Admittedly, the evidence that points to this conclusion isn’t rock-solid. It’s all based on the EXIF of the photo, which says that it’s captured with the Samsung I9500 and that’s a model number higher than that of both the Galaxy S II (I9100) and the Galaxy Nexus (I9250). And since the only smartphone worthy of such position is the expected Galaxy S II successor, logic suggests that we are looking at a Galaxy S 3 photo sample.

Plus the EXIF shows coordinates that belong to one of the Samsung centers in Korea.

The first thing to note here is that the image has 5MP resolution and we can’t see Samsung releasing the Galaxy S 3 with a 5MP camera, given that the Galaxy S II already has an 8MP snapper. Also, the EXIF data is relatively easy to fake, but we guess if someone was to try and fool us he would write in more believable information across all the fields (notice the 50s exposure time?).

Samsung reports rising sales of the Note in France, Germany, Hong Kong and Taiwan and XL-sized droid will be arriving in the US some time next year too (there’s still no official info on when that will happen).

Of course, 1 million shipments don’t mean 1 million sales (sales are less but we don’t have exact numbers), still it’s very good going for something that seemed out of a place (too big for a phone and too small for a tablet).

There’s not much competition in the 5″-6″ range right now but the success Galaxy Note phoneblet might bring new players into the field. Samsung execs are reportedly proud of breaking new ground in mobile devices and promise more to come.

And even though the quarter that saw the market release of Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 is nearing its end it’s still really hard to tell if they are being well received by the market or not. We are getting all kinds of reports about their sales, so we are not even sure what to expect in the end.

For example, according to the survey done by mobile comparison shopping site MobilesPlease, the Lumia 800 accounted for a mere 0.17% of the UK smartphone sales in November. That’s close to 100 less than the market share of the most popular phone according to the survey – Samsung I9100 Galaxy S II.

However, in the Lumia 800 appears to still be doing greatly in the Netherlands. The smartphone was the second best-selling device on KPN Netherlands (the country’s largest carrier) at the end of November, than rose to first place at the start of this month and has been staying there ever since.

The O2 Germany most popular phones chart tells a similar story, with the Nokia Lumia 800 occupying the first spot for quite some time now. Over at T-Mobile Germany the Lumia 800 ranks 6th, behind three of the iPhone 4S versions, the black Galaxy S II and the black Galaxy S Plus.

As we already told you, we won’t know the truth before the actual results are published, but for the sake of a more competitive market, we are keeping our fingers crossed the Lumia duo will turn out a success.

Rivette believes that the Cupertino-based company owns patents that could secure it as much as USD10 for every Android device sold if it licensed them. That’s twice the amount Microsoft receives from their current licensing contracts with Android manufacturers.

Yet, Apple doesn’t seem interested in renting out its technology and prefers to try and ban as many Android products as possible from as many markets as it could manage. And while a potential triumph in this crusade will certainly bring in lots and lots of cash, it seems highly unlikely that it will ever be achieved.

Instead Apple will probably force the companies to find workarounds for their technology (as HTC and Samsung did after the two minor victories that Apple had) and while that certainly wins time for the iOS products on the market, it deprives the company of the revenue that could be had if a licensing contract has been signed instead.

Not to mention that all those lawsuits aren’t helping Apple make friends and now it’s facing a few patent infringement lawsuits itself. Maybe it would be much wiser if Apple just listens to Rivette and end this whole legal battle, while it is still in a somewhat favorable position.

The phone will go on sale starting January 1, 2012 and will cost TWD 21,900 (USD 722). Other than the color, the phone is identical to other Galaxy S II phones, wherein it has the same 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display, 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video, 1,650mAh battery and Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The HTC phone is codenamed Radiant whereas the Samsung phone is being called Mandel. Not much is known about the Radiant at the moment but Mandel is said to have a really large display, over 4.3-inches in size.

If you were hoping to see these phones running Tango, however, you might be disappointed as they are said to be running on a pre-Tango version of Windows Phone, whose only difference from the current versions seems to be the support for LTE connectivity.

Earlier there were rumors that these phones might launch on Verizon’s network but now Paul Thurrott has confirmed that they will instead release on AT&T’s network and will be available before mid-2012.

Not much else is known about these phones at the moment but we will surely find out more at next year’s CES.

This means that the Koreans hope to sell about 374 million phones (including 150 million smartphones) next year, which should be enough to almost equal Nokia as the top cell phone manufacturer. The Finns are expected to ship about 399 million phones next year, so the gap between those two is as minimal as it gets.

Just two years ago Nokia had almost twice the market share of Samsung (36.4% vs 19.5%), so the Koreans are really making significant progress towards their goal of becoming the world’s number one manufacturer.

And we also shouldn’t forget that Nokia failed to meet its sales target in 2011, whereas Samsung exceeded it, so we might see a reversal of roles even sooner than expected. Then again, 2011 was a transitional year for Nokia and things should be much different now that it has finally started selling its first WP smartphones.

According to the latest rumor the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S will get a Value pack update, instead of the real Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The value pack update is said to improve the user experience by bringing some of the ICS features to the Gingerbread ROM. Better web browsing, multi-tasking and new widgets were explicitly mentioned, but there’s no saying if other apps will be updated as well.

Samsung did a similar thing with their low-end Bada phones, Wave525 and Wave533, which were deemed unable to run Bada 2.0 and were promised a Value pack update instead.

Obviously, Samsung decided that the I9000 Galaxy S hardware would be unable to provide satisfactory user experience with Android 4.0 ICS and TouchWiz on top. Now that might as well be true, but the Galaxy S is fully capable of running the stock ICS, as proved by the guys over at XDA.

So maybe it would have been best if Samsung released an optional ICS update without the TouchWiz launcher and let people decide which one they prefer, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. Of course, you can still have that, but you will have to go the dark ways of manual flashing and voiding your warranty in the process.

The roadmap has the Tango update arriving in Q2 of 2012. The earlier info had Tango launching at CES (which is in January 2012), but maybe it will be unveiled at CES and the official rollout will begin in the April-June time period.

The tile under Tango says “Product with best prices”, which is in line with what we’ve heard of the codenamed update, namely that it will enable cheaper WP7 phones. It will do that by adding support for a lower resolution. Initial info on WP7 said it will support WVGA and HVGA, so 320×480 is a good guess for the low-end devices.

Tango is also supposed to enable LTE, Microsoft was holding out on adding support for that until there were LTE chips that were power-efficient enough.

Next up is the Apollo update (Microsoft has a confusing naming scheme for these code names). It’s supposed to arrive in the final quarter of 2012, with earlier info suggesting that Microsoft will unveil it in June.

Apollo (often referred to as Windows will supposedly add the promised dual-core processor support (or more likely multi-core processors, not just dual-cores), bump up the supported screen resolution and add NFC. Changes to the UI are likely too.

According to the roadmap, Apollo will help increase overall volume of WP phones and make them competitive and also enable business and superphones.

Nokia, Samsung, LG and Motorola have already built plants in Argentina, so they all escape the recent Government ban.

Apple and RIM though aren’t so lucky. Their only option is to build a factory in Argentina. RIM is already looking for a partner to do so, while we don’t have any info on Appleplans.

This ban is part of the government’s anti-crisis policy and is temporary, until the Argentinian economy heals. Apple and RIM reportedly hold about 60% of the Argentinian smartphone market so this is no minor blow and we guess we will see some kind of response rather quickly.