Fabulous 5-inch screen
Packed with high-end features
LTE and 802.11ac Wi-Fi support
HDMI-out via Micro-USB
with MHL support
Surprisingly good battery life
Cons :
Expensive
Many of the proximity- and gesture-based features feel gimmicky
Limited internal storage (16GB) on review unit
It's hard to know where to start with the Samsung Galaxy S4. After
months of rumours, leaks, hyperbole and more than one launch event, this
is undoubtedly the most lusted after Android smartphone to date. In
fact, we'd say that interest in the phone before launch was at least as
high as for upcoming Apple phones, including the
iPhone 5S and
iPhone 6.
Now we finally have an S4 to review, just two simple questions
remain. Most importantly, is this the best smartphone you can buy today?
But also, has Samsung taken a big step forward over last year's S3 or
is this more an evolution of that handset?
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| It's finally here and it looks very similar to its predecessor |
BUILD QUALITY AND DESIGN
At first glance you'd have to err towards an evolution. The S3
certainly isn't a phone to show off with; not that it doesn't look
rather pretty, but more because it's almost unrecognisable from its
predecessor unless you look up close. This is no bad thing in our
opinion as it didn't attract any unwanted attention on the train home,
unlike an
iPhone 5 just after its release.
The new handset appears to retain the same white plastic finish, but
look closer and you'll see a fine diamond pattern beneath the gloss
surface. It's a nice touch, and one subtle enough to avoid accusations
of unnecessary bling.
Given its big 4.99in display, the S4 is surprisingly svelte. It
measures just 136.6x69.8x7.9mm and weighs only 130g. That makes it both
smaller overall and lighter than both its immediate rivals, the
Sony Xperia Z and our current favourite, the
HTC One.
From the front the most obvious change is the thinner screen bezels,
both down the edges and at other end. This puts the screen just 2.5mm
away from the edge of the device and it's becoming hard to imagine this
distance getting any smaller without seriously compromising the
survivability of the handset when dropped. The sides have been squared
off, compared to the S3, which makes it easier to grip though it looks a
little chunkier for it.
The areas above and below the screen are now far smaller, which has
significantly reduced the amount of space for the physical home button
and touch sensitive menu and back commands. This could have made them
awkward, but the button needs an appreciably lighter press and we had no
trouble hitting the touch sensitive controls.
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| The screen fills the handset like we've never seen before | | |
Despite the back being removable, which has advantages we'll discuss
later, the S4 doesn't suffer overly for this practicality. The rear
panel fits snug against the body with no flex or shift. When in place,
the handset feels like a single piece of tech.
The
Samsung Galaxy S4 is among the best-looking plastic phones we've
ever seen. It's a decent evolution from the S3, ironing out plenty of
the minor flaws that its predecessor had. These include a USB port that
didn't look very well cut out and a rear case that had quite a loose
fit; with the S4, it feels that much more finished and as though more
attention has been paid to the detail.
Having said that it's a very conservative design. Purely from a look
and feel perspective we prefer the aluminium
HTC One. The curved back
and sharp corners make it look far more striking that the rather
amorphous blob of the S4; plus HTC has squeezed in a pair of front
mounted speakers onto the One, as we'll discuss later. However, as a
piece of practical engineering the S4 is simply superior, because it
fits a noticeably larger display into a similarly sized handset. You
simply can't get more screen than this in your pocket for the size or
weight.
The S4 is better designed from an ergonomic point of view. The
HTC One's power button at the top of the phone is beautifully designed, it
doesn't stick out but it responds reliably when you press it (once
you've got the hang of where it is). The problem is its position, having
pressed it with your forefinger, you can't then reach the buttons below
the screen with your thumb. The S4's right-hand-side power button has a
far more traditional and boring look, but at least you can use the
handset one handed without having to shift your grip constantly.
DISPLAY
This is the first smartphone to use an AMOLED display with a Full HD
resolution. Measuring 4.99in across this gives it an on-paper
pixels-per-inch figure of 441, up from 306PPI on the Galaxy S3. As
always, it's worth noting that the display uses a pentile arrangement of
subpixels - with two colours per pixel, rather than three – which means
its actual resolution is less than equivalent LCD displays.
This is less of a problem on a Full HD display than it was
previously. The incredibly high number of pixels-per-inch makes the lack
of refinement, usually apparent on the edges of text, practically
unnoticeable. Furthermore, the incredible contrast you get from an
AMOLED display more than makes up for any small perceivable loss of
detail.
