Samsung officially announced that the Galaxy S II will launch on May 1st in the UK. There were some reports that the handset was already shipping, and some said it'll ship sooner, but now it's official.

Samsung's Galaxy S2 is the successor to the popular Galaxy S. It has a 4.3" WVGA Super AMOLED plus display, 1.2Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point.

Update: It turns out that even though Amazon.co.uk lists this as 'shipping', when you add it to your cart it states that the shipping date is May 2nd. Thank you anonymous commenter...

According to Amazon.co.uk, the Samsung Galaxy S2 is now shipping for £621.14 (unlocked). Samsung's official release date is May, so this is a bit strange (even though Play.com originally listed March 2011 as the S2 release date, so maybe this is for real).

Samsung's Galaxy S2 is the successor to the popular Galaxy S - with a 4.3" WVGA Super AMOLED plus display, 1Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point.

Update: Play.com updated their page, and the release date is now listed as May 6...

According to Play.com, Samsung's Galaxy S2 will ship on March 31st. The price is £600 for an unlocked phone (no contract). If true this will probably be the first Super AMOLED Plus phone that actually ships. The Galaxy S2  has a WVGA 4.3" Super AMOLED plus display, 1Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+. It's only 8.49mm thick at its thinnest point. 

Samsung released a short video showing the difference between an IPS-LCD (as used in Apple's iPhone 4), a Super AMOLED and the new Super AMOLED Plus:

Super AMOLED Plus displays are an upgrade to Super AMOLED. They use a real-stripe subpixel matrix and not pentile - and so has 50% more sub-pixels. The PPI is a bit larger but Samsung will soon make them at much higher resolutions. Super AMOLED Plus displays are also thinner, brighter and use 18% less energy than the older Super AMOLED displays.

We've got a lot of Super AMOLED Plus news today. Here's a short video comparing the Galaxy S2 (with its 4.3" Super AMOLED Plus display) to a Galaxy S (4" Super AMOLED) and an iPhone 4 (3.5" IPS-LCD). The most apparent thing about the S2 - it's a big phone...

Update: We have some new information about Samsung's AMOLED manufacturing process. It turns out that they plan to soon move to a laser-based method (LITI) from the currently-used shadow-mask method (FMM). This will allows them to achieve 300ppi or more...

Earlier today we posted about the Super AMOLED plus resolution - and now we got our answer. It turns out that my calculations about the pentile matrix were incorrect - it fact it uses 2 sub-pixels for each pixel while a 'real' RGB matrix (or Real-Stripe as Samsung calls it) uses 3 sub-pixels for each pixels - and here's your 50% increase. Here's Samsung's own image showing the difference:

It also turns out that a Real-Stripe matrix also takes up more space per pixel. This explains why a 4.3" display that uses Real-Stripe has the same resolution as a 4" with a penTile matrix. But this display should actually be clearer because of the added sub-pixels and better matrix design.

Update: We now got the answer to this little mystery, you can read it here.

Samsung's new Galaxy S2 phone has a Super AMOLED Plus display but something is strange about the resolution of this phone. It's a 4.3" panel with 800x480 resolution (WVGA). That's the same resolution found on the original Galaxy S that has a 4" Super-AMOLED. When Samsung announced the Super AMOLED Plus they said that it offers 50% more sub-pixels and offers over 300ppi.

The original Super AMOLED used Samsung's PenTile Matrix scheme (shown above on the right) - which uses a shared green pixel (RGBG). The Super AMOLED Plus displays uses a regular RGB matrix (shown above on the left). That means that you need more subpixels to show the same amount of pixels - indeed a pentile matrix uses 33% less pixels (for example a 4X4 RGB display will use 48 subpixels while a 4X4 RGBG pentile will use only 36 subpixels).

Samsung's Galaxy S2, the successor to the popular Galaxy S is now official -and it has a 4.3" Super AMOLED plus display, 1Ghz dual-core processor, NFC, Bluetooth 3 and HSPA+.

According to reports, the display offers 800x480 (WVGA) resolution - the same as the Galaxy S' Super-AMOLED which is smaller at 4". This is rather strange...

Samsung reported strong financial results, with over 80 million mobile devices shipped in the fourth quarter of 2010. In their financial report, Samsung also confirms they will ship a new phone that will be the Galaxy S successor during the first half of 2011, and this device will have a dual-core processor and a Super AMOLED Plus display. This will probably be the Galaxy S2, leaked a few weeks ago.

With regards to tablets, Samsung says that they have sold over 2 million Galaxy Tab devices in three months, and they plan to release a 'number of versions' in 2011. Will some of these use an OLED display?

Update: The Galaxy Tab 2 is now official, here's more details along with the new Galaxy S2 phone.

Update: We understand that Samsung wants to introduce the Galaxy Tab 2 soon, and it's not clear whether they'll be able to actually deliver 7" Super-AMOLED displays in time - some say that it will use an LCD like the original Tab. It's not clear also whether this video is real or is this a fake...

We found a "leaked" video announcing the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. The leaked specs include a 7" 2048x1200 Super-AMOLED display (which is probably a Super AMOLED Plus, really, because of that resolution). Samsung unveiled a 7" Super-AMOLED in a tablet prototype back in November 2010, so this isn't a huge surprise. Here's the video: