Slim and light, terrific screen, powerful processor, very good camera, loads of features
Possibly too many features, mono (not stereo) speaker, no HDMI port
The Galaxy S3 firmly moved Android phones from iPhone wannabes to fully-fledged iPhone alternatives, matching Apple's baby in terms of performance and many features, and in the process became the best-selling Android phone in the world. The problem was how to follow it, but the S4 is better in just about every way -- thinner, lighter, more powerful, with a better screen and more features.
What's not to like? It's on sale now for around £600, so lets find out.
Design
Samsung certainly hasn't dropped the ball on the design front.
It's a beautifully sleek slab of tech cool, vanishingly slim at a sliver under 8mm thick with a screen that goes almost to the edge at left and right. Not everyone's a fan of Samsung's typically thin, plasticky back plate -- and HTC's comparably powerful and full-featured One certainly takes the gold on the premium feel here -- but it helps to keep the weight down, and feels robust enough in use. It's easy enough to pop off though, allowing you to add up to 64GB of microSD memory or change the battery.
Beneath the screen is a hard home button, flanked by touch sensitive versions of Android's back and current apps buttons, which light up with the screen but dim in repose.
Around the sides are a volume rocker, power/sleep button, with a 3.5mm headphone jack and microUSB power/sync port. There's no HDMI port for putting your movies straight to an HD telly though. The speaker mounted on the back kicks out a decent volume without distorting, but it would have been nice to have stereo speakers so the sound could do justice to that gorgeous screen.
The stonkingly sharp Super Amoled touch screen sits behind Gorilla Glass and offers a resolution of 1,080x1,920 pixels, which boils down to 441ppi -- sharper than the iPhone's 326ppi and only very slightly below the HTC One's 468ppi (though at 4.7-inch that's a smaller screen on the One). It's bold and bright and all but bullies you into staring at it, soaking up the enhanced colours and detail with your flattered peepers.
Processing power
No, we didn't get the much-touted eight-core version that's apparently available in some markets. But we did get the quad-core 1.9GHz model and it's more than capable of driving all the myriad phone features without any serious problems. Apps mostly open up nippily, including the camera, which is ready to go in under a second. Browsing and downloads are fast too, especially if you can take advantage of the 4G connection it's capable of (which means EE for the moment, though there'll be others soonish).
[pullquote source="KeepInline]
The S4 delivered an AnTuTu performance benchmark score of 25,394 -- far and away the most powerful smartphone we've yet seen, and easily beating the [link url="https://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/2013-03/htc-one"]HTC One[/link]'s 22,420.
For gaming, this is a peach of a device and it'll handle just about any graphics you can throw at it. The high-speed thrills of Raging Thunder 2 were rendered smoothly throughout and in terrific detail -- it's not quite console level, but it's not far off.
AnTuTu's 3D benchmark software gave it a score of 6,063, which puts it ahead of any other Android handset. Safe to say, if you're gaming on anything right now, this will be an improvement.
But though it's clearly a powerful phone, it doesn't always feel quite as quick as it should. Apps can occasionally take a split second longer than is strictly necessary to open; some features take their time rendering. This could be due to the fact that there's just so much on there, with shedloads of apps and features, or that the intricacies of Samsung's TouchWiz interface slow things down a little, but it means the S4 doesn't seem quite as high-powered as it actually is -- [link url="https://www.wired.co.uk/reviews/mobile-phones/2012-11/nokia-lumia-920"]Nokia's Lumia 920[/link] Windows device isn't as powerful or as feature-packed, but it feels quicker in general use.
[Quote"]There's lots (and lots) to do with the S4, so much in fact that it can seem a bit overwhelming. In which case, you can select Easy Mode[/pullquote]
Speaking of TouchWiz, Samsung's latest version of its proprietary UI adds a distinctive look to standard Android which in this case is the very latest 4.2 Jelly Bean. There are a few dynamic widgets to play with, including Story Album, which lets you create slideshow photo albums for your homepage, and the S Health app widget, which displays how you're doing in terms of your planned walking, eating and exercise targets.
There's also Samsung Hub, which gives you access to Samsung's online media content including music, films and books. You'll find more content on a Kindle or a Nook, but there's a decent and growing selection to choose from -- that's if you should ever get bored with Google Play.
