Samsung’s forthcoming Galaxy S III smartphone appears to be selling like hotcakes already. With a couple weeks left before the phone begins to hit stores around the world, pre-orders of Samsung’s latest flagship phone have been skyrocketing.

In fact, according to a report from Reuters this morning, over 9 million Galaxy S IIIs have been preordered. While that seems like a lot – and, to be fair, it is – much of the reporting on this story this morning has missed an important point: according to Reuters, all those pre-orders have come from “more than 100 global carriers.” So, contrary to some reports, it’s not actually customers who are pre-ordering all those phones, it’s Samsung’s carrier partners.

Now, 9 million pre-orders from carrier partners is still nothing to sneeze at – notwithstanding Jim Dalrymple’s statement that it’s “bullshit.” After all, carriers wouldn’t be ordering phones in such numbers if they didn’t at least hope to sell them. Nevertheless, carrier pre-orders are a very different animal from customer pre-orders, and acting as though the Galaxy S III was seeing unprecedented demand is inaccurate. The Galaxy S III’s real popularity test will come in terms of actual units sold. For that, we’ve still got a little time left to wait.