In practical use there's far less difference between this and the LCD
HTC One than their technology would suggest. The pentile pixel
arrangement doesn't seem to noticeably effect detail on the S4, while
the contrast on the
HTC One was also excellent. The colours on the S4
are a little richer at any given brightness, but then the
HTC One is far
brighter at its maximum setting, handy on sunny days - although run it
that way all the time and your battery life will be severely diminished.
Speaking of brightness, Samsung's controls are far better, with a
brightness slider always present on the notifications drop down menu.
This also lets you tweak the auto brightness settings, allowing you to
have it a few steps brighter, or dimmer, than the variable default. By
comparison the
HTC One makes you dig in the menus to adjust it and
offers no such tweaking of the auto setting.
Having said all that, the biggest difference is simply that the S4's
screen is bigger. It's not a huge deal when using apps day to day,
sending texts, or hammering out a quick email, but for browsing desktop
website sites, playing games and watching video clips it's a big plus.
SPEAKERS
The S4 may have a bigger, higher resolution screen than its
predecessor for enjoying such content but the audio from its speaker
hasn't improved by the same degree. The speaker is still a rear-mounted,
mono design and so you have to carefully position your hands to avoid
muffling it accidentally. Sound quality isn't bad for such a speaker,
but if you like to entertain yourself and friends with your handset then
the
HTC One's front stereo speakers are far superior.
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| The single mono speaker is now at the bottom of the back |
While we're talking audio, the
HTC One (and Xperia Z) also have FM
Radios, which is missing from the S4 for the first time in the series. A
disappointment, and one that may sway some radio fans.
HARDWARE
In the run-up to the launch of any exciting new smartphone or tablet,
much is made of the exact nature of the hardware contained and its
processing power. For the
Samsung Galaxy S4 the talk was of an
eight-core CPU, though the reality turns out to be far more complicated
than that.
Yes, there's an S4 (the GT-I9500) with a Samsung designed and
produced Xynos eight-core CPU, but that actually consists of a four-core
main CPU and a four-core low-power CPU, which the handset switches
between in realtime to maximise performance and battery life. It's an
idea that's been around a while, ARM calls it big.LITTLE, but it's good
to see it finally implement on a quad-core flagship device.
But, and it's a big one, that eight-core
Galaxy S4 isn't the one
you'll be buying in the UK. Instead when you turn on your shiny new S4
the first thing you'll see is that it's a GT-I9505 handset, which uses a
Qualcomm designed quad-core chipset instead. This is because the other
model doesn't include 4G/LTE support, something that Samsung obviously
feels is key for a new handset launching in the UK.
 |
| This isn't the Android you're looking for ... but it's still pretty impressive |
Given that there's no option to buy the eight-core S4, unless you
import one yourself and pay full price for it plus a hefty import duty,
there's little point in comparing the two in detail. We haven't been
sent an I9500 for testing, but looking at reputable sources online it
appears to be a little quicker with slightly improved battery life.
We'll be looking forward to seeing a big.LITTLE device released in
the UK then, but the Qualcomm chipset in our version of the S4 is no
slouch. It uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset as the
HTC One,
though the S4's runs at 1.9GHz rather than 1.7GHz. We couldn't detect
any noticeable change in browser speed in real-world testing, but the
GeekBench 2 benchmark showed the faster S4 edge ahead by 3,227 to 2,688.
In use, everything feels incredibly slick, apps launch quickly and
everything flows along, very impressive stuff.
The S4 also uses the same Adreno 320 GPU as the
HTC One. It's a
powerful chip and a huge step forward over the S3. We hit 50fps in the
recent 3Dmark Ice Storm test, and managed almost 30fps in the far
tougher Extreme version of the same test. We doubt anyone will make an
Android game in the near future that will trouble this hardware overly.
BATTERY
Beneath the removable rear cover is a rather large-looking battery, with
a hefty 2,600mAh capacity. That's over 10% bigger than the 2,300 and
2,330mAh examples in the HTC One and Sony Xperia Z respectively. The
results though were even more impressive than that figure might suggest.
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| The S4 retains the S3's highly practical design |
In our continuous video playback the S4 managed an impressive ten
hours and 43 minutes, a score we'd largely attribute to its more
power-efficient AMOLED display. The
Sony Xperia Z has a 5in LCD display
and it only ran for five hours and 48 minutes, while the
smaller-screened
HTC One put in a much more respectable eight hours and
32 minutes.
If battery life is a big concern for you then the S4 stands well
above its main rivals then. In addition to this its removable back means
you can switch out the battery if required. Samsung sells spare
batteries and an official charger for them too, so if you fear running
out of power, the S4 is the phone for you.
