Samsung Electronics this week said that its flagship Galaxy S III smartphone has surpassed 30 million global sales in approximately five months since its debut in May. Putting this number into perspective, during a similar selling period (150 days), the acclaimed Galaxy S II, launched in 2011, globally sold 10 million devices.

"The Galaxy S III continues to be a runaway favorite with customers around the world. Meeting this sales milestone in five months sets another record for Samsung, and we are extremely proud and yet motivated to continue to provide our customers with products that they love," said JK Shin, president and head of IT and mobile communications division at Samsung Electronics.

Samsung Galaxy S III was sold in twenty million quantity in 100 days after the beginning of sales. In average, the company has been selling over 190 thousand of flagship smartphones every day. While early in the lifecycle shipments of Galaxy S III were over 200 thousand units per day, even slightly slower pace is remarkable for an expensive handset.

While the success of the Galaxy S3 is evident, shipments of the smartphone in little less than two first quarters on the market are still much lower than sales of Apple iPhone 4S in its first and second quarters after the launch, which were over 70 million units.

Another important trend that 20 million units of Galaxy S III demonstrate is rapidly increasing demand towards smartphones with large touch-screens. Tens of millions of people preferred 4.8" screen of Galaxy S III to smaller screens of Apple iPhone 4S or inexpensive Android-based phones despite of the fact that Samsung's flagship offering is rather large.

Samsung Galaxy S III is based on the company's own Exynos 4412 system-on-chip with four ARM Cortex-A9 cores as well as Mali 400MP graphics engine (the U.S. version is powered by dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4). The third-generation Galaxy S has 4.8" Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with 1280*720 resolution [306 pixels per inch, similar to Apple iPhone 4/s] and Corning Gorilla Glass 2. The flagship phone has 1GB of RAM and can be equipped with 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of NAND flash storage.

Samsung equipped its flagship Galaxy S III model with 8MP rear and 1.9MP front cameras, 802.11 a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS/GLONASS, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0 (LE), accelerometer, RGB light, digital compass, gyroscope, barometer, 2100mAh battery and so on. The Galaxy S III now comes with Google Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" operating system and supports all 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G (up to HSPA+ with 21Mb/s) types of networks as well as 4G/LTE where available.

Tags: Samsung, Galaxy, 4G/LTE, Qualcomm, Snapdragon, Exynos, Google, Android