Flagship Galaxy S3 Left Behind Already

I'm sorry an update past 4.1 is not available for your Galaxy SIII. 

Unfortunately, I don't have any information on future updates for this phone. 

I'm sorry, TailGunner, but a bit of research would have told you that going with AT&T would land you in the same boat as the millions before you who bought a "flagship" phone.  AT&T is glaciallly slow to release updates for Android phones, if they even bother to release an update at all.  And for a communications company, their customer communications are sadly few and far between.

Basically, you get what you get when you buy the phone.  And, if they're feeling generous, you *may* get an update or two.  But let me tell you, the few updates I've gotten in the past 14 months for my Galaxy SII have each had some pretty bug "gotcha" baked in that made me wonder if I was overall any better off.  Like battery life nearly cut in half or near daily "sleep of death" bouts.  I've had to do a factory wipe on my phone twice as well as visit an AT&T Device Store to have them wipe and reload Android for me.  I'm finally back to 4.0.3 which suffers from the inability to reconnect to wifi when resuming from sleep.  But that's far better than 4.0.4's inabillity to wake from sleep at all!

My wife's Samsung Captivate Glide is a similar story.  Maybe it's the very design of Android that makes this all work so poorly.  But AT&T seems to know ways to cr@p up a phone like few other companies.  It takes them a good 6 months to add their junk to an Android build and it looks to me like their testing process is HORRIBLE.

So be happy where you are, or look into a 3rd party custom Android ROM.  Cause I'd bet money that any AT&T "upgrade" will break about as many things as it fixes.

This is exactly why the Galaxy S3 may be the last carrier-branded phone I ever purchase. With LTE becoming more ubiquitous, I am hoping that the next Nexus phone released by Google will be LTE-compliant. I've had a Galaxy Nexus before joining AT&T, and the philosophy behind the Nexus line is what Android is all about. You get pure stock Android, directly from Google, with no meddling from manufacturers and carriers. The updates are rolled out directly by Google, so there are no annoying manufacturer skins, no "testing" delays, nor any bloatware. Best of all, everything works as intended. If the Nexus 4 had LTE, I'd have dropped the GS3 like a bad habit.