Water and dust proof, powerful processor, hi-res screen, it takes pics underwater!
Not as rugged as its name suggests, bigger and heavier than the S4
Samsung's been doing its best to capitalise on the good word surrounding the Galaxy S4 by flooding the market with a further four S4 devices. We've had the Zoom, the Mini and the Mega but now it's the turn of the Active, designed for outdoors rough 'n' tumble and, er, underwater photos.
It's on sale now for around £450.
Design
The S4 Active is a similar size to the original S4, but it looks and feels pretty different. It's considerably heavier, at 153g instead of 130g and feels sturdier too. On the front the three Android controls beneath the screen are all hard buttons, with no touch sensitive pads.
Surprisingly, considering its underwater credentials, it has a removable back, very similar to Samsung's standard ultra-thin plastic designs, though it has some extra clips to hold it firmly in place. It's designed to be completely waterproof to a depth of one metre for up to 30 minutes -- certainly enough time to pull it out of a puddle if you drop and time enough to take a few quick snaps underwater if you take the notion.
The 5-inch touch screen nestling behind tough Corning Gorilla Glass is TFT rather than the Super AMOLED we've been seeing on other high-end Samsung handsets.
So it's perhaps not quite so bright and vivid but it still looks terrific, with a full HD resolution of 1,920x1,080 pixels, which boils down to an impressive 441ppi.
Photography
With 8 megapixels the camera is a step down from the S4's 13 megapixels but it has at least one significant trick up its sleeve -- it can take pics underwater. There's no dedicated camera shutter button but the volume rocker will perform this function in aqua mode -- just as well since the touch screen won't work well under water. The Active's aqua mode loses the autofocus, so it's harder to take sharp pics, but it's still an impressive trick, and there are plenty of options to play with in conventional camera mode.
There's a generous 16GB of memory as standard for your HD pics and vids, but you can add more via microSD up to 64GB.
Android, software and processor
The quad-core processor is backed by 2GB RAM and it's up there with the original S4 in terms of performance. Apps and menus open in a twinkling and HD games like Riptide GP gave it no problems. Our AnTuTu benchmark test gave it a score of 25,964 -- slightly ahead of the S4 and the highest score we've yet seen on a handset.
It's running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean which has only just been superseded by version 4.3, and the Google Nexus 4 is the only handset to have it so far. No shame there, and it's got Samsung's busy TouchWiz user interface running on top, so you get all Samsung's usual high-end widgets and smart screen features too.
It's good to know there's a sizeable 2,600mAh battery on board with a high-spec phone like this, but unfortunately it's not a miracle worker -- don't expect to get much more than a day's worth of heavy use out of it.
Conclusion
The Galaxy S4 Active isn't quite as rugged as its name suggests -- despite the water and dust proofing, and the Corning Gorilla Glass covering the display, there's not a lot of protection against dropping it. Still, it could certainly take the original S4 in a fight, and with some fairly minor economies on the screen and camera, it offers a similarly high spec to the original S4.
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Software: Google Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
Processor: Quad-core 1.9GHz Qualcomm APQ8064T Snapdragon 600
Memory slot: Yes
Display: 5in TFT 1,920x1,080 pixels
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
Camera: 8-megapixel, autofocus, LED flash, 2-megapixel front-facing camera
Video playback: AVI, WMV, ASF, FLV, MKV, MP4, 3GP, WebM
Audio playback: MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB/WB, OGG, FLAC, WAV, WMA, MIDI, SP-MIDI, XMF. i-Melody
Radio: No
Battery: 2,600mAh
Size: 140x71x9mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
