Samsung Galaxy S III hits 30M sales mark

Computerworld - Samsung's Galaxy S III smartphone hit the 30 million sales mark in its five months on the market, according to a Samsung blog post Monday.

The latest Samsung smartphone moved much faster than its predecesser, the Galaxy S II, which sold 10 million devices over its first five months of availability last year, the company said.

The Samsung report cites Galaxy S III sales into sales channels, not necessarily to end users. Thus, some of the 30 million devices could still be on store shelves.

Even so, the Galaxy S III is seen as widely successful by analysts. The analysts note that the smartphone is sold by all of the major U.S. carriers and many others around the globe.

"Meeting this sales milestone in five months sets another record for Samsung. We are extremely proud yet motivated to continue to provide our customers with products that they love," said JK Shin, president of Samsung's mobile communications division in the post.

The Galaxy S III features a 4.8-in HD super AMOLED display and is upgradable to Android 4.1.

IDC analyst Ramon Llamas said Samsung has marketed the Galaxy S III well in the U.S.. He noted that Samsung has signed up many carriers to stock it and is running advertising touting the support for NFC and some other capabilities not available in Apple's iPhone 5.

Several reviewers of the new LG Nexus 4 from Google also have noted that the Galaxy S III operates with fast LTE networks available from some carriers, while the Nexus 4 does not come with LTE.

Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen, or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed . His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.

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