Samsung Galaxy S III to be launched after Mobile World Congress

Sponsored links, if any, appear in green.

Samsung Galaxy S II

It has been widely speculated that Samsung would launch the Galaxy S III, the next generation of its flagship Galaxy S smartphone line, at the Mobile World Congress trade show at the end of February. Samsung announced the Galaxy S II there last year, so it would make sense for the company to announce it's successor there as well. According to a statement provided to TechRadar, however, it doesn't look like Samsung intends to launch the Galaxy S III at the big mobile show at all.

Samsung's official statement, as quoted by TechRadar:

"Samsung is looking forward to introducing and demonstrating exciting new mobile products at Mobile World Congress 2012. The successor to the Galaxy S2 smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product. Samsung stays committed to providing the best possible mobile experiences for customers around the world."

It's hard to call this a "delay" on the launch of the highly-anticipated phone, since Samsung never indicated or said when it planned to announce the Galaxy S II's successor. Looking at the company's current lineup, we can understand why February might not be the best time for the launch of the device. Samsung has a host of different versions of the Galaxy S II on the market that are selling quite well, and some, like the Galaxy S II Skyrocket HD for AT&T, have been announced but have yet to even be released. Announcing the Galaxy S III's successor this early would certainly cannibalize some of those sales.

Additionally, Samsung could just wait until it is closer to actually making the Galaxy S III available to consumers. When the Galaxy S II was announced at MWC in February 2011, it was 4 to 6 months before it actually landed on retail shelves and was able to be purchased by customers.

Either way, what we can gather from this news is that Samsung is certainly working on a successor to the Galaxy S II (duh), but we just might have to wait a little bit longer to see it announced. MWC is lining up to have a lot of interesting things happen, so we aren't too concerned that the Galaxy S III won't be there.