Snapdeal, one of India’s most aggressive online retailers known for cut-throat prices, has launched pre-booking on the new Samsung Galaxy S3 in India.
The phone is being launched in India at 1:30 pm on Thursday, you can watch the launch live
The website has not declared the final price of Samsung Galaxy S III, but prebooking can be done by paying a price of Rs 250 per piece.
The phone is priced at aroundt €599 ($786, Rs 42,000) in Europe and is likely to be priced in the same range in India as well. The S2 was priced at Rs 33,000 when it was launched in India exactly a year ago.
The difference between the prebooking amount and the final price of the Galaxy S3 has to be paid at the time of intimation by Snapdeal that the phone is ready to ship. If the customer decides to buy the phone from some other outlet and cancels the prebooking, the Rs 250 will be forfeited.
The S3 has already been launched in Europe, but is yet to reach North America or most Asian markets.
India is one of the largest mobile phone markets, with nearly 21.5 crore (215 million) phones sold every year.
It is interesting that the other ecommerce giant, Flipkart, is yet to launch prebooking on the Galaxy SIII.
The S3 is the third in Samsung’s flagship high-end smartphone series, Galaxy S. The Galaxy S2 was given the title of the best selling smartphone in 2011, according to some industry trackers.
The Galaxy SIII is arguably the most advanced phone available in the global market at present.
The most advanced smartphone available in the Indian market at present is the HTC One X, priced at Rs 36,000.
Both the Galaxy S3 and the HTC One X have Android 4, 8 megapixel cameras, shoots ful HD 1080p video, 1 GB of RAM, HD display (1280*720 pixels), quad-core processors, 21 Mbps 3G and weigh around 130 gm.
The main points of difference are display size and type, processor speed, graphics processor type, front-camera resolution, availability of memory card option, battery capacity.
In nearly all these cases, the comparison is in favor of the Galaxy SIII. For example, the S3 has a MALI graphics processor which also powers the Galaxy Tab 680 and Galaxy Tab 2. The processor, from ARM, is widely seen as among the most powerful mobile graphics engine out there.
HTC One X is powered by Nvidia’s GeForce graphics unit.
The S3 also has a 4.8 inch display, which has a surface area of 9.84 inches, 4.3% more than that of the HTC One X.
The front camera on the Galaxy S3 is a 1.9 megapixel unit, compared to the 1.3 megapixel one on the HTC One X.
Similarly, the Galaxy S III supports up to 64 GB of external memory in the form of a micro SD card slot, something which is lacking in the HTC One X. The S3 also has a bigger battery and uses a different a different display technology.
In conclusion, it may be said that while the difference in specifications are unlikely to make a noticeable difference (unless you can notice a 4% difference in display size), the Galaxy S3 can claim to be slightly more highly speced that the One X.
In addition, Samsung is increasingly focusing on differentiating their phone on software, and not just increasing the hardware capacity.
The new phone already comes with a eye-tracking software that prevents it from going to sleep as long as you are looking at it, for example, while reading something off it.
Another example is direct call – If you’ve got a contact on your screen, there’s no need to hit call: simply hold the device up to your face and the number will be dialled automatically.
It also has a voice assistant, like the iPhone’s Siri, called S-Voice. This allows you to control your phone through voice, eg to turn up the volume, and to ask it questions.
The phone also supports S-Beam – high speed file transfer via NFC (near field communications) and WiFi Direct, between two phones touched together, operating at up to 300Mbps.
Snapdeal will sell the S3s based on first-booked-first-served principle. Users will have to pay the full amount as soon as they get an email intimating them about the availability of the phone on the website.
It is expected that other players will also start opening booking for Samsung Galaxy S3 in the coming days.