Samsung Galaxy S III To Land On Five U.S. Carriers In June, Verizon Pre-Orders Begin On June 6

And here we go! Samsung announced late last night that the long-awaited Galaxy S III would hit five of the U.S.’s biggest carriers — Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular — this month, with prices on contract starting at $199.

There’s no news yet on specific launch dates as those announcements are being left up to individual carriers, but a few carriers have already started to get their ducks in a row for an impending launch.

AT&T has whipped up an informative preview page for eager consumers to peruse, but Verizon has just announced that they’ll be taking pre-orders for the device starting on June 6. They’ve also revealed their 16GB model will cost $199, while the 32GB model will set folks back $249 — whether or not the rest of the carriers listed will use the same pricing structure is still unknown.

Interestingly enough, it looks like T-Mobile’s version isn’t the only one to carry over the design seen on the international model — all of Samsung’s press images (even the ones that appear on AT&T’s and Verizon’s preview pages) feature that physical home button. Though the domestic and international models look very much alike, the Galaxy S III had to have its internals swapped out before it makes its Stateside debut.

Like the HTC One X before it, the GSIII’s quad-core processor (in this case, the Exynos 4 Quad) has been replaced with a dual-core Snapdragon S4 chipset clocked at 1.5GHz. Samsung also notes that one of the devices packs support for HSPA+ 42, which means that T-Mobile’s variant will be left out of the LTE party as expected.

UPDATE: T-Mobile has just announced that they will launch the Galaxy S III on June 21. No word on pre-orders or price, though with any luck they’ll stick to the $199/249 model Verizon is running with.