Late last week I attended Samsung's "Unpacked 2013" event at Radio City Music Hall in order to take a closer look at the Galaxy S4 smartphone, set for release in April. The experience was mostly positive. Despite selling over 100 million Galaxy SIII phones last year, Samsung continues to grapple with its Apple inferiority complex and overcompensates by offering a dizzying array of new features at each of its launches. This event was no exception. A 45-minute "Broadway-styled" set of skits designed to showcase all of the line's improvements read like an inspired but endless laundry list of the recently-unimaginable. Bigger screen, longer battery life, better camera, faster, more-efficient chip, foreign language translation, eye scrolling, air gesture recognition, dual video capture and call mode (where the person you're speaking with can see your face through the secondary camera and everything around you via the primary camera)...this is a phone that is begging you to be its friend!
So many features were touted and applauded that choosing what to highlight became difficult. However, the S4 upgrades that I think are most significant are its improved primary camera (now 13 megapixels); its coterie of space-age user-tracking functions (including "eye-scrolling" that detects where your eyes are on the screen and will no doubt have Philip K. Dick rolling in his grave); and the promise of a Galaxy S4-compatible, Wii U-style controller that can turn your phone into either a handheld gaming device or a highly portable video game system.
A full list of Galaxy S4 features I liked included:
- A 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display with a pixel density of 441ppi — a genuine improvement over the Galaxy S III's 306ppi display, as well as the iPhone 5's 326ppi retina display.
- A 13 megapixel primary BSI camera with f/2.2 aperture and autofocus.
- A battery that lasts up to 24 hours and will now be able to charge wirelessly using NFC (near field communication).
- New toys for that new camera: Drama Shot will create animated GIFs using the camera's "burst mode," and Sound & Shot will record up to nine seconds of audio to accompany a still photo.
- A Green PHOLED display that sucks less juice from your battery. (As I explained in my review of the Galaxy Note 2 last fall, battery life is extremely important to me.)
- An Exynos 5 Octa eight-core chip, which will feature both a quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 1.8GHz setup and a Cortex-A7 1.2GHz cluster alongside -- which will also contribute to that more-efficient battery usage.
- A glove friendly interface: In other words, the phone will detect touch even through gloves.
- The aforementioned Galaxy S4-compatible controller, also pictured below. The controller will come bundled with eight games, be compatible with 80 additional Android games, and will communicate with televisions via Bluetooth. It is set for release in May. For handheld game play, the controller has an extendable clamp designed to accommodate either the S4 or the Note 2. For gaming on a larger screen, the phone will communicate wirelessly via Bluetooth with any smart TV.
Features I still have questions about:
- The Eye scrolling -- Will my preferences be saved somewhere? Am I giving away privacy for the sake of fingerless page scrolling? Also: Will it keep up with me? I'm a pretty fast reader...
- The Air Gesture -- Is this going to pick up all of my movements and interpret them as actions? Will it become the auto-correct of the user tracking world, performing actions I am not asking for simply because I use my hands when I talk?
- The Dual-Video Capture mode -- Do I want to easily share my surroundings with the person that I'm talking to on the phone?
- The Smart Pause feature that stops video you're watching if your eyes drift away -- What if I simply don't want to watch that portion of the video? What if just-listening is just fine?
Conclusion:
None of the criticisms I've written about here are actually deal breakers. I think that Samsung is actually making a very interesting set of products with its Galaxy series. Furthermore: At this point, I think that Samsung's products are more innovative and playful than Apple's but that Apple has the better app store.
What do you think? Apple or Samsung?
