Samsung Galaxy S4 Announced

By Alex Angove

Last updated 15 March 2013

The Samsung Galaxy S4 (GS4) has finally been unveiled at an odd, broadway-themed Samsung launch event in New York. While the event itself was strange enough to possibly warrant its own post a little later on, for now we’ll stick to covering the new heir to the Android throne, the Galaxy S4, and the new hardware/features that it brings.

We'll say at the outset that we're glad Samsung has ditched the Roman-numeral thing. GSII and GSIII were appallingly similar in text and GSIV just doesn't look that great. We're glad we can now call it the GS4 without fear of fanbois crying foul when we 'misspell' their favorite device's name.

As with many global releases, there will be both a 3G and 4G LTE version of the GS4, so specs will vary depending on region.

Design of the Galaxy S4

Aesthetically, the GS4 really doesn’t differ much from the Galaxy S3. The tacky plastic has been replaced by a tougher polycarbonate design, but as far as appearances go there’s very little to differentiate between the two other than a much thinner bezel, larger screen and a shinier rim around the edge.

That’s not exactly a bad thing; the GS3 is a beautiful device. We were a bit sad to hear that the Pebble Blue option isn’t making a come-back and that the GS4 will be available in “Black Mist” and “White Frost”, or “black” and “white” for the verbosely-disinclined. This isn't exactly 'bad' news; just a bit of a let down for us.

Despite the increased screen size, the GS4 is actually smaller than its predecessor. Not by much, granted; the height and width are almost identical, but the profile has dropped from 8.6mm to an impressively thin 7.9mm. That 0.7mm might not sound like much, but it actually is the kind of thing that you can really feel in your hand or, especially, in your pocket. Our worries about the display-size increase have been pretty much banished thanks to this welcome news.

Of course, smaller bezels around the screen mean a more easily damage display when dropped and we didn’t hear anything about screen durability or protection. It’s most likely Gorilla Glass 2 at the very least, but with all the circulating rumors about a ‘flexible’ and ‘unbreakable’ screen we would have liked to hear a little more.

GS4 Hardware

As expected, the Galaxy S4 packs some serious stuff under its hood. What we do know is that the GS4 will come with either a 1.6GHz Exynos Octa-core or a 1.9GHz quad-core, depending on region. Most likely the outstandingly powerful octa-core version would be 3G and the (still quite impressive) 1.9GHz quad-core would be for the 4G LTE.

At this point we would like to take a second to tell the 4G LTE buyers to calm down. A quad-core 1.9GHz processor is fine. In fact, it’s better than fine; it’s huge. We simply cannot think of a single reason why anybody would need an octa-core handset in the current market, unless they were planning on ROOTing the device and using it as a powerful pocket computer.

There’s 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM to back up whichever processor you get, as well as options for 16GB, 32GB or 64GB of storage with a MicroSD slot supporting up to 64GB more.

The 4.99 (just below the unofficial ‘phablet’ cutoff) inch display is of the Super AMOLED variety and, unsurprisingly, offers a 1080p resolution with 441 pixels per inch (ppi). That’s over 100ppi more than the iPhone 5 on a display that is, for all intents and purposes, a full inch bigger.

The rear camera is 13MP, unfortunately conforming to the MP trend that 'more is better’, and the front-facing shooter is 2MP. We’ll talk more on the cameras later. Sufficed to say that we expect them to be good, but the presentation left us wanting in terms of image quality reassurance. Though, it certainly made up for that in camera new functionality.

Other specs include:

WiFi a/b/g/n/ac
BlueTooth 4.0
NFC
IR LED
Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
Temperature & Humidity Sensors
IR Gesture sensors (more on this later)

The keen eyed and well-informed may have noticed that little “IR LED” inclusion. Those who have read our post on the HTC One launch event may remember our appreciation of the One’s ability to act as a universal TV remote via an infrared LED sensor. Interestingly, happily, intelligently, the Galaxy S4 also has this ability.

