Samsung's Galaxy S2 will make its U.S. debut soon. Photo courtesy of Samsung

Samsung plans a U.S. release for the sequel to its most successful Android smartphone by the end of the summer, according to a senior executive of the company.

“We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” said Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung president of mobile business and digital imaging, in a briefing with reporters in South Korea on Wednesday. The story was first reported by Yonhap News.

The phone was initially released in South Korea — Samsung’s global headquarters — in April, subsequently rolling out to Europe and southern Asian countries in the months that followed.

The release of the Galaxy S2 comes at a particularly contentious time for Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers of Android-powered smartphones. The company is embroiled in a bitter patent dispute with Apple, the latter claiming Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S products were utter rip-offs of Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.

“We love competition, but we want people to invent their own stuff, and we are going to make sure we defend our intellectual property,” Apple COO Tim Cook said on the company’s earnings report conference call on Tuesday.

Samsung’s first Galaxy smartphone model — which admittedly looks a lot like the first iPhone — was hugely successful for the company. In its first six months after release, Samsung sold 10 million Galaxy S smartphones worldwide. Total sales of the Galaxy S2 from the countries it has already been released in amount to approximately 3 million devices thus far.

Considering the patent dispute with Apple, Samsung’s sales figures beg for comparison to the iPhone’s success. Apple reported record sales of its iPhone devices in its earnings report on Tuesday, with 20 million iPhones sold in a period of only three months.

But Shin has the company’s sights set high. Samsung is heavily promoting its latest tablet offering, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. And Shin expects the company to sell over 60 million smartphones by the end of this year.

Whether that number is realistic or not remains to be seen. If customers love the phone as much as our sister site Wired.co.uk does, Shin’s expectations may not be far off base.