Live photos of a possible SGS III surface, not exactly what we expected

A few days back we saw a live photo of what the Samsung Galaxy III could look like. This came from a tester who claimed that this will be the SGS III. A few days later, we heard from a source from the UK telecom industry that the SGS III would not be the ‘holy grail’ of smartphones after all, instead, it would be an incremental update. This was a bit disappointing since if that’s indeed the case, we really don’t get the whole secrecy bit. Today, Gizmodo Brazil managed to get some more live shots of what could be the final product which Samsung will unveil on May 3. The photo appears to have been taken with an iPad 2 so the quality is not very good (makes you wonder how bad his phone camera was that he had to resort to the iPad). In any case, the photos show a highly reflective phone with a full chrome finish.

Is this the real deal?

Now let’s analyse this a bit closely. The first picture reveals a very similar design we saw on the GT-I9300. The phone appears to have a second mould around it which hides the otherwise Nexus S-like curved body. There’s a physical home button present and what appears to be, two capacitive buttons on either side. We can also see the front facing camera and the two sensors up top. The speaker grill looks very similar to the current line-up of phones that Samsung have. We can also see a volume rocker on the left side of the screen.
Coming to the second picture, the phone appears to have a full metallic body (so much for polycarbonate) which resembles the back of an iPod Touch. Now if you remember the invite Samsung sent out to all the media folk, there were blobs of ‘metallic’ paint lying around which hints to the metal housing for the phone. The source also claims that the phone is slimmer than the S II but heavier, which is to be expected. Also, the camera is a 12MP shooter, another feature which we all expected.

Quite an ugly looking rear

So what do we think of it? Well, if this is in fact the S III then from these pictures alone, it’s a huge disappointment. Everyone is moving away from chrome and glossy chassis for obvious reasons so we don’t understand why Samsung would choose such a design. The back of the phone is probably the ugliest as it just looks like a slab of metal. We really hope this is one of the prototypes and not the final product. I guess all will be revealed on May 3 so we’re counting down the days.