We just think that the idea of including an IR sensor for this purpose makes so much sense. We really do look forward to the day where we never have to look for a remote again and, while every member of a family keeping a remote in their pocket may lead to some minor feuding, this one definitely comes out as a major tick for both Samsung and HTC.

New Features

Air View

Interestingly, the GS4 has incorporated gesture control. By gesture control we don’t mean swipe, tap and pinch gestures; rather, Samsung has enabled their newest flagship to take commands from a hand passing over it, or a finger hovering just above the screen.

The new functionalities seem to be a blending of Xbox Kinect-style hand gestures and the hover abilities of the S-Pen on the Samsung Galaxy Note 2. Samsung calls this Air View.

For instance, holding a finger above an album in the picture gallery will expand the album out, allowing the user to either take their finger away, thus minimising it, or to select one of the pictures in the expanded view.

Hand gestures are done by swiping a flat hand upwards or sideways across the screen, palm-down. This can be done to turn pages in eBooks, call contacts, scroll down a page etc. This is a pretty cool option that would be handy when eating, or generally any time your hands are dirty. We can’t see it having too wide-spread an application, but its addition is certainly a plus with no minuses.

Smart Pause/Scroll

The Smart Pause and Smart Scroll rumours can finally be put to rest. Smart Pause is exactly what everyone thought it would be: an eye-tracking function that can pause a video should you look away from the screen. Once again we find this questionably useful, as we often glance away from our displays for seconds at a time while watching a movie or video.

Smart Scroll, as far as we heard in the presentation, was brushed off as a scrolling option whereby the user can tilt their S4 forwards or backwards to scroll up and down a page. This is hardly the impressive/creepy eye-tracking service we’d heard it to be but then again, the whole event was a little hard to follow so maybe that feature will crop back up in more detail soon.

S Translate

S Translate appears to be pretty much Google Translate, but with less languages – just 9 at this point. However, S Translate does have the huge benefit of being available when offline. It’s actually built in to the email and messaging features, too, so an incoming message from an overseas friend can be easily translated.

The offline-mode is probably its major selling point. Anyone who’s travelled with a smartphone before knows one or all of these three things:

Roaming data is incredibly expensive
Many smartphones won’t work in many countries, no matter how ‘unlocked’ they are, so you end up buying a burner phone if you want network access
Finding free WiFi may be easy in some countries, but you can almost never find it when you really need it

Offline mode for an international translator app with voice-input really would be helpful to travellers.

KNOX

KNOX is definitely one of our favorite features. Just like in BlackBerry’s new BB10 OS, the Galaxy S4 can be essentially split in to two different phones for the purposes of business.

Enterprise users can use the S4 for personal stuff and for work, with neither portion being accessible from the other without permission. The business side is even based on Secure Android, which was developed by the United States government specifically for security purposes.

That means that business users can keep sensitive documents, pictures and email accounts on their S4 without ever risking information fall in to the wrong hands, or being accessed by their kids.

This should be a big hit in the business market.

Camera on the Galaxy S4

The S4 received some enthusiastic applause when its 13MP camera was revealed, but while others were cheering we were worrying. Cramming more pixels in to a picture is in no way indicative of that picture’s quality. As we’ve said before, more pixels certainly allow for a better picture, but they in no way create it. Lens systems, imaging software and imaging sensors are all far more important than how many pixels a photo has.

Not just that, but a 13MP photo would be huge. 8MP is already so big that many 8MP cameras default to 5MP photos just to save space. Try going on a holiday with a 16GB phone and going 8MP snap-happy. If you have any music, apps, games or anything else on that phone other than photos you’re going to run out of room surprisingly quickly.

Now, it’s possible, even probable, that the improvements to the S4’s camera are big and the 13MP tagline is just there to keep the marketability rating high. It may very well default to 8MP or even 5MP and have such a new and great camera system that users will never even need those extra 5MP. We hope so, anyway.

What we were impressed with are the new camera features on the GS4, many of which are reminiscent of the new things introduced on the HTC One.