TouchWiz has its own quick menu that you can drag out from the left of the screen and gives you a choice of up to 19 programmable shortcuts -- you can edit them so they all fit on one page, or you can scroll them.
There's also the picture-in-picture feature that allows you to watch a video in the corner of the screen while you're doing something else, like checking your email or browsing the web.
Gestures and eye-tracking
Samsung's range of gesture controls are getting their most advanced incarnation yet on this phone. The Smart Scroll system is actually a lot more basic in practise than it sounds. With the system enabled (in the system menu), when you're looking at a page of scrolling text, an eye symbol appears on the screen to show that you're being watched. However the text doesn't actually scroll strictly according to your eye movements but when you tilt the phone -- tilt it away to scroll down, forwards to scroll up, and keep it face on to stand still. Same goes for the Smart Pause function, which is meant to pause the video you're watching if you look away -- in both cases, sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.
More effective were the gesture controls that Samsung calls Air View. These allow you to hover your finger over the phone to bring up extra features, like the controls when you're watching a video. Swiping a hand downwards to scroll down a page of text or skipping a song for instance tended to work very well, but it wasn't always clear which apps you could use gestures in -- it was fine using the Android browser, but didn't work with the Kindle app for instance.
Panorama stitches pics together to create a widescreen view and Eraser allows you to erase moving objects, such as passers-by (by taking several pictures in quick succession and detecting what changes between each frame and removing it), from your pic. Sound and shot lets you add a few seconds of background sound to a still photo and Drama takes several pictures of a moving subject and lets you combine them into a single pic with a still background. It's a bit fiddly -- you'll need to stand still and have nothing moving in the background, but it can be fun.
Animated photo allows you to select some moving elements within a still photo and get them to move, Harry Potter style.
Unfortunately, these animated and audio formats don't seem to share easily, so you're pretty much stuck with viewing them on your phone, which is a shame.
Picture quality is really rather good overall, certainly better than what we saw from the HTC One's four-megapixel camera and possibly just nudging the iPhone 5's eight-megapixel iSight out of the running.
There's a two-megapixel camera on the front for video calls and the video mode will record in 1,080p HD resolution at 30fps. It also has the dual video/still photo function that allows you to take snaps while you're filming. You can take a picture of yourself to get a reaction shot while you're filming something else with the main camera and insert it into the film -- yes, it's a gimmick, but handy for WTF Facebook posts and how-to YouTube videos.
The 2,600mAh battery is bigger than the S3's 2100 and does a reasonable job, but that powerful processor and all those features take their toll -- you can still expect to have to charge it every day.
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Conclusion
You might ask just how many features you actually need on a smartphone, and in the case of the Galaxy S4 you get pretty much all of them. Yes, there are likely to be many more features than you'll ever need, and some of them, like Air View and Smart Scroll don't seem quite reliable enough yet, though they can be fun to play with.
Yes, it costs a small fortune, there's arguably too much on it and certainly too many ways to do everything, with multiple browsers, email clients, online stores and more. But it does at least as good a job at virtually all of its functions and any other smartphone, including the popular fruity one.
If you've already got an S3 and are wondering whether or not you should upgrade ahead of schedule, that'll depend on the kind of person you are. It's better than the S3 in almost every way, so if you're the type who needs to have the latest and greatest immediately -- dive in! But that said, it is expensive, and it should certainly be seen as an improvement on its predecessor than a radical reinvention, so if you've got your practical head on, you might find you can put up with your old phone for a little while longer, at least until you're due for an upgrade.
It won't be for everyone -- some will prefer the sturdier build quality of the iPhone or HTC One, many will forsake the highest of specs for something a little more affordable, but there isn't a better smartphone out there at the moment -- Samsung has set the new standard.
Software: Google Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
Processor: Quad-core 1.9GHz Cortex-A15
Memory: <strong>slot</strong>: Yes
Display: 5in Super AMOLED touchscreen, 16m colours, 1,080x1,920 pixels
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.0
Ports: microUSB, 3.5mm headphone jack
Camera: 13 MP, autofocus, LED flash; 2 megapixel front-facing camera
Video: <strong>playback</strong>: MP4, DivX/XviD, WMV, H.264, H.263
Audio: <strong>playback</strong>: MP3, WAV, eAAC+, AC3, FLAC
Radio: No
Battery: 2,600mAh
Size: 137x70x8mm
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
