The
Samsung Galaxy S4 is a nice phone. When I first laid my hands on it, it felt immediately familiar. I was a Galaxy S3 owner for about seven months, and I felt right at home with the new device. If you’re in the same boat, you might feel the same, too. After diving deeper into the
software, I found myself saying quite often, “Oh, that’s nice.”
That’s my overarching experience with the Galaxy S4. This is nice, that is nice. But nothing is completely mind-blowing because it’s just a finer iteration of the line of Galaxy S flagship smartphones that Samsung has been pumping out since 2010. However, all the little nice things can add up to make one excellent smartphone. You’ll see what I mean in this review.
Hardware
Perhaps the best way I can sum up the
hardware is that I’ve been carrying
the Galaxy S4 around for the past week now and no one seemed to notice. My friends didn’t think twice to ask what it was, and it didn’t perk up any stranger’s eyes, either. The differences between the Galaxy S4 and its predecessor are immediate only to those who have obsessively researched the device online, or to those who have spent considerable time with one. Another way to tell the difference is to put the S4 and S3 together, side by side.
The new version has a 1920 x 1080, 5-inch display with 441 ppi pixel density, making it the sharpest display that Samsung has put on a smartphone to date. However, the Super AMOLED display does retain some qualities that the Galaxy S3 had. It’s hard to describe; perhaps it’s the lack of a certain kind of punch, but I’d liken it to looking at photos from a certain type of film: It’s hard to put its character into words, but you know it and feel that familiarity when you see it.
Near the earpiece are sensors and the 2MP front-facing camera. Aside from your typical ambient light sensors, there is also a sensor that detects things like motion and your eyeballs. We’ll get to more of that later. At the bottom are the touch-sensitive menu and back buttons, and a physical home button.
The right side of the device has the sleep/wake/power button, volume keys on the left, micro-USB at the bottom along with the microphone, and a 3.5mm headset jack at the top along with an IR blaster (you can use the Galaxy S4 as a remote control for your TV, music player and more).
The back of the device has a 13MP camera with an LED flash, and down near the bottom is the speaker. The plastic back plate of the device is also removable, covering the 2,600mAh battery, SIM card and microSD card slot. This is actually Samsung’s argument for using plastics instead of glass or metal alloys: Plastic allows the device to be more durable, it saves weight and allows easier
access to things like swappable batteries and cards.
To those who care about these types of specs, the Samsung Galaxy S4 U.S. version has a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor and 2GB RAM. The global version features Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor.
Software
Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean powers the Galaxy S4 along with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI. Whether you like the UI is a matter of preference, but it’s not bad and Samsung has taken great pains to make the device easy to use for novice smartphone users along with advanced users, too.
Samsung has thrown in nearly everything you can possibly imagine or want in a smartphone, and added more stuff on top of that. You might not use much of it, but it’s nice to have them there, even if they turn out to be gimmicky party tricks. As an example, you can scroll up and down in certain apps just by tilting your head up or down slightly. It’s imperfect, but when it works you can impress your friends with your Jedi mind tricks.
Neat features are buried everywhere. You can, for example, swipe between photos and videos in your gallery by waving your hand left and right across the face of the phone. You can also use this gesture with other apps, like the Internet browser. You’ll just have to poke around the phone to see what works and what doesn’t.
Another feature taken from the Galaxy Note 2 is Air View, except it works with your fingers now -- no stylus or S Pen necessary. If you hover your finger over galleries, videos, calendar dates and so forth, you get previews, additional information and anything else relevant to what you’re looking at. Air View is even integrated with the Flipboard app, which comes preloaded with the Galaxy S4, and it gives an expanded view of the items within a certain pane (e.g. top headlines in the tech or fashion sections).
All the new features and tricks that have been poured into the device are accessible via the notification panel or drawer (the one you pull down from the top of the screen). If you click the upper-right button in the notification panel, you’ll see an overwhelming number of features and toggles. If you’re unsure what each one does, like Smart Stay or Screen Mirroring, all you have to do is press and hold the toggle and you’ll be taken to that particular feature’s settings. From there, you’ll learn exactly what those features do.
For smartphone newbies, Samsung also has another mode called Easy Mode, much like its predecessor. In this mode, accessible in the settings, you’ll have access to basic apps like your phone, messages, email, contacts, weather and a few more. The idea is it will ease you into taking advantage of the more advanced goodies after a few weeks or months depending on your personal learning curve and level of comfort.
Overall, the software gives a little something for everyone, whether you’re new to smartphones or you’re a hacker and tinkerer, an artist or an entrepreneur,
the Galaxy S4 ought to satisfy most of your needs on the software front.
Camera
I’m very critical of smartphone cameras, but for the most part the majority of them are good enough. The Samsung Galaxy S4 camera is no exception. It’s not the best, but it is great as long as you aren’t planning on making giant prints. With that in mind, I really do wonder why Samsung went with a 13MP camera sensor instead of the 8MP found in the Galaxy S3. In my experience, the newer, higher resolution sensor doesn’t lend much more to image quality, mostly because individual pixels have to be much smaller to fit on such a tiny sensor.
