Hands On: Samsung Galaxy S III

11607updated 08:35 pm EDT, Thu May 3, 2012 Samsung Galaxy S III includes quad-core processor

Samsung held its "Unwrapped" event in London yesterday to show off its next handset, the Galaxy S III. Electronista attended the unveiling, and spent some time with the handset after an hour-long presentation from the company management. The new model is considerably larger, but not significantly thicker. It offers a high-quality screen, faster processor, a Siri-like voice management feature and a smooth finish in Samsung's latest attempt to best the industry-leading iPhone.Put side by side, the Galaxy S III is noticeably bigger than its predecessor, the S II. The 4.8-inch screen makes the newer handset about half an inch longer than its 4.3-inch sibling, albeit with rounder corners. The thickness isn't greatly increased, only by 0.1mm to 8.6mm. It wasn't possible to tell if it was lighter, as the devices on demonstration were secured to the desk, but the 133-gram (4.7oz) weight isn't too hard to imagine.

It did feel nice to hold in the hand, and felt fairly solid with little in the way of flex, but the lightness doesn't exactly exude confidence in the build quality. The main front button does feel quite unsatisfactory to press, but that is more a personal preference.

The HD AMOLED display seemed to look better than the S II, with a fairly high level of detail that is seemingly comparable to Apple's Retina tech, but neither the exact information was to hand nor an iPhone 4S available for a direct comparison. It is not a 'Plus' display, meaning that it uses a 'fuzzy' PenTile array with shared sub-pixels, though sharpness did not seem unduly affected.

The S III boasts a quad-core ARMv7 processor, which in the downloaded benchmarks (when combined with Android 4.0 and the ARM-based GPU) showed a fairly hefty amount of power, trouncing the Galaxy Tab, Galaxy Nexus, and Galaxy Nexus S by a considerable amount. Only the Asus Transformer Prime showed to be better in one of the tests.

Samsung's latest TouchWiz overlay really showed the display and processor off, despite the

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