STORAGE
Also behind the cover is the Micro SD slot, which can take a card
with a capacity of up to 64GB. Such a card will cost you about £35, with
a 32GB card costing around half that. The
Sony Xperia Z also has this
option, but it looks to be another point scored over the
HTC One which
is internal storage only.
However, the
HTC One comes with 32GB of storage as standard, of which
around 25GB is available for you to use. Comparatively, the S4 only
comes with 16GB as standard, of which only a measly 8GB is immediately
available for your use, we managed to quickly clear another 1GB, but we
still reckon a memory card will be a good idea for most users.
Of course, many people prefer to store much of their data in the
cloud now, and Dropbox is Samsung's preferred partner. The handset comes
with two years of free storage with a huge 50GB limit. Disappointingly
for anyone who's making a quick upgrade from an S3, buying the new
handset doesn't reset the two year time limit on this offer. The S4
handily backups all your camera shots to your Dropbox account
automatically when a Wi-Fi connection is available.
CAMERA
Samsung has opted for a 13-megapixel backside-illuminated sensor and
the resulting images are excellent. There was plenty of fine detail to
be seen in our still life tests and exposures were consistently well
judged throughout the varying light levels. It was notably crisper than
the
HTC One's four-megapixel camera, you won’t notice on Facebook, but
even a Full HD TGV they were noticeably sharper, with better refined
lines. The extra resolution also helps when cropping images without
resulting in too much pixellation.
Taking the camera out and about in the spring sun also produced good
results. Its exposures dealt with the strong contrast created by the
sunshine, and colours looked accurate. It also has a 20-shot burst mode
that's activated by simply holding down the shutter button. The front
camera has a 2-megapixel BSI sensor and takes pretty decent little snaps
too.
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| We saw good results across our range of test shots ... |
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| ... this 1:1 pixel crop shows up some nice detail in the fur |
PHOTO MODES
There's lots more to Samsung's new camera than good image quality and
specifications, though. With a raft of playful extras that should
provide at least momentary amusement and possibly a lot more than that.
DUAL SHOT
By far our favourite of the various fun photography modes is dual
shot. The concept is actually quite simple, the S4 uses both the front
and back cameras to simultaneously capture two images, which it combines
into a single image.
Now you might just ask why not just take two shots and fit them
together later, but that would miss out on the immediacy of Samsung's
take. This way you take one picture, hit share and get a great shot up
on Facebook, plus your smug, smiling mug in one easy step. It's the next
logical step for the much-beloved 'Selfie' style of photography, and
unless Samsung has a patent we can see this appearing on every other
smartphone by next year.
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| This vertiginous dual-shot captures our News Editor's love of heights |
Now Samsung's take on Dual Shot is to put proud parents in the shot
with the mewling darlings – not a bad idea given that one parent is
often noticeably absent from a whole holiday's worth of snaps. In
practice though we found it a great little creative tool, the ability to
juxtapose two images together on the fly is great fun and can create
some quite striking compositions.
You can change the size and shape of the second, superimposed image,
with various shapes or just a plain box. It will even take the two full
images and tag them side by side into a super-widescreen effort – good
for more serious efforts or adhoc vistas. You can also switch the
cameras around at a tap, making you fill the screen with just a small
image of your surroundings to add context.
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| There's a good range of frames for the shot-in-shot mode |
Best of all, it just works, what you see is what you get. It can be a
little hard to line up at first, but you soon get used to it and then
you're away. It even has its own shortcut, so no messing with the mode
menu to activate it.
The fun doesn't end there though, as Dual Shot can also be used with
video. You get all the same options as to how it combines the two images
and the ability to switch. It really adds something to short clips and
could be great for those who love to shoot and talk to camera.
ANIMATED PHOTO
Samsung is trying to get in on the craze for GIF animations with this
clever mode. It takes a short video clip, identifies moving parts from
the results and then allows you to freeze or animate those while the
rest of the frame remains still. You can choose how the animations loop
and where the start and end points are. Once you're done you can then
upload the results to Facebook or share it online.
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| You can freeze most of the image and keep just one part moving
to create a GIF - which our website doesn't support, so you'll just have
to imagine the cars moving by |
ERASER
The Eraser effect could be useful, as it lets you remove unwanted
moving elements in a shot by combining five shots together. For example
you could remove someone who walk across the background of the shot.
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| Remove moving elements from a shot, like people or cars |
It sounds good, and it works in terms of the results, but it's not
useful in practice. First, you have to activate the mode before
shooting, it can't be used retroactively from any run of burst shooting.
Of course with such pre-planning you could easily just reframe the shot
or wait for the moving object to pass by – it's moving after all. A
rough-and-ready content aware fill feature, as seen in Photoshop Elements, would be far more useful, allowing you to remove moving or still elements after shooting.
