Samsung’s Galaxy S II invades the US in August

U.S. gadget hounds will soon be able to get their hands on Samsung’s massively successful Galaxy S II, Yonhap News reports.

“We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” Samsung mobile president JK Shin told reporters in a briefing. Judging from his language, it doesn’t appear as if the company has locked down a specific launch date yet. We’ve sent a note to Samsung to see if it can offer any more specifics.

The Galaxy S II is Samsung’s latest flagship Android smartphone, and if it wasn’t obvious already, it’s the successor to last year’s wildly popular Galaxy S. The company launched Galaxy S variants across all four major US carriers last year, something that hadn’t been attempted with any major smartphone, let alone an Android one. Together with strong international availability, Samsung managed to sell 10 million units last year and snatched the lead Android manufacturer crown from Motorola.

After selling 3 million units in less than two months, it appears the Galaxy S II is already off to a strong start. The phone launched in Korea in April and hit Europe and Japan afterwards. The Galaxy S II sports a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen (though the resolution is lower than some 4-inch competitors), a Samsung dual-core processor, and support for near-field communications (NFC) built-in. The latter feature makes it primed to take advantage of mobile payments services like Google Wallet.

Samsung so far has been fairly conservative with its estimates for the Galaxy S II’s success, saying that it projects 10 million units to ship this year. But given that anticipation for the phone is running high, I suspect Samsung will end up selling closer to 20 million. Overall, the company expects to sell 60 million smartphones this year, which includes a bevy of inexpensive mid-range devices.

The Galaxy S II’s biggest competitor, not surprisingly, will be the iPhone 5 (or whatever else Apple has up its sleeve). Samsung may have been better off bringing the Galaxy S II to the US sooner, because come August all the tech world will be talking about is Apple’s plans.