Samsung Galaxy S3 Release Date 2012: Unveiling Countdown Begins For Monday, April 23 [PHOTOS + VIDEO] [UPDATED]

Update (11:07 a.m. ET): It looks like Samsung will tease the Galaxy S3 until its official unveiling at Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012. Get more details at www.TheNextGalaxy.com. Here is the company's newly released video:

Update (10:24 a.m. ET): Samsung's site is back up, but the site tgeltaayehxnx.com now redirects to Samsung Mobile's YouTube page. The latest video on that page is a teaser for Samsung Mobile Unpacked 2012. The end of the video includes a link to tgeltaayehxnx.com, but again, it just redirects to Samsung's YouTube page. One Samsung executive said today the company will be releasing more teasers about the Galaxy S3 smartphone, so it may be that Samsung's pages are simply overwhelmed with traffic and the company needs to redirect its incoming users somewhere. We'll update you once we know more.

Update (7:47 a.m. ET): Samsung's landing page for tgeltaayehxnx.com has updated with a new message: You've got it all mixed up, Samsung says. Following technology blindly often gets you nowhere. Click on the letters in the correct order to reveal your real destination. However, the script on the website itself is still not working, and the unscrambled site TheNextGalaxy.com is also not working. We'll update you with more once Samsung's servers get rebooted.

Unless this is some type of elaborate marketing scheme, Samsung will unveil its third generation Galaxy S smartphone, the Galaxy S3, on Monday, April 23 at about 7 a.m ET.

On Sunday, Samsung Mobile's twitter account made a mysterious announcement at 9:52 a.m. ET: Destination: tgeltaayehxnx.

The word tgeltaayehxnx is actually an anagram that, when rearranged, spells The Next Galaxy. But better yet, if you add a .com to the end of that anagram, you visit a Samsung Mobile website a beautiful-looking countdown clock. The title of the page reads, A Whole New Universe. Unless this is an extremely late April Fool's Joke, it looks like Samsung's going to leap frog its own official May 3 unveiling at Samsung Mobile Unpacked in London with a surprise unveiling at around 7 a.m. on Monday, April 23. We'll be checking this very website at that time, as well as Samsung's main site, to see what goes down.

Up until this announcement, May 3 was the release date that most Samsung customers and Android smartphone users were looking forward to. Starting around mid-April, Samsung began releasing its invitations for the Samsung Mobile Unpacked event in London, but the invitations had a not-so-subtle to its next Galaxy S smartphone: Come and meet the next Galaxy, the invitations beckoned.

The latest report of the Samsung Galaxy S3 looks highly accurate: On Friday, April 20, Vietnamese website Tinhte claimed to be in possession of the Galaxy S3 smartphone, which they said was disguised as another phone, the Samsung GT-i9300. They said that smartphone featured a 4.6-inch AMOLED display with a 720 x 1184 resolution, a quad-core 1.4 GHz processor, an 8-megapixel camera, 1 GB of RAM, an NFC chip, 16 GB of storage plus micro SD capabilities.

Samsung may pushed up the Galaxy S3 unveiling because it knows Tinhte did in fact have smartphone, but if the news gets a chance to properly disseminate, Samsung will lose all chances to surprise fans. It's just like what happened to Apple back in 2010, when an engineer lost the iPhone 4 at a bar -- also disguised as another phone -- and The Verge got to describe the phone's specs in detail before Steve Jobs got a chance to. Samsung may not break the news first, but it refuses to be the last one to its own party.

Samsung Galaxy S3: Other Likely Features

Screen Size. Dutch tech site Tweakers.net expects the Samsung Galaxy S3 to feature a 4.7-inch AMOLED screen with a display resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels. In contrast, BGR thinks the Galaxy S3 will feature a 4.8-inch full HD display with a 16:9 aspect ratio and 1080p resolution. Either way, the phone will reportedly be a monster, stretching from the 4.3-inch screen size of the S2 to a 4.6-4.8-inch display, which is almost tablet-sized.

With a screen stretched by almost half an inch, the Galaxy S3 will reportedly feature a five-column layout, similar to the Note, instead of the the four-column layout of earlier Galaxy models. If Samsung's really pushing the stylus like it is with the Note, who knows? Maybe the Galaxy S3 will come with an adorable mini stylus.

Home button. Speaking of tablet-sized, there were rumors that said the Samsung Galaxy S3 would dump its physical home button like the Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Instead, it looks like the S3 will get a home button just like its little brother, the S2, and its cousin, the Galaxy Note.

Processor Power. Tweakers expects the Galaxy S3 to feature Samsung's Exynos 4412, which is a quad-core system-on-a-chip made with four Cortex A9 processors running at 1.5 GHz. However, previous rumors said the Samsung Galaxy S3 could be packing a quad-core A9-based Exynos 4212, which can clock a whopping 1.8 GHz. We'll look forward to this specific feature on Samsung's forthcoming announcement planned for Monday, as 1.8 GHz would make this new Galaxy one of the fastest phones on the planet -- almost twice as fast as the iPhone 4S.

Outside and Inside. Outside, the Galaxy S3 smartphone will reportedly feature a much firmer ceramic made encasing, similar to that of the HTC One S. Inside, the phone will reportedly run on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Face and Eye Tracking. One Samsung source told CNET that the company was working on adding advanced eye-tracking technologies to its front-facing camera, allowing it to detect when you're looking at the screen so it can lock when you look away. As interesting as the idea sounds, it could become a hassle if you need to enter your passcode every time you look up from your phone. Unlike the Face Unlock feature from Ice Cream Sandwich, this feature sounds very gimmicky.

Camera. Samsung is believed to have improved its 8-megapixel camera from the Galaxy S2 into a killer 12-megapixel camera for the S3. But besides taking up more space, the camera is also said to feature a 1/2.3-inch sensor, which is considerably bigger than the 1/3.2inch CMOS chip found in most smartphones -- iPhone 4S included. A camera with a similar chip, the Pentax Q system camera, costs more than $800 here in the U.S.

What else would you like to see in the Samsung Galaxy S3? Are you excited for this April 23 announcement? Is Samsung pulling our legs? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.