After months of speculation and rumour across the internet, Samsung has finally confirmed that it will announce its next flagship Galaxy phone in London on 3 May, which all indications pointing to the Samsung Galaxy S3 being released.

Samsung disappointed many Android fans when it declared that it would not be announcing the follow-up to the Samsung Galaxy S2 at Mobile World Congress back in February. Samsung is thought to have delayed the launch of its latest flagship phone because it wanted to close the gap between the European launch and the US launch, which was six months in the case of the Galaxy S2.

Samsung has now sent out invites to the press to an event in London on 3 May, with the tagline, "Come and meet the next Galaxy." While the invite does not specifically mention the Galaxy S3 and Samsung has never publicly confirmed it will be launching one, all indications point to this being the phone we will see come 3 May.

Samsung Galaxy S3: What to Expect

The event on 3 May will take place at the same time as the BlackBerry World conference is taking place in Florida, though the Samsung announcement is sure to hold a lot more interest for most smartphone fans around the world.

So, what can we expect from the Samsung Galaxy S3? Well, it's hard to say as nothing has been confirmed by Samsung, but we can make an educated guess based on leaks and rumours circulating the internet.

The phone is likely to feature an even bigger screen, possibly 4.8in in size, which will continue to use the Super AMOLED technology so popular on the Samsung Galaxy S2. The phone's design should not differ too much from the S2, though we would hope for a more premium-feeling device, such as the HTC One X, and rumours of a ceramic body would support this.

The Galaxy S3 will follow the likes of the One X, the ZTE Era, LG Optimus 4X and the Huawei Ascend D quad by featuring a quad-core processor, but it will stand out from the rest of the quad-core pack by using Samsung's own quad-core Exynos 4412 chip running at 1.5GHz. As well as being 26 percent faster than current Samsung dual-core processors, it could also be as much as 50 percent more efficient on battery life too, which is the benefit of multi-core chips which will please smartphone users the most.

The Exynos 4412 System-on-Chip (SoC) is rumoured to feature four Cortex A9 cores and is built on a 32 nanometer (nm) process compared to the 45nm process used on current Exynos chips. Samsung is thought to want to reduce the number of Qualcomm chips it uses in its devices, preferring to use its own SoCs instead.

The Samsung Galaxy S and the Galaxy S2 were both huge sellers for Samsung and have arguably been the standout Android smartphones for the past two years. Samsung will hope to continue this trend with the Galaxy S3 and so will launch it with the latest version of the operating system, Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich).

This is very likely to be overlayed with Samsung's own proprietary UI known as TouchWiz. A more unlikely rumour doing the rounds on the web is the possibility that the Galaxy S3 will be the launch device for Android 5.0 (Jelly Bean) which is set to launch sometime this summer.

However we would predict that the rumoured Google Nexus Tablet is a more likely candidate for this and that the Galaxy S3 will be one of the first phones to get the update later in the year.

With a 3 May announcement, we expect the latest Galaxy phone to be in the shops very soon afterwards, as Samsung will want to get as much of a lead over the iPhone 5 which could launch as early as June.

Must Read: Samsung Galaxy S3: What to Expect

Samsung Android London Congress