DRAMA SHOT
Drama Shot creates an action-effect shots with multiple instances of
the same moving subject, see below for an example. Although it creates a
still image it looks to be using the video function to create it,
rather than burst shot. It captures a short clip and then picks out
frames which it combines into a single shot.
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| This basic example shows how it works |
The effect is a bit hit and miss, it's rather fussy about getting the
subject to move across the whole frame and about you keeping the camera
dead still while it captures it. You can use tick boxes at the bottom
to add or remove instances of the subject to get some control over the
finished image. The resulting image, in 16:9 aspect ratio, was
1,888x1,062 – good enough for posting online, but not great for printing
if you've put a lot of effort into a shot.
SOUND AND SHOT
The most straightforward of the oddball shooting modes, Sound and
Shot simply captures 9 seconds of audio with the image. We're not quite
sure what the point is over simply capturing a short video clip and the
fact you can't share the combined image and audio online makes it even
more pointless.
BEST FACE AND BEST PHOTO
Two variations on a theme. Best Photo simply takes a short burst of
eight shots and then you can pick which of them (if any) you want to
keep by putting a thumbs up on a thumbnail. It's a great way of getting
the best shot using burst mode, but without cluttering your phone with
loads of almost identical images.
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| Even given a choice sometimes it's hard to choose a 'best face' - not the S4's fault though |
Best Face is a variation on this, with face detection used. It takes
five shots in quick succession and then you can choose which face you
want from each shot. It allows you to combine the exposures so that in a
shot with multiple subjects you can get them all smiling and with their
eyes open. Genuinely handy for group shots.
In both modes it's quicker than the S3's take on the same functions,
with the thumbnails appearing almost as soon as the last frame is
snapped.
STORY ALBUM
A separate app from the camera but one that allows you to select
pictures from your gallery, or have them selected for you based on GPS
location and date, and then create picture albums from them. Initially
these are just virtual albums that you can page through on your phone,
but you can also order physical copies if you wish directly from the
handset.
 |
| Layouts can look a bit messy if you've been abusing Dual Shot heavily |
You can add or remove photos from the selection, add captions and change
to one of six different layouts/themes. It all works fairly well, but
you can't fine tune it in the same way as you can with many online album
creators.
ANDROID
Samsung has done well in releasing the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the
latest version of the operating system - Android 4.2.2. There are many
advantages to this, but we particularly like the highly customisable
list of shortcuts buttons you can add to the notifications dropdown.
 |
| Your settings, just where you want them |
Of course, it's customised in numerous ways by Samsung's TouchWiz
interface, but we feel it's one of the less offensive variants out
there. For example, it at least lets you hide applications from sight in
the app tray, so you can clear away those you don't use and can't
uninstall.The new keyboard has a row of numbers above the standard
layout, so you don't have to use a switch key or long press to type
them. We'll be lloking at these in more details as we use the handset
more, but there's nothing in the UI layout itself that will particular
wow or frustrate those used to vanilla Android or another Android
launcher.
EXTRA FEATURES
Samsung has packed a lot of extras into the Samsung Galaxy S4. So
many in fact that it's unlikely that anyone but a smartphone reviewer or
the most ardent Samsung smartphone fan will ever realise they're all
there, let alone use them. It does mean though that there's bound to be
something that you find useful, or even indispensable.
A quick overview of such features includes: S Health, which tracks
food intake and exercise to help you improve your fitness; S translator,
which translates speech or text into nine different languages; Knox
Tracking, which lets you track down your handset if its lost or stolen.
There's also a far wider range of eye and motion tracking features
than we saw on the S3. You can hover your finger over the screen, much
like hovering your mouse cursor over a link on your PC, and engage
high-sensitivity mode for use with gloves on. Eye tracking will now
pause videos when you look away and you can even scroll up and down web
pages by tilting your head up or down.
Then there's Group Play, which lets you share music, video and even
some games with other S4 users, plus you can even use multiple handsets
to create stereo or surround sound effects; plus a built-in IR blaster
for controlling your home cinema kit.
We'll be expanding on all these as we get more hands-on time with the handset over the next couple of weeks.
CONCLUSION
It's hard to find chinks the S4's general excellence. The storage is
measly and the mono speaker and lack of FM radio may be a downer for
some, but despite these it's still a lot of phone for your money. We
shopped around and the best deal we saw was a free handset for £31 a
month with unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of mobile data.
According to research and experience even these reasonable prices
will drop steadily over the next six months. For the S3 this meant you
could shop around for a phone late last year and find it as cheaper, if
not cheaper, than many mid-range handsets