Samsung’s New Premium Suite Update Brings Split-Screen Multitasking To The Galaxy S III

Easily one of the best features Samsung has been implementing on its newer Galaxy Note devices is the ability to run two apps in separate windows at the same time. I’ve long lamented the feature’s limited availability, but Samsung is clearly looking to remedy that — earlier today the company confirmed that the Multi-Window feature is indeed part of the Galaxy S III Premium Suite update it began pushing out a few days back.

According to a report from Slashgear, users in “Poland, India, the UK, France, Sweden, Italy, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and Algeria” have received and installed the update, with more locales sure to report in soon. Just a heads-up for you U.S. Galaxy S III owners — there’s a good chance your device has received a Jelly Bean update recently, but you’ll still have to wait to get your hands on the Premium Suite’s goodies.

Apart from bringing a tweaked version of Jelly Bean to one of Samsung’s most popular devices (Android 4.1.2, if you’re counting), the rest of the changelog is relatively mundane. The page buddy feature brings up certain homescreen pages when a user plugs in a pair of headphones or docks the device for instance, and users can now also view their apps by order of frequency in the notification panel. Curiously, Samsung isn’t sharing everything it’s packed in the Premium Suite update just yet — instead, it pushed out a hokey teaser video (see below) to highlight some neat new additions and promised to flesh out that changelog even more a little later on.

A brief aside: In the event that you’re still rocking some slightly older Samsung hardware, you can still join in the fun… sort of. The split-screen multitasking feature was just recently cajoled to run on the Galaxy S II, and it only requires a passing knowledge of Android hackery to implement.