Flagship phones are supposed to make us stand up and take notice, but not the Samsung Galaxy S4. It's not that there is not much good in it, only that the not-so-good somehow managed to put me off.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 isn't a worthy successor to the Galaxy S III. This is what I had written in my Galaxy S III review, "Human nature is that we tend to get attached with others who understand us, fulfil our needs and desires and generally take care of us. But when a human and a smartphone develop a similar bond, it should seem to be out of the ordinary. But it is not, when the gadget in question is the Samsung Galaxy S III - the smartphone right on top of the Samsung line up. While reviewing the unit I got so attached to it that even I set my photograph as the wallpaper, as if I owned it."
The S4 couldn't continue the connection that I had developed with its predecessor. The S4, to me, is somewhat like a richly dressed stale salad. I fully agree wit AP's Anick Jesdanun, when he says in his review that the "Galaxy S4 decent, but filled with gimmicks".
Quite a lot about the phone is gimmicky and as a consumer I would like to spend my money for stuff that I would actually use and not some cheap tricks that I have to scratch my head over on how to turn them off. But that said, as I pointed out before, the S4 maybe gimmicky but not a disaster.
At first glance, the Galaxy S4 looks quite like the Galaxy S III, but with a patterned back. The Galaxy S4 is based on the same design principles as the Galaxy S III. Made of polycarbonate, the Galaxy SIII's rear is plain, while the Galaxy S4 has a patterned, glossy rear panel, that looks gaudy. The phone is surprisingly light and is in fact lighter than its arch-rival the HTC One. But the HTC One has a metallic body and scores higher in design.
Whilst the plastic is unimpressive, but the phone's rounded corners make it easy to grip the device and the corners don't jut into your palm. Operating this gigantic 5-inch device with a single hand was a duck soup.
The phone features a 5-inch Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels at 441 ppi. The display is amazing and produces rich colours. Text appears crisp and photographs look detailed. The display has Gorilla Glass protection. Viewing angles are great and navigation is smooth. At 468 ppi, the HTC One, however, has a higher pixel density than the Galaxy S4, but the pixel density war should not matter much as the naked eye cannot distinguish much between a 441 and 468 ppi.
The software that Samsung has added to the S4 only compounds the disappointment of its exterior. The software features in the Galaxy S4 that Samsung is bragging so much about, after a week's of usage, appear to be mere promotional gimmicks. At the Galaxy S4 launch event in March, the same features sounded interesting, but the actual use lead to an altogether different story. Much like so many other reviewers, I was soon looking for ways to turn those features off.
The dual-camera feature lets you simultaneously shoot with the front and rear cameras, but what good is a stamp size image of the person taking the photo? The sound and shoot allows you to record a few seconds of audio before a picture is captured, but if we wanted our images to have audio in them, wouldn't we simply record video?
The not-so-smart Smart Scroll feature lets you scroll a page you are reading on the phone without touching the screen. This feature didn't ease my reading experience, instead left me with a pain in my neck.
Now on to a little of the good.
The phone has a 13 megapixel rear and a 2 megapixel front camera; both capture brilliant images. The S4 has quality speakers that produce loud and clear sound, but the HTC One - equipped with the Beats Audio sound technology - trounces the Galaxy S4 in sound quality. The phone runs Android 4.2 OS with Samsung's TouchWiz UI on top. There is not much change in the user interface. In fact, the HTC One has a cleaner UI than the Galaxy S4. The phone also supports 1080p video recording and playback and wathcing videos on the S4 was an amazing experience.
Equipped with an octa-core processor and 2GB RAM, the phone is powerful, lets you multitask and run scores of heavy apps simultaneously, but there is one thing that is misleading and buyers should be aware of. The phone includes four processors clocked at 1.6GHz for heavier tasks and four processors clocked at 1.2GHz for handling lighter tasks. A lot of buyers have this perception that the phone has eight cores and thus they will get significantly more power on the Galaxy S4 than any quad-core phone, while the fact is that only four cores work at a time in the Galaxy S4.
The Galaxy S4 has a decent battery life, but not great. The phone could not last for a day, while the fully charged HTC One had enough juice to last for around a day. What I observed was that on normal usage there was only 26 per cent battery left after 12 hours.
For an optimal screen rotation experience ensure that both auto rotation and smart rotation options are not on at the same time, else you might feel a delay in the screen getting rotated.
Though the phone has 16GB of memory on board and supports a microSD card up to 64GB, but out of 16GB, only half of the memory, i.e., 8.82 GB is user-accessible. But Samsung allows you to expand the memory up to 64GB and this compensates. The call quality and reception is good.
Undoubtedly, the Galaxy S4 is a powerful device, but then a phone isn't not only about power and performance. The HTC One does emerge as a strong contender to the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Also if the hardware in the Galaxy S4 impresses you but the software disappoints, Google has a solution tailor-made for you. At its I/O 2013 developers conference, Google unveiled the Nexus variant of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that comes with an unadulterated version of Android on it. But there's yet no word when the Nexus version of the S4 would be available in India.
Pros
+ Amazing display
+ Powerful
+ Light weight
+ Great cameras
Cons
- Stale design
- Gimmicky features
Rating: 3/5
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