By Michael Fisher

Last week’s Samsung Galaxy S III giveaway contest here on Pocketnow was a huge hit with readers, racking up over 1300 submissions during the week-long contest period. The AT&T-branded Galaxy S III we’re giving away is a hot item indeed, something that Alyssa Ascher is about to find out first-hand, as she’s our contest winner! Alyssa, congratulations! We’ve contacted you at the email address you provided; please reply at your earliest convenience.

We thought everyone might appreciate a peek into the methodology we used to determine a winner. There were 1,343 entries in all, of which about 80% bore the correctly formatted hint sentence, which was “Save juice with Smart Stay” (not case- or spelling-sensitive). After the contest period ended last Friday, we used a random-number generator to provide an integer between 1 and 1343, which first provided the number 160. The email corresponding to that number, however, didn’t contain the proper hint sentence, so we generated another random number: 857. That number corresponded to Alyssa’s entry, which bore the correctly-worded sentence.

We’d like to sincerely thank everyone who participated in the contest, from our regular readers to first-time visitors. We don’t get to do giveaways too often, but they’re a lot of fun, and we hope to have more opportunities to do so in the future. Thank you for your submissions!