Samsung Electronics announced recently that total life-to-date shipments of its flagship Galaxy S family of Google Android-based smartphones hit whopping 100 million units. In less than three years, Samsung Galaxy S-series handsets have proven themselves to be worthy competitors to Apple’s iPhone lineup and also helped the company to become the world’s No. 1 supplier of smartphones.

Samsung Electronics’ flagship Galaxy S series surpassed the accumulated sales record of 100 million units from the supply side in only 2 years and 7 months after its launch in May 2010. Galaxy S III is selling at much faster rate of 30 million in 5 months and 40 million in 7 months, after becoming a million seller in only 50 days after its release last May. Currently, its average daily sales are 190 thousand units, according to Samsung. The driving force behind Samsung Electronics’ rise to the top on the global smartphone market is the Galaxy S II, which is gaining ground as a steady seller hitting the sales of over 40 million in only 20 months.

The Galaxy S-series smartphones are not only Samsung’s most advanced handsets, but in many ways trend-setters for the whole industry. For example, Galaxy S and Galaxy S II were among the first smartphones with large displays. Some capabilities of the Galaxy S III, e.g. eye tracking feature, are not present even on Apple’s iPhones, which also set trends for the industry.

Samsung plans to release its next-generation Galaxy S IV smartphone this March or April. In case everything goes as planned, the device will be the world’s first phone with eight-core application processor inside.

Samsung’s recently announced Exynos 5 Octa has four ARM Cortex-A15 high-end general-purpose cores for demanding applications as well as four more ARM Cortex-A7 low-power cores for use cases where maximum computing performance is not required. The new application processor will likely feature new ARM Mali graphics core as well as support for advanced graphics technologies, such as output to UHD 4K (3840*2160) resolutions. The chis is made using 28nm HKMG process technology at Samsung's manufacturing facility near Austin, Texas.

Tags: Samsung, Galaxy, Android, Google, Apple, iPhone