As promised, Samsung officially unveiled the Galaxy SIII Mini today, though they’ve already dampened the surprise by confirming the news yesterday.  So if you’ve been eyeing the Galaxy SIII but thought it was a bit big, then the Galaxy SIII Mini might just be what you’ve waiting for. (Though you may want to see how the SIII Mini compares to the iPad Mini – click here!)

“The GALAXY S III introduced a new concept of smartphone that has proven hugely popular around the world.

“We’re now delighted to bring its revolutionary design, intuitive usability and intelligence to the GALAXY S III mini in a more compact form,” said JK Shin, President and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics. “We continue to make every effort to provide extraordinary mobile experiences to meet a wide variety of user needs.”

The Galaxy SIII Mini features a 4” Super AMOLED screen with a 480×800-pixel resolution, comparably lower than the original’s 720p resolution, but at its size I don’t think it will be too much of a problem.

It has a dual-core 1GHz chip, which is a far cry from the original’s quad-core, 1GB of RAM, and is available in 8 or 16GB internal storage plus an extra 32GB maximum via microSD.

For the cameras, there’s a VGA front-facing camera for video fans and the main or rear camera comes at 5MP.  It still comes with the 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, GPS, GLONASS, Bluetooth 4.0 (LE) and NFC.  It looks just like the original Galaxy SIII but it’s a bit thicker at 9.85mm thick, compared with the S3’s 8.6mm.

The Galaxy SIII Mini will run on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and will bring users a new Google Search experience that features Google Now, delivering  just the right information before you even ask.

And the SIII Mini still has the awesome features of the original SIII such as Smart Stay, Direct Call, Smart Alert, S Beam, S Voice and the Buddy Photo Share.  No word yet on the Best Photo feature but considering that the Mini only has a 5Mp camera, I’m not sure that the feature would be greatly utilized.

The Galaxy SIII Mini has considerably lower specs than the original, but this just means it’s likely to be priced lower.  No news yet on the exact price of the S3 Mini, but we expect a considerably lower price than its big brother.