Jason Inofuentes, AnandTech:

The 8.6 mm thick slate fea­tures a 4.8″ HD SAMOLED dis­play push­ing 1280×720 pix­els, on an RGBG stripe.

RGB would have been better.

Update 2012.05.08: The First Smartphone Designed Entirely By Lawyers.

Update 2012.05.10: Maybe RGB might not have been bet­ter. Dan Seifert, MobileBurn:

Samsung’s Philip Berne explained to me that the blue sub­pix­els on AMOLED dis­plays actu­ally degrade the fastest – quicker than the red or green sub­pix­els. With a PenTile lay­out, the sub­pix­els are arranged RGBG (red, green, blue, green), so they fea­ture more green sub­pix­els and fewer red or blue sub­pix­els than an RGB stripe lay­out with the same res­o­lu­tion. Because of this, AMOLED dis­plays that have the PenTile lay­out tend to have a longer lifes­pan than those with RGB lay­outs. Since Samsung is sell­ing its phones to users that usu­ally keep them for 18 months or longer, it has to be sure that the dis­play will still offer peak per­for­mance at that time. According to the com­pany, PenTile AMOLED dis­plays have proven to be more reli­able than those with RGB layouts.

The rea­son is not because there are more green sub-pixels than red or blue. Someone from Nouvoyance should explain to Berne exactly why the blue OLED phos­phor lasts longer in a PenTile Matrix sub-pixel struc­ture com­pared to RGB. The real rea­son why PenTile lasts longer is because the blue sub-pixel is much larger and there­fore does not need to be dri­ven as hard com­pared to the blue pixel in a RGB sub-pixel layout.

But this is the inter­est­ing part: If I’m read­ing the above quote cor­rectly, Samsung is not sure its RGB OLED dis­play, called Super AMOLED Plus, will offer peak per­for­mance for 18 months or longer. That’s it? Eighteen months? That must suck for Samsung Galaxy S II owners.

Update 2012.05.22:

Samsung’s Dong-hoon Jang took issue with blas­phemy float­ing around accus­ing the world’s largest mobile phone com­pany of redesign­ing the Samsung Galaxy S III to make it look as lit­tle as pos­si­ble as the iPhone due to ongo­ing lit­i­ga­tion. Sam Oliver, AppleInsider:

The curved shape of the new Galaxy S III is a design that has gone through hun­dreds of iter­a­tions, he said, adding that Samsung is a mar­ket leader in design.

The new Galaxy S III design is the result of a five year plan accord­ing to Jang. Let’s see… Five years ago would make it May of 2007. That actu­ally makes a lot of sense: Samsung drew out a five-year design plan for its smart­phones four months after Apple unveiled the orig­i­nal iPhone. A mar­ket leader in design? Why yes, of course.

Update 2012.05.26: Vlad Savov, The Verge:

This 4.8-inch dis­play can be held up proudly along­side most other AMOLED pan­els. Sadly, while that may have been a great com­pli­ment a year or two ago, the qual­ity and view­ing angles of AMOLED have recently been bypassed by refine­ments in LCD tech­nol­ogy. HTC’s One X is the stand­out demon­stra­tion of that — offer­ing unri­valled clar­ity, color bal­ance, and view­ing angles. In all of those respects, the Galaxy S III is one or two tiers below the One X [...]

LCD > OLED.