I did see 8 x 10 prints made from the Galaxy S4, and they weren’t particularly sharp. Otherwise, for the Web, it’s fine and probably more resolution than you’ll ever need for daily use. Image quality is good, and the camera has a decent dynamic range. Moreover, it’s fast enough that you don’t have to worry about missing important moments.
You’ll also be able to edit photos right from your camera or gallery app. Basic options like adjusting brightness, saturation, contrast and hue are standard, but the camera also features live filters. With the live filters, you can apply color tones or vintage looks to your photos and see what they’ll look like before you even take your snapshot. Samsung has gone to great lengths to make sure that casual smartphone camera users might not have to download additional apps to make their photos look cool.
Perhaps the biggest additions to the camera are the new shot features. First, there is Drama Shot, which allows you to take an action shot and have the moving subject appear in the photo more than once. I’ve included a sample below to show how it works.
Next is Cinema Photo, which is a feature built into the camera that allows you to create cinemagraphs, or animated .gif files. You shoot a scene and the camera will record movement for a few seconds. From there, you can select which areas of the scene to freeze and the areas that will retain their movement or motion. The effect is nifty, although it’s hard to make perfect cinemagraphs and the likelihood you’ll be sharing them as often as still photos is pretty small. This is what everyone talks about when they say the phone is loaded with gimmicks. There are plenty of nifty tricks, but in the end they’re just tricks.
In all, the camera is good. It has good dynamic range, images are sharp and colors look good, and the camera software is packed with tons of features and tricks that it ought to keep you or your friends amused for some time.
Performance, battery life and call quality
I feel like in all but the most extreme cases, performance reviews these days becomes meaningless when we talk about quad-core or eight-core processors. I mentioned before that the Samsung Galaxy S4 U.S. variant has a 1.9GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core processor. But the hardware is half the story, because how the software and platform use the hardware makes a big difference in practice. For daily use (i.e. phone calls, messages, email, browsing, watching videos, Facebook, etc.) the Galaxy S4 performs just fine. I didn’t experience any real hiccups or lag, which is the kind of performance you expect out of a flagship or high-end Android device these days, anyway.
Perhaps the only issue I ran into when it came to performance was using the camera. Every now and then, one of the little tricks or features like Drama Shot would lag, and I’d have to stage and take the shot all over again. That’s not something you’d want to run into if you’re taking a shot of something you’re likely not going to see again -- like watching your favorite basketball player dunk a ball when you managed to score third-row seats.
I played a few games, nothing very intensive, but the experience was just as smooth. I hate to admit it, but I must have spent about 40 minutes playing Temple Run 2 without taking a breath. Not once did the phone give me any problems, and some would consider it a moderately intensive game in terms of graphics.
Battery life was excellent, and I easily got a full day of use out of the battery except one day when I decided to push everything the phone could do. The Galaxy S4 comes with a 2,600mAh battery that is easily user replaceable. Additionally, Samsung sells a separate charger that will charge batteries only, so if you decide to carry a spare battery or two, you can charge them independently.
Battery life is a big deal-breaker for me. A phone can have every last bell and whistle that you can stuff in it, but if the phone won’t make it past lunch, there’s no sense in owning it. Smartphone manufacturers are now moving toward the trend of making bigger batteries for phones, mostly because the phones themselves are becoming increasingly huge. The upside of having these two-hand devices is that they’re likely to have enough juice to get you through the end of your day, or damn close to it.
Call quality is just as good as you’d expect for a modern smartphone. My particular Galaxy S4 unit is with Sprint, and I never experienced any robotic noises, disruptions in my calls or popping or metallic sounds with the speakerphone. If you’re going to pony up for this phone, call quality is the least of your worries. Frankly, you probably won’t have too many worries at all.
Final Thoughts
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a great smartphone. Its build quality is good, the screen is excellent and the camera is better than most smartphone cameras, too. Battery life is great, Samsung’s added dozens of new features and its Samsung Hub are all very excellent additions to the device. Will this be a ridiculously popular and another best-selling device from Samsung? You bet.
The one thing I can’t get over is the feeling that the phone is lacking something. It’s lacking soul. That’s not a knock against the phone -- I’ve already admitted that it’s a great device that is going to flood the streets much like the Galaxy S3 did. It just didn’t leave me feeling
the way the HTC One did, for example. Perhaps there is something about the
methodical approach to the Galaxy S4 that gives off that feeling. Or maybe it’s the strong similarities between the new and the old devices, which in itself isn’t a bad thing. Or I can just chalk it up to being picky and having strange, intangible expectations. I should just get over it and take the Galaxy S4 for what it is: a damn good smartphone that you probably won’t regret buying.
