Samsung originally announced the Galaxy S III Mini back in October. As of today, Samsung has returned with another Galaxy S III Mini announcement — they are releasing another variant of the handset, one with NFC. As of now, Samsung has confirmed the release for the UK market and mentioned that the handset will arrive later this month.

Samsung has yet to offer anything about a price, however it should fall somewhere close to that of the currently available (non-NFC) Galaxy S III Mini which is selling for around £270 contract-free. As to what the addition of NFC will mean — S Beam and Wi-Fi Direct file transfers.

Using S Beam you will be able to share files with another S Beam capable device. The S Beam transfers are direct and do not require any other connectivity. In other words, you can share without having to be on the same Wi-Fi network. Moving over to the Wi-Fi Direct side and we have Samsung touting that “by combining NFC and Wi-Fi Direct, S Beam is capable of sending larger files” including video files. Samsung has said that you will be able to transfer a 10MB audio file in under two seconds.

Otherwise, aside from the addition of NFC, the Galaxy S III Mini remains the same as we saw back in October. That is to say, a handset with a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, dual-core 1GHz processor, 8GB or 16GB of internal storage, VGA quality front-facing camera, a 5 megapixel rear-facing camera and Android 4.1 Jelly Bean with the TouchWiz user interface.

[device id=3718] [via SlashGear]