Though it's already been broadly assumed that Samsung's "Next Galaxy" event in London early next month would be for the hotly anticipated Galaxy S II successor — the flagship phone in the Korean giant's Android lineup — we've now been able to confirm it with a source close to the company. In other words, this won't be for a new Galaxy Note, Galaxy Tab, or a lower-end product or range of products — May 3rd is the real deal. It's still unclear whether this milestone device will be known as the Galaxy S III or something else entirely, but we'll know soon enough.

We've also confirmed with our source that the global version of the device will feature a quad-core processor, matching up with earlier rumors. "Expect superlative benchmark performance," we're told, which comes as no big surprise considering that the dual-core Exynos processor found in many versions of last year's Galaxy S II were benchmark leaders. We haven't gotten a lock on exactly which quad-core processor will be in this phone, but it seems like a reasonable guess that it'll be the same 32nm Cortex-A9 based Exynos teased earlier this year and slated for the new Meizu MX this June. In other words, don't expect a Tegra 3 here as HTC is using in the One X.

Notably, our source points out that the quad-core part will be in the global version of the phone. That likely means that certain regional variants will substitute other chips as necessary to meet requirements (for instance, to support LTE, AT&T is using a Snapdragon S4 in place of Tegra 3 in its own version of the One X). But that's not necessarily a bad thing: "As we've seen with Qualcomm's S4, [quad-core] isn't automatically better than a dual-core," our source says. Non-Exynos variants of the Galaxy S II (on T-Mobile, for instance) haven't been slouches, so there shouldn't be any big concern that Samsung will be selling "slow" phones this year, either.