Samsung boasts 100M Galaxy S smartphone sales

Computerworld - Sales of Samsung's two Galaxy S smartphones have topped 100 million since the first version sold in May 2010, Samsung reported via Flickr on Monday.

The site indicates that 30 million Galaxy S III devices were sold in five months, and rose to 40 million sold at seven months. Average daily sales are 190,000 units.

It took the Galaxy S II a total of 20 months to hit 40 million units. With those sales, the Galaxy S Series is the most successful smartphone line for Samsung.

The success of the Galaxy S III has helped Samsung reach the top spot globally in cell-phone sales and has boosted the prominence of the Android mobile operating system among several carriers, according to analysts. For all of 2012, Android smartphone share globally was 65%, followed by Apple's iOS at 21%, according to research firm IDC.

Speculation is rising that Samsung will announce a Galaxy S 4 smartphone at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in late February. Shipping could start in May, a full year after the launch of the S III. Samsung would not comment.

Various sources have indicated the S 4 will have a 5-in. display with full HD 1080p resolution, Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa processor and a 13-megapixel camera. The phone would run either Android's Jelly Bean or the the next-generation Android OS, known as Key Lime Pie.

In a CES keynote by Samsung Electronics president Stephen Woo, the Octa was described as having two sets of four processing cores each. Demonstrations of a reference design tablet showed it running a 3D video game while also processing various tasks.

The Octa chip will compete against Nvidia's Tegra 4 chip and Qualcomm's 800 series processors. Octa will offer a 70% power savings, Woo said. He described it as having four Cortex A15 cores for running video and four Cortex A7 cores for lower-power tasks like texting.

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 email address is mhamblen@computerworld.com.

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