The six best features of the Samsung Galaxy S III

By itself, Samsung's recently-announced Galaxy S III is fairly iterative. Samsung hasn't pushed the design envelope all that far, and instead decided to play it safe with its latest flagship phone. The interesting bits with the phone lie elsewhere.

Many of Galaxy S III's most interesting features are unique to the phone. Samsung, it seems, is intent on differentiating the device on a variety of levels - from software to hardware to extra unexpected add-ons.

See also: Samsung announces Galaxy S III with a focus on natural interaction

An AMOLED Screen

The biggest pull of the Galaxy S III, at least initially, is its screen. At 4.8 inches, it's huge, larger than the screen of the Galaxy S II and a tad bit smaller than that of the Galaxy Note.

SmartStay looks into your eyes

One of the more unique and compelling features in the Galaxy S III is Smart Stay, a technology that uses eye tracking to prevent the phone's screen from dimming while the user is looking at it. It's a clever feature, and though Samsung will be hard-pressed to be able to effectively advertise it, it's certainly something that owners of the Galaxy S III will notice and appreciate.

S Voice listens to sound of your voices

S Voice is, in short, Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri. Built on voice commands, S Voice allows users to do anything from silence their alarms (say "Snooze") to call friends while in the middle of texting them. The feature, which understands English, French, Italian, and German, will also be able to tie into other services, giving it a fairly robust potential for expandability.

Dropbox: 50GB free

While more than a few phones have come with free Dropbox space in recent months, none of them have launched with quite so much. There are some question marks though: the free space is only set to last two years, and while that tends to be how long smartphone owners hold onto their phones, it still seems a bit strange that Dropbox would impose such a limit.

LTE support

While the Galaxy S III is set to launch later this month in Europe with an HSPA+ radio, LTE support will also be incoming a bit down the line. This, of course, is a big deal for Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon, all of which are pushing heavily their own 4G LTE offerings. That alone makes it likely that the Galaxy S III will appear on at least one, if not all three, of the carriers when the phone launches in the U.S. this summer.

FlipBoard: Exclusive to the Galaxy S III (for now)

One of the bigger surprises with the phone is that with it would be arriving Flipboard, the social media aggregation app previously exclusive to iOS. Somehow Samsung managed to get exclusive access to the Android version of the app - initially anyway. Flipboard will eventually make its way to other "select" Android phones, but for now, it belongs to the Galaxy S III.

See also: Samsung unveils Galaxy S III phone with quad-core, Android ICS | CNET's Hands-on First Take| Photos: Galaxy S III is plastic, powerful |Galaxy S III has ears, eyes just for you