Eraser

Eraser is almost exactly the ‘Object Removal’ feature of the HTC Zoe system. A user can take a photo, but the camera records a short, high-res video in the background. Should something enter the photo during the 3 seconds or so, said object can be selected and removed.

This kind of function is awesome and works like magic on the One, so we expect it should be similarly hassle-free on the Galaxy S4.

Drama Shot

Drama Shot, once again, is easily compared to a One feature. The S4 takes a quick burst of 100 high-res snapshots over 4 seconds. It then automatically chooses the most appropriate options and creates a sort of collage.

In the demonstration a (notably skilled) tap-dancing child twirls past the camera. The S4 then takes the child at 5 points across the photo and amalgamates them, showing him at different points in his spin from left to right.

Sound Recording

Here’s where the Zoe and the S4 diverge a little. While HTC’s Zoe feature actually records a short video, the S4 has the option to record a snippet of sound while taking the photo. This adds an extra element to the picture that we think is pretty cool. It not only allows you to remember the visuals, but helps jog your memory by playing back the sound of the crowded room, or your friends laughing as you snap off a shot.

Dual Camera

Dual Camera is going to be one of those options that people either love or hate, we can just see it now. What Dual Camera does is either take a recording or a photo out of the front-facing camera, while doing the main business with the rear.

The idea here being that folks who are the regular photographers never end up being in any of them, so this is a way of easily adding themselves in to a pic.

The end result is a picture or video with a thumbnail of the user’s face inserted with any one of a number of preset aesthetic styles, such as making it look like a postage stamp.

Story Album

Story Album is an automatic album generator. It uses dates, pictured environments and geographical location to piece together certain photos. It will then prompt the user if they wish to immediately create and name an album or if they just want to leave it.

We like this feature, too. It’s really easy for photos to get cluttered up on a smartphone, even out of order if you go back and delete a few embarrassing shots in the middle of your gallery. This sounds like an easy way to keep things neat, assuming that it works.

Video Calling

Dual Camera also works during video calls, so a caller can keep themselves in frame, while showing their conversation partner what they’re looking at with the main camera. There’s also the option to share whatever is on screen, making it easy to show someone pictures or venues that you’ve been looking at, or a map of where to meet up.

Summary

There were a few other features, such as health monitoring apps and accessories, but we might go in to them later in a separate article, as they’re more of a niche thing.

As far as being a new flagship smartphone goes, the Galaxy S4 is definitely looking like a serious contender. The fact that it manages to be smaller than the S3 but sport a larger screen is not only impressive but important, as more than a few users were already distressed with the imposing size of its progenitor.

The new camera features are great and are definitely going to give the HTC One a run for its money. While we still think that the One had a better-rounded new camera experience (from what we’ve seen), the S4 at least offers a similar enough experience to compete in the camera department, while offering other incentives with services that the One doesn’t have.

All the new services sound pretty cool, especially KNOX and the IR LED TV remote, and the hardware improvements are fantastic. The 2600mAh battery should be enough to handle the raw power and 4G LTE speeds of the 4G model and, hopefully, the 8-core CPU of the 3G model, so we’re not too concerned there.

The polycarbonate design does look a little samey, but hey, it worked for Apple so why shouldn’t it work for #2? It’s still quite handsome and the new material should be tougher than the old, so it’s at least improved in functionality. We also like that the battery is removable, so folks who like to keep a spare one around still have that option.

Basically the Samsung Galaxy S4 was very impressive. But there’s one huge flaw with everything we’ve said so far.

The presentation itself was incredibly staged. Almost none of the new features were actually demonstrated live. Rather, they were explained and then acted out, or shown on a pre-recorded video. This gives us doubts as to just how seamless, easy and well-implemented a lot of them are.

It’ll be interesting to see, once reviewers get their hands on the S4, just how much of the stage production was lights and broadway-magic and how much of it actually stands up in the real world.

Should the S4 manage to live true to its word, we certainly expect it to do incredibly well in the coming months.

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