s3

The housing market may never get back to where it was in the boom years, but even if you can't flip your condo it could be possible to flip your phone this month with some help from eBay.

eBay's Instant Sale site is offering some pretty big bucks for used flagship smartphones through the end of June, a promotion timed to coincide with the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S III later this week. For example, an iPhone 4 with 32GB in working condition could be worth as much as $300 -- that's $100 more than competing buyback site Gazelle is currently offering.

eBay is showing love to existing Android phone owners, too, with a used Galaxy S II fetching up to $220 and a Droid Razr Maxx worth as much as $250. If you're able to work it so you can get a subsidized price on your Samsung Galaxy S III, you could end up upgrading for a net cost of zero, or even make some money on the deal.

Here's some more example trade-in offers that eBay sent along: … Read more

HTC has confirmed with The Verge that it is using a lower-powered Snapdragon S3 chipset for the HTC One S in select European and Asian markets. Thanks to an unusually high demand for the Snapdragon S4 processor, HTC has instead opted for Qualcomm's S3 CPU in some instances. … Read more

Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC says it plans to go ahead with its planned purchase of computer graphics company S3 Graphics.

HTC had announced last July that it planned to buy the California-based company for $300 million. S3 was an attractive takeover target for HTC, as its 270 patents had stood up well in disputes against Apple. But HTC got cold feet over its acquisition of S3 last fall, when the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled in favor of Apple in a patent dispute between S3 and Apple.

The company said in November that it was reconsidering its options. Now … Read more

Amazon's Jeff Barr noted this morning that its S3 online storage service reached 1 trillion objects, or files, last week, impressive growth for a service that launched in 2006.

Barr writes on the company's Amazon Web Services blog:

That's 142 objects for every person on Planet Earth or 3.3 objects for every star in our galaxy. If you could count one object per second it would take you 31,710 years to count them all.

He added that the object count has been growing by up to 3.5 billion objects in a single day, or … Read more

It's time to pony up for prepaid iPhones, avoid password scams and drop that mayor obsession:

The iPhone is coming to Virgin Mobile at the end of June. But you'll have to drop a hefty $650 to get the iPhone 4S, since there's no two-year contract. Plans start at $30 a month. It's cheaper in the long run to go prepaid with this plan instead of spending $200 upfront and paying for a more expensive monthly bill for two years (but you'll be limited with talk minutes). Virgin is on the Sprint network.

If Android … Read more

Samsung's Galaxy S III Android 4.0 phone is generating so much buzz, you could almost forget the Olympics are being held this summer.

U.S. fans of the Galaxy S series have been closer to the back of the line this go-round, as the flagship Android phone is rolling out elsewhere across the globe while we twiddle our thumbs over elder-generation smartphones. Finally, the picture is becoming a little less cloudy as to when the S III will finally land stateside.

We already know that T-Mobile and Sprint will start selling the thin taste of Ice Cream Sandwich on June 21, but now it appears that AT&T is telling customers who preorder the Galaxy S III that they can expect it to ship on June 18, according to droidmatters.… Read more

Excited shoppers weren't the only ones buying Samsung's latest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S III, when it went on sale in the U.K. last month.

Apparently Apple bought one too and wasn't too happy about what it found in the box.

In a new court filing (PDF), picked up by intellectual property-tracking blog FOSS Patents, Apple says the S III infringes on two of its patents, both related to software features. As a result, the company wants to keep it from being sold in the U.S.

"Because the Galaxy S III contains two of … Read more

Samsung may be working on a larger, more powerful Galaxy Note for October, according to rumors hitting the Internet this week. Listed as having a 5.5-inch, 1,680x1,050-pixel display, the presumed Galaxy Note II is also said to feature a faster CPU and more memory.

Tracing the rumors back to their source, UbuntuLife advises that the smartphone will include Samsung's own Exynos 5250 dual-core processor, clocked at 1.7GHz. What's more, the Android 4.0-powered Galaxy Note II should come with 4G LTE connectivity across the board. … Read more

The Samsung's Galaxy S III's vast 4.8-inch screen sits atop a quad-core processor and Sony camera, among other goodies exposed in detail via a chipworks teardown.

Before we dive into the specs, let's be clear. For a phone, it's big. Big enough to be brushing up against 5-inch mini tablets.

"I'd say it does verge on being unnecessarily large, but thankfully it isn't as ludicrously big as the Samsung Galaxy Note with its 5.3-inch screen," said CNET"s Jessica Dolcourt in her review of the phone.

And note this … Read more