Samsung has made the Galaxy Premier official, a phone which was the subject of a brief leak last week, and fits just below the Galaxy SIII in Samsung’s range. It has taken on the distinct style of the Galaxy S III too, with the same front and rear panel design, wrapped up in a curvy chassis.

Samsung has given the Premier a slightly smaller touchscreen, 4.65-inches, which still boasts a high definition, 1280 x 720 pixel resolution. Instead of the monster Exynos 4 Quad chip, a dual-core, 1.5GHz Texas Instruments processor powers the phone, along with 1GB of RAM.

There’s a choice of either 8GB or 16GB of internal memory, plus a microSD card slot which can increase this figure by a massive 64GB, and other important features include Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, NFC, Wi-FI, plus the majority of Samsung’s software tweaks seen on the SIII, such as Smart Stay, Pop-Up Play and S-Voice.

Samsung has left the camera equipment unchanged, so the Premier has an 8 megapixel camera on the rear and a 1.9 megapixel video call lens above the screen. It’ll be shipping with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean already installed too, with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI over the top.

Slashgear notes that the Galaxy Premier supports 4G LTE connectivity, although there’s no word on which bands, so any keen EE subscribers may not have found a slightly cheaper alternative to the S III LTE just yet.

All this may remind you of the Galaxy Nexus, which the Galaxy Premier appears to be succeeding, with some tweaked specs and the addition of Samsung’s custom UI. This follows the launch of the Galaxy Nexus’ replacement, the Nexus 4.

As for the release, initially the phone seems to be headed to Russia, but will make its way through Europe over the coming months.