

Galaxy S III preorders approach 10 million - kemper
http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/18/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-preorders-9-million/

======
cryptoz
This phone is one of the most exciting things happening, at least for me: It
has a barometer! Joining the ranks of the Galaxy Nexus, Note, and Moto Xoom.
Except, I think the SGS3 is way more popular than any of those others (by a
couple orders of magnitude in some cases).

I'm the developer of pressureNET, an open source Android project to build a
live, global barometer network. The project has seen solid growth, but not on
the scale that would allow for groundbreaking weather prediction. We get about
17,000 measurements per day, but I think I need something like 1,000,000.

Does anyone have ideas that could help me with marketing and growing the
network with the release of this phone? I've been posting to Reddit, XDA, HN,
Twitter, Facebook, etc, but I worry about spamming them and I think I have
saturated my audience there.

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I'm anxious about missing out
on all these new barometer users.

~~~
pnachbaur
Given that a barometer is seemingly so rare on the market (and your app is
probably one of the few set to take advantage of it) maybe you could talk to
Samsung about a cross-promotional type deal? It could allow them to further
differentiate and market their phone, and you'd get your data!

~~~
cryptoz
I've been thinking about contacting the manufacturers for a while, but the
task is daunting. Does this kind of thing actually work? I'll definitely
investigate this with the kind of response I've had here on HN, it sounds like
it may almost be common. Thanks for the help!

~~~
StavrosK
Who cares? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Just contact them.

------
weiran
This is bullshit, the "preorders" are from carriers not actual customers.
Samsung could sell zero units and still claim to have 9 million preorders.

> Samsung Electronics Co has received some 9 million pre-orders for its third-
> generation Galaxy S smartphone __from more than 100 global carriers __, the
> Korea Economic Daily reported on Friday.

Source: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-samsung-
idUSBRE...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/18/us-samsung-
idUSBRE84H00X20120518)

The number of "news" sites just blindly reposting this as if it were actual
customers is frankly disgusting.

~~~
akmiller
What is your point exactly? I'm pretty certain the carriers do their homework
before placing orders. They don't want a ton of inventory just sitting on
their shelves. So the carriers expect to sell them and Samsung did sell them
(doesn't matter who bought them).

~~~
tvon
The point is it doesn't matter how many units they sell to Best Buy, what
matters is how many units they sell to consumers.

This happens all the time, we hear about X millions of units "shipped" only to
find out months later that a small fraction of those actually made it into
consumers hands.

~~~
bsphil
Given the incredible popularity of the GS2 among the Android community, I'd
say it's not unreasonable to think the GS3 will sell well.

~~~
bradleyland
No one is saying it won't sell well. They're saying that reporting carrier
orders as "sales pre-orders" lacks an important detail. Thus, some are calling
bullshit on the headline.

------
6ren

      Chipset 	Exynos 4212 Quad
      CPU 	        Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9
      GPU 	        Mali-400MP
    

<http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i9300_galaxy_s_iii-4238.php>

The Mali-400MP is quad-core (x2 from before)
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exynos> This seems feasible, with similar
battery life, as they've shrunk the process to half the area: 45^2 vs 32^2.

Its performance per core is comparable the sgx543 of the iPhone/iPad.
[http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-
hardwar...](http://www.arm.com/products/multimedia/mali-graphics-
hardware/mali-400-mp.php) vs <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerVR#Series_5XT>
(though depends on the clock actually used)

So, this phone's GPU is similar to the "new iPad"3 (quad-core sgx543). (Apple
have also done a shrink, but it's only used in the old iPad 2 so far...)

I think quad-core _CPUs_ are past the point of diminishing returns (consider
the latest Transformer); multi-core are still hard to code for, and they are
usually underutilized on desktops.

Note: the iPad 4 is likely to have the next in the GPU series (Rogue 6200),
which apparently is comparable to the xenos GPU in the xbox360. So, it's
leapfrog, jumping x2 as far each year.

~~~
nextparadigms
Both ARM CPU's and GPU's seem to jump 2x in performance every year, so at
least so far, they've been moving faster than Moore's Law.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the Exynos 5250 chip, with a dual core 2
Ghz Cortex A15 CPU and a Mali T-604 GPU (new Midgard architecture) that's
supposed to be 4x faster than Mali400 (the original in GS2), so probably 2x or
faster than the current overclocked Mali400 in GS3 (will also support OpenCL).
This chip should appear in some tablets and phones, and maybe even a
Chromebook by the end of the year.

I'm also looking forward to them pairing Cortex A15 with the ultra-low-power
Cortex A7, maybe in a 2+2 core configuration. Samsung mentioned that they
might be ready with Cortex A7 by the end of the year, but in general we can
expect Cortex A7 to arrive next year.

I would prefer this over something like a pure Cortex A15 quad core chip,
which should also appear next year. Starting with 2014 we should see the
successor of Cortex A15 in dual core version, based on the 64 bit ARMv8
architecture.

------
gcp
I find it quite ironic that the same site posted this article 2 weeks ago:
[http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/04/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-htc-
oppor...](http://www.bgr.com/2012/05/04/samsung-galaxy-s-iii-htc-opportunity/)

Basically saying that the SGS3 looks like a dud and HTC is where it's at. HTC
currently isn't able to import phones into the US.

~~~
bookwormAT
Do you remember how much fun they had with the size of the Galaxy Note?
BGR,buisinessinsider,gruber,siegler,the verge,... The whole techmeme club.

Then Samsung sold 5 million Notes in the first months.

~~~
dmix
A ton of films get trashed by critics and imdb then go on to be commercially
successful.

That doesn't mean it was a good piece of film. More likely it was accessible
everywhere and well marketed.

~~~
bookwormAT
this is a good argument for sales vs quality.

But the lesson with the Galaxy Note was that many people want a device with a
5.3 in screen, and the critique was that people do not want a device with a
5.3 in screen.

Remember that Samsung sold the Note together with the Galaxy S2 (same
hardware, smaller screen, higher marketing budget) and even smaller form
factors.

Or, to put it another way: The lesson is that there is no "average consumer".

~~~
falling
_> Remember that Samsung sold the Note together with the Galaxy S2 (same
hardware, smaller screen, higher marketing budget) and even smaller form
factors._

The Note has been promoted much more than the S2. In SF I see as much ads for
the Note as you used to see for the iPad 2 when it came out, which means
they’re everywhere.

Last week three guys with Samsung t-shirts stopped me on the street to make me
try it.

------
kaolinite
Has BGR ever written an article longer than a few paragraphs? (Edit: huh..
that struck a nerve it would seem).

~~~
mpclark
First rule of tech blogging -- all stories, even those best reported as just
one line, must be expanded to meet Google News's minimum word count
requirement.

------
unconed
Still waiting for a high end Android phone that isn't enormous.

------
samhan
Now this is quite amazing . Has Samsung also started to attract an albeit
smaller apple like following .. ?

~~~
objclxt
It's certainly a good indicator of smartphone demand, although I'm not sure
it's comparable with iPhone 4S pre-orders. I _suspect_ that a lot of the S3
pre-orders are direct from carriers, rather than individuals, so it's more of
a 'product shipped' rather than 'product sold' statistic.

I could of course be totally wrong, although as it's a leaked stat it's hard
to know exactly how a 'pre-order' is being defined...but in my office (of
about 180 people, all mobile facing) far fewer people have pre-ordered the S3
versus the iPhone 4S.

~~~
jk
I guess Samsung phones are more popular outside US. Among my colleagues, of 10
smartphones, 8 are Samsung ones (includes 3 Samsung Notes) and only one
iPhone4S.

~~~
objclxt
Our split is fairly even (I lead a mobile dev team in London, both Android &
iOS). Maybe it's a demographic thing: most developers have a Galaxy Nexus, and
they don't really see any compelling reason to move on to the S3 right now.

------
mvasilkov
> CPU Quad-core 1.4 GHz Cortex-A9 > GPU Mali-400MP

Finally, smooth animations?

~~~
hammersend
I've been getting smooth animations on my Nexus S ever since I put ICS on it a
few months back and this phone "only" has a 1 GHz single core CPU and 512 MB
of RAM.

------
swah
I just got my first Android phone (a 1ghz dual-core 512mb LG) and it its
fuckin slow :( (my iPhone 3GS felt way way snappier).

~~~
darkstalker
That's because in iOS the UI has maximum priority. It can even pause the app
so the UI keeps a high framerate.

~~~
rsynnott
This is a myth, introduced by an uninformed Google intern in a blog post.
Hint; start Skype on an iPhone, switch to another app, and scroll a list. Note
how your Skype call continues.

