Samsung won't be launching the Galaxy S III mini in India

Samsung’s Galaxy S III mini has been available in the grey market for quite some time now, but according to our sources, the phone will not be making it to Indian shores through official channels. This essentially puts the phone out of reach of the people who prefer to have warranties with their expensive gadgets. A representative said that Samsung hasn’t revealed any plans to launch the handset in India as of yet.

There can be many reasons for Samsung to not release the phone in India. Maybe the company doesn’t see a market for it here and prefers concentrating on the low-end and high-end smartphones. The more cynical among us may think that the company doesn’t want the S III mini to cannibalise the sales of Samsung’s other phone in a similar price-bracket—the Galaxy Grand.

For those that don’t care about the warranty, though, the phone is available through various grey market outlets. Grey market vendors are quoting a price of Rs 17,750 for the handset. The S III mini looks like a smaller version of the record breaking Galaxy S III. While the device was launched back in October 2012, it never made it to India.

Not coming to India

Here are some of the specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S III mini:

• 4-inch Super AMOLED display with a WVGA resolution of 480 x 800 pixels
• 3G, EDGE/GPRS, Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi Hotspot, DLNA support
• GPS with A-GPS and GLONASS
• Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP, LE, EDR, NFC
• 5 megapixel camera with AF, LED flash, BSI sensor and 720p HD video recording
• VGA front facing camera for video chat
• 16/32GB internal memory expandable up to 32GB via microSD

Apart from the above mentioned features, this handset comes loaded with sensors for accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass. The brand has used a 1500mAh battery on this smartphone, which should be sufficient given the specifications of the device. As far as the size of this handset goes, the Galaxy S III mini measures 121.6 x 63 x 9.9 mm and weighs in at 111.5 g.

The size of the display has been discussed much, as 4-inch is not exactly small, but in comparison to the Samsung Galaxy S III, this handset could be much easier to handle. The handset is heavily based on the Galaxy S III and this feature translates to the design of this latest model as well.

As far as the technical specifications of the handset go, the Galaxy S III mini is powered by a dual-core 1GHz NovaThor U8420 processor and comes equipped with 1GB RAM. As for the OS, the phone comes with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.

If you're interested, check out our unboxing video and our first impressions of the Galaxy S III mini.