III could end up sharing the same brain as the similarly-modified HTC One X on AT&T. It’s not a bad thing, per se — I’d gladly give up a bit of horsepower if it meant that I got super-fast download speeds in exchange, but not everyone will be a fan of that trade-off.
Samsung Mobile head JK Shin noted onstage in London that a LTE-friendly version of the Galaxy S III would make its debut in the United States this summer, so there’s little doubt that more of these minor appearances will be discovered shortly.
One also has to wonder if this same hardware change is in the works for the rest of the carrier variants coming down the pipeline. Barring any peculiar last minute decisions, AT&T’s GSIII will almost certainly feature the same chipset given their history with One X, but T-Mobile remains a bit of a mystery. Their LTE network is nowhere near completion (CEO Philipp Humm continually pointed at 2013 during the carrier’s most recent earnings call), and their version of the Galaxy S II ended up sporting a different chipset than its cousins in order to play nice with T-Mobile’s 42Mbps HSPA+ signal.
