Samsung Galaxy S III to get Jelly Bean upgrade in October

Samsung will deploy an Android 'Jelly Bean' 4.1 update to its flagship Galaxy S III handset next month, the manufacturer has said.

Apparently hoping to improve on the snail-like pace at which it updated the Galaxy S II, the Jelly Bean upgrade will come just around four or five months after the device went on sale. A week or so ago, Samsung said it had sold 20 million of the handsets in the first 100 days of availability.

The news that the Galaxy S III would get Jelly Bean in October came via our sister site CNET UK, which received a categorical statement from Samsung.

As that piece also noted, the 4G version of the S III that EE will launch later this year will come with Jelly Bean from the start.

Android 4.1 is pretty similar to Android 4.0, with one notable difference: the addition of the Google Now personal assistant feature. Google Now is in some ways a rival to Apple's Siri, and also extends Google's semantic search efforts onto mobile devices.