With Nvidia officially taking the reigns off of its quad-core Tegra 3 platform, it was only going to be a matter of time before the quad-core smartphone rumours began.

But it's not a Kal-El powered phone whisper that has caught Pocket-lint's eye - but rather the murmur of a quad-core packing Samsung Galaxy S III that has got the fandroid in us all hot an bothered.

According to an Android and Me source, Samsung has some devices planned for early 2012 that will "blow minds" and that are a "big step past the Galaxy Nexus class, in every way".

Blimey o'trousers indeed - that's some prediction.

And it's led to reports that the third instalment of Sammy's most popular smartphone range yet will come packing the Korean company's recently discovered quad-core System-on-Chip (SoC) - the Exynos 4412. The 4412 is apparently in testing and is said to be based on the ARM Cortex A9 architecture with four CPU cores with the same clock speed, 1.5GHz, as the recently announced Exynos 4212 - but with double the core action.

Throw in the possibility of the Mali-T604 GPU, with up to 5x performance improvement over previous Mali graphics processors and one that is scalable up to four cores, and you're looking at a beast of a handset.

Of course, it's all rumour and speculation at present but, with Mobile World Congress now on the horizon, it's a rumour mill that's bound to gather some pace.

And, with 10 million global sales of the Samsung Galaxy S II, making it the fastest selling handset in the company's history, added to the 20 million sales of the original Galaxy S smartphone, and it's fairly obvious that this is a line that Sammy is going to stick to for a while yet.

Whilst you wait for the S III to land, why not check out our Samsung Galaxy S II review