Well now although old Sammy has now gone official with the new Samsung Galaxy S3, it appears there will be a limited edition of the Android Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone that wont be available to the public, and that limited edition Galaxy S3 is the official 2012 Olympics smartphone.

According to the guys over at Slash Gear the Samsung Galaxy S3 has now been named as the official smartphone of the 2012 Olympics, and will be a special limited edition of the device that will support for Visa payWave payments, and will only be given to Visa sponsored trialists and athletes.

Samsung Mobile Communications, head of sales and marketing, DJ Lee has said that the Samsung Galaxy S3 is the ideal handset to showcase the convenience and ease of the Visa payWave mobile payments app during the Olympics 2012 in London.

To use Visa payWave the user requires the Visa app on their smartphone and then holds the handset near an NFC enabled terminal, and apparently transactions above 20-quid, approximately $32, require a passcode to be put into the device, whist the app’s history shows all transactions and account balance.

Of course the regular Samsung Galaxy S3 also has NFC functionality; however thus far no specific NFC payment deals have been announced for the Android Ice Cream Sandwich smartphone.

Apparently old Sammy has been working with Visa for over a year with a view to bring their NFC payment system to Samsung devices, and a promise was made back in April 2011 that there would be an Olympics 2012 tie-in, and thus it appears Sammy has kept that promise, although originally it was expected that the handset would go on general sale to the public, but now that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Of course that doesn’t mean that you wont be able to get hold of one of the limited edition Olympic Galaxy S3 handsets, as these kind of limited edition devices seem to have a habit of popping up online for sale sooner or later.