After months of anticipation, Samsung finally released its latest smartphone, the Galaxy SIII today to great fanfare in London. The phone is the official smartphone of the 2012 Olympics and is competing in its own olympics of sorts against Apple’s iPhone 4 and Android’s HTC One X.

Upon first appearance, the hyped up phone’s aesthetics are underwhelming.

"It is not an eye-catching device that will overwhelm consumers," said IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo to Reuters.

However, like most things in life, the capabilities of the smartphone more than make up for its blah appearance.

Specs

Dimensions: 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, 133 g
Screen: 4.8”
Display: 16M-color HD (720 x 1280 pixels) Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, Gorilla Glass
CPU: Quad Core 32nm ARM Cortex A9 1.4 GHz processor, Exynos 4212 Quad chipset
GPU: Mali-400MP
RAM: 1 GB
OS: Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich
Memory: 12GB/ 32GB/ 64GB with Micro SD Card Slot
Camera: 8MP Auto Focus Camera with Face Detection, touch focus, and Image Stabilization with burst shots. Full HD 1080p video recording at 30 fps, LED Flash and 1.9MP Front Camera 2100 mAh battery,
Battery: 2100 mAh

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‘Mind Reading’ Features

Facial Recognition uses front camera to unlock phone
Smart Stay uses eye-tracking technology on the front-facing camera to register usage
Direct Call, automatically places a phone call based on whom you’re text messaging, i.e. Lifting the phone to ear in the middle of texting will cause phone to call that person
S Voice(similar to Siri) uses voice recognition to check the weather, place a phone call, search the web, and add appointments to the phone’s calendar app, launch camera

Pop Up Play multi-tasking feature that switches full-screen video to a smaller pop-up window in order to continue watching a movie while texting, browsing or using other apps.

Samsung will be selling the 3G version in Europe starting today and then expand to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In June Canadians will be able to get their hands on the Galaxy SIII while the U.S. has to wait until summer. The phone will run on 4G LTE networks in the U.S. No word yet on pricing or how/where the phones will be sold.