Before we dive too deeply into this, understand that Best Buy is wrong A LOT of the time. They were telling employees that Ice Cream Sandwich updates were coming to the Rezound and RAZR back in early April, and yeah, owners of those phones know exactly how that panned out. They also tend to populate their systems with dates that look more like estimates than anything official. With that said, they do give us good info from time to time, so we thought we would at least share.

If you pre-order the Verizon version of Galaxy SIII from BBY, they are apparently telling customers that the device could arrive in stores by Thursday, June 28. There are a couple of reasons we like this date:  1. It’s a Thursday and Verizon likes launching phones on Thursdays. 2. We were told by a source that Verizon expects to have the device at warehouses as early as June 23. If that’s the case, then the 28th is certainly a possibility.

Again, Best Buy is hit or miss with this stuff, so don’t take it as gospel, just file it away into a “potential” locker. If you pre-order directly from Verizon, they are telling customers to expect it by July 9.

Cheers Matt!

With all of the major U.S. carriers announcing pre-orders or launch dates for the Samsung Galaxy SIII yesterday, we were sort of surprised to have not heard from Best Buy. Well, we heard from them this morning. As of today, you can walk into a Best Buy store and pre-order the Android phone of the year from 3 carriers – Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T.

Via:  Best Buy

If you follow us on Twitter, you probably saw this over the weekend, but we wanted to make sure all of our tech-obsessed readers were in the loop. Since Best Buy didn’t post the greatest Q4 earnings numbers, they have decided to close a bunch of their big box stores in 2012 – 50 to be exact. Over the weekend – probably to sneak by the media – they released a list of the stores, many of which will close by May 12.

It’s not specifically Android-related, but we know that many of you buy your phones and keep up with tech via Best Buy. Some of you may have a harder time doing that if one of the stores on this list was your closest. Missing from the list are two stores that already closed in Kansas City, MO and Scottsdale, AZ. 

So this is not all that surprising. Best Buy notified employees last Friday that we would see Ice Cream Sandwich roll out to the DROID RAZR and RAZR MAXX on April 4. As you know from reading this site, there is an update headed to both phones, but it is not Android 4.0 and is instead a bug fixer as build 6.12.181. Best Buy apparently got that memo and has now updated their systems to reflect a “delay” on ICS. That’s sort of an unfair tag, as we aren’t exactly sure that this update was ever going to be ICS in the first place. Will both phones see Android 4.0.3 in the near future? Yeah, they will, but probably not for another few weeks.

On a related and potentially good note, the HTC Rezound is supposedly still on for Friday, April 6. Do we really believe that it will happen? Eh, we’ll give it a 30% chance.

Cheers ___!

Best Buy and Motorola announced a deal this morning that will allow you to save $50 on select Moto devices (including the DROID RAZR) when you trade-in your current phone. The Photon 4G and Atrix 2 are also included in the promo. On top of the phone discount, they will also give you up to $200 in Best Buy store credit depending on the phone you trade in. If you are in the market for a new phone, the RAZR continues to be one of our favorites. You can read our review on the device here.

Promo details.

Best Buy has your deal of the day going on right now. If you purchase the Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 from their website it will only run you $349.99. On top of that already really good price, once you add it to your cart, Best Buy throws in a keyboard dock for free. Pretty good right? This is the 16GB WiFi version of the Tab line, but Samsung’s tablets still stand as some of the best Android tablets out there. Head on over to Best Buy’s site if this sounds right up your alley.

Buy.

Best Buy is ready to take pre-orders on the HTC One X that is headed to AT&T here in the States. Remember that this is the non-Tegra 3 version since that chip has yet to play nicely with LTE. Since AT&T is looking to push their new LTE network all year, they had to go with the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core chip instead. It’s no slouch, so that shouldn’t discourage you from thinking about it.

More at Android Life.

If you are planning to upgrade smartphones within the next year, Best Buy wants your business now and is willing to give you $50 for it. Even if you can’t upgrade until June, September or even December, you can let them know and a $50 gift card will be held for the day you finally do upgrade. In order to participate, you only have until February 12 to reserve a card, so be sure to jump on it if BBY smartphone deals are you thing.

Offer.

Cheers Scott!