News - Samsung GALAXY S III 16GB White on-time, others, not so much

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Vodafone confirms delays of several weeks for several variants of the S III.

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Read more.

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Samsung simply hasn't built-up enough stock to meet pre-order requirements, focusing on the 16GB Marble White variant, which will no doubt be the most popular, with consumers tending to favour SD cards over premium-priced internal memory and with white as a safer colour for those who've yet to try the device hands-on.

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Strange that Voda are having problems getting anything-but-16GB-in-white because Amazon's still advertising the 16GB blue for delivery tomorrow on SIM-free.

As to the bigger memoried versions, the quote above is right on the money (weak pun intended). When I placed my SIII pre-order (in white, so hopefully Amazon's courier will deliver it early tomorrow) I bought a 64GB uSDXC card too - and the total cost came to about the £550 that seems to be the lowest price on Google Shopping for a 32GB SIM-free SIII. And - to me at least - getting 80GB for the same price as a 32GB (albeit with the latter having the option to go to 96GB) seems like a good deal to me. 80GB is more than enough for a pretty healthy collection of music and I'm not planning to keep a lot of video on mine.

I wonder if they are fixing the eMMC firmware on the S3? It seems to be effecting the galaxy notes ICS upgrade quite badly (See http://www.xda-developers.com/android/hard-brick-bug-on-galaxy-s-ii-and-note-leaked-ics-kernels/ but note its still a problem with the officially released firmware). Maybe they are trying to patch up the firmware in the factory before shipping?

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Originally Posted by cheesemp

I wonder if they are fixing the eMMC firmware on the S3? It seems to be effecting the galaxy notes ICS upgrade quite badly (See http://www.xda-developers.com/androi...d-ics-kernels/ but note its still a problem with the officially released firmware). Maybe they are trying to patch up the firmware in the factory before shipping?

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Hmm, I'm not so sure - all the systems referred to in that article were originally GB'd and are now receiving an ICS "upgrade". However, as we've seen elsewhere - e.g. Sony, Asus to my knowledge - the GB->ICS upgrade can be pretty problematic. I've got personal experience of an upgraded Arc S having some unexplainable/unrepeatable force-closures, and whilst my TF101 ICS upgrade was problem-free, I know others weren't so lucky.

If the freely available gen is to be believed, the SIII has been designed for ICS. And I would suggest that if Sammy DO have problems with it, then given the importance to their bottom line, they'll have everyone from the CTO downwards working on it. (And I hadn't realised how difficult it was to type with your fingers crossed until doing that last sentence!)

Of course, that does remind me of the oft-quoted maxim that a new Android device doesn't really start to achieve it's true capabilities until the first or second OTAU. Kind of like Windows and it's service packs... ;)

Crossy - its not the actually upgrade thats the problem. Its the fact that ICS uses some wipe command on the internal eMMC storage (like trim on an SSD). This is called when wiping the phone settings from the settings menu. Once this has occurred the eMMC is corrupt in such a way it causes the eMMC controller to lock up and needs power cycling to work again - of course if this occurs in the boot sectors its good bye phone. Over on XDA where i've read up on this they have been escalating this with samsung on several fronts and the engineers at android and appear to have got the message across. I'm just wondering if they are upgrade the eMMC firmware on the s3 to work around this (The galaxy nexus already has this fix as android devs found it during the phone development). Just a theory of course...

On my recently upgraded S2 I keep getting a message to reformat my SSD card...

Damn, annoying that mine'll probably be delayed, but I'd rather that then have to RMA it after a couple of weeks.

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Originally Posted by crossy

As to the bigger memoried versions, the quote above is right on the money (weak pun intended). When I placed my SIII pre-order (in white, so hopefully Amazon's courier will deliver it early tomorrow) I bought a 64GB uSDXC card too - and the total cost came to about the £550 that seems to be the lowest price on Google Shopping for a 32GB SIM-free SIII. And - to me at least - getting 80GB for the same price as a 32GB (albeit with the latter having the option to go to 96GB) seems like a good deal to me. 80GB is more than enough for a pretty healthy collection of music and I'm not planning to keep a lot of video on mine.

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You could also buy multiple MicroSD Cards (although having written that it's sounding like not such a good idea) and, say, store some movies on a couple of spare cards which you pop in when you want to watch them. Course, not losing the cards could be a slight issue ;)

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Originally Posted by Valinor

You could also buy multiple MicroSD Cards (although having written that it's sounding like not such a good idea) and, say, store some movies on a couple of spare cards which you pop in when you want to watch them. Course, not losing the cards could be a slight issue ;)

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Good point - however, there's a lot of talk that the SIII (or should that be "S3" - I'm not 100% sure) not only has full "USB Host" support, but it's also capable of USB OTG mode. Personally I find this very unlikely (because, to be honest, if it could do that then I'm 100% sure that it'd be mentioned by Samsung!). However, if it is true then it does lead to the interesting prospect of perhaps being able to use an externally-powered disk crate on the back of the SIII.

On the other hand, like I said, I've got a 64GB uSDXC card and that'll be more than enough to accommodate my backups, apps, entire music library and a good few episodes of Futurama.

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Originally Posted by crossy

Good point - however, there's a lot of talk that the SIII (or should that be "S3" - I'm not 100% sure) not only has full "USB Host" support, but it's also capable of USB OTG mode. Personally I find this very unlikely (because, to be honest, if it could do that then I'm 100% sure that it'd be mentioned by Samsung!). However, if it is true then it does lead to the interesting prospect of perhaps being able to use an externally-powered disk crate on the back of the SIII.

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The Exynos 4 Quad has USB 2.0 OTG built-in, Samsung will probably have this element routed instead of the host option in order to act as a client, in which case Android 4.0 is likely to support its OTG features, but indeed we'll find out soon (mine's arriving tomorrow though I may have to go and collect it Thursday :( )

If they are short on how many they can produce, surely it would make sense to supply the highest margin phones first, i.e. 32gb ones? Weird.

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Originally Posted by miniyazz

If they are short on how many they can produce, surely it would make sense to supply the highest margin phones first, i.e. 32gb ones? Weird.

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Depends if they have had a lot more 16gb orders than 32gb it makes sense to push those orders. Doubt the margins on the two are vastly different.

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Originally Posted by Scribe

The Exynos 4 Quad has USB 2.0 OTG built-in, Samsung will probably have this element routed instead of the host option in order to act as a client, in which case Android 4.0 is likely to support its OTG features, but indeed we'll find out soon (mine's arriving tomorrow though I may have to go and collect it Thursday :( )

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Hmm, didn't know that. Might even be worth ponying up less than the price of a computer mag to get a uUSB->USB-socket cable, just to have a go. If it did work then there's the possibility of using a cheap, and readily, available flash drive to put videos on. :thumbsup:

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Originally Posted by miniyazz

If they are short on how many they can produce, surely it would make sense to supply the highest margin phones first, i.e. 32gb ones? Weird.

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Not sure that there's that much difference in profit between the various models - however, what I will say (judging on the comments elsewhere) is that the price of the 32GB and especially 64GB models might rule them out of the running for a lot of people, (myself included!), in which case I can understand why Samsung would want to focus on the "budget" model initially. ;)

Speaking of budget models - mine apparently is still wending it's way north from Birmingham, so a morning or early afternoon delivery is probably out of the question. :'(