Review: Samsung Galaxy S4 – Part 1
The latest smartphone that I’m reviewing is the much anticipated Samsung Galaxy S4 powered by Rogers LTE network. Let me start the review off by dealing with the elephant in the room. This phone is not exactly small. It’s thinner than the iPhone 5 but is bigger in terms of length and width. I will say this in it’s favor: It fits into my front pocket and allowed me to drive with it in said pocket. But I was wearing dress pants at the time and I pretty much guarantee that it will not fit into my jeans. Guys might want to invest in a man purse if they don’t have a jacket pocket to slide it into. For those who are upgrading from an Galaxy S3, the dimensions are basically the same, so you can safely ignore most of what I just said. In terms of construction, I hate to say it but it does not feel like a high end phone. The HTC One is all aluminum and glass and feels like someone spent a lot of time and effort to make you feel that you spent your money well. Copy and paste that for the iPhone 5. This phone feels kind of “plasticky.” Not what I would expect from a phone that plays in the same space as the iPhone 5 and HTC One. Another thing to note, this case and screen attract fingerprints like crazy. Keep your microfiber cloth handy.
Speaking of the 5″ screen, it is simply stunning. It’s sharper than the iPhone 5 in my opinion and at worst is on par with the screen on the HTC One. The screen is also vivid in terms of how photos look on the screen. Not a shock given that the screen is 1900 x 1080 which is a hair under HD resolution. In terms of the stuff under the hood. It runs a heavily customized version of Android 4.2 and has 16 GB of storage. Unlike the iPhone 5 or HTC One, you can expand to 64GB via MicroSD card. One thing that blew me away is how fast this phone is. Over Rogers LTE, I averaged 50 Mbps downstream and 30 Mbps upstream. By way of comparison, in the same physical location, I got 39 Mbps both ways on average (although I will admit that I am not using Rogers for my iPhone). Needless to say, the Galaxy S4 is not slow by any means.
A big feature of this phone is something called Air View. This feature allows you to browse updates, scroll web pages, answer calls, change music and more simply by moving your hands over the screen. There’s also the ability to scroll through things like web pages using your eyes and stop and start videos by looking away to do the former and looking at the phone to do the latter. Sounds good on paper, but it took me a fair amount of practice to get the former to work consistently and the latter was simply a non starter likely due to the fact that I wear glasses. I handed the phone to a friend who doesn’t wear glasses and she was able to get the eye tracking features to work, though not consistently (to be fair, she only tried it for 10 minutes before she gave up). A third person was able to get all of the above working perfectly (though he too didn’t wear glasses). Thus I think these two features fall under the “your mileage may vary” category. In my case I found it to be much more efficient to turn these features off and simply use touch based gestures to do what I wanted to do. On the plus side, typing is easy because of the haptic feedback which makes it easier from those of us (like yours truly) who grew up learning to type on real keyboards.
A feature that I find unique is the way you can move your contacts from your old phone to your new phone. Simply pair your old phone to the S4 over Bluetooth and the contacts move over. It’s amazingly simple and one wonders why other phone manufacturers don’t do something similar.
Tomorrow I will be looking at the software that comes with the Galaxy S4. Stay tuned.
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