Samsung Galaxy S II Plus Leaked Ahead of Announcement?

Lately there has been a lot of speculation about the possible specs and release dates of Samsung’s Galaxy S III. These recent speculations gave birth to a new rumor that Samsung will launch a Galaxy S II Plus in the coming months as well. And what do you know, today a proported render of this Galaxy S II Plus phone has hit the internet.

From the render we see that overall the form factor is nearly identical to the international Galaxy S II. However, the phone is clearly running Ice Cream Sandwich and now has three capacitive buttons (ditching the physical home button and capacitive menu button). These three capacitive buttons are indentical to what is found on-screen on the Galaxy Nexus. This is a little iffy as international Samsung phones are known to have the iconic physical home button and only two capacitive buttons. Conversely, on the screen we see a calendar widget that displays the exact date and time of Samsung’s press event at the upcoming Mobile World Congress. This is either legit or someone put a lot of time into faking a render.

Ironically enough, a benchmark of this Galaxy S II Plus smartphone has recently made way onto the internet. It states the phone as being named the Galaxy S 2+, running on Android 2.3.4 with an 800×480 display, and a 1.5Ghz Processor. Interestingly, this benchmark was run on Android 2.3.4 while the above render is clearly using an Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 build.

If Samsung were to use a 1.5Ghz processor and a Galaxy S II Plus really does exist, I’d wager it is the Exynos 4212. The 4212 is just a slight upgrade over the current 4210 used in the Galaxy S II: it comes with a higher native clockspeed of 1.5Ghz and a slightly improved GPU. It’s still a dual-core chip using Cortex A9 architecture which would perfectly fit the bill for an incrementally upgraded Galaxy S II variant.

I do believe Samsung will release a Galaxy S II Plus smartphone alongside the new Galaxy S III. Why? Because the Galaxy S II is still a completely relevant smartphone. It’s still considered high end by today’s standards and if people don’t want to shell out top-dollar for the Galaxy S III, they can save a little bit and get the S II Plus. However, these reports are a little contradicting and I wouldn’t place my money on either being entirely true. I do believe the Galaxy S II Plus will end up looking like the render, but we should see a few cosmetic changes for a menu button (if Samsung goes with capacitive) and Samsung’s traditional home button.