Samsung predicted right about the new Galaxy S3 - that it will push out at least 10 million units worldwide in the initial months of its global debut.

The man who had made the bold declaration in early June, Samsung mobile division chief Shin Jong-kyun, was again the source of the good news, which of course the Asian tech giant wanted the whole world to know.

According to South Korean news agency Yonhap on Monday, Samsung's flagship smartphone has already sold more than 10 million units, which far exceeded the numbers that Mr Shin said would mark the product's total sales in the few months of its entry into to the market.

"It appears that (the S3's accumulated sales) has exceeded 10 million units," Mr Shin was reported by Yonhap as saying.

But he fell short in one respect as the S3 proved more attractive than anyone in Samsung had expected when reached it target sales before August, meaning the new gadget's performance was beyond the benchmark set by its predecessor, the S2.

Tech blog site Slash Gear noted that the S2 breached the 10 million mark five months after its release and with so short a time for the S3 to achieve the same number of sales, Samsung was again emboldened to project that by year-end the handset is well on its way to chalk up some 40 million units of total sales.

By its estimates, Samsung said global consumers scooped up some 190,000 S3s in the past few weeks each day and if the same trend would be sustained, there should be no problem for the device to rack up sales and again prove that the new phone has become Apple's latest nemesis.

However, Samsung's new announcement was not accompanied by detailed breakdown of sales per region or specific market.

Some analysts also raised questions if the figures actually represented units that were bought by consumers or mere shipment numbers that Samsung had delivered to its retailers as of the end June, more than a month after the S2 debuted in late May.

Nonetheless, the new report should further ignite the growing animosity between Apple and Samsung, whose bitter rivalry is also being waged in court rooms around the world.

A patent trial between the two tech titans is scheduled to start by July 30 in the United States while another commenced today in Australia, only parts of the ongoing global legal contests that only trained high-profile media attention to what analysts viewed as currently the dominant companies in the tech world.

And the tussles should only grow more interesting as Apple is expected to issue another iPhone upgrade by late 2012 while Samsung is believed to soon unleash another crop of Galaxy gadgets - possibly a new version of the tablet-smartphone Galaxy Note and a tablet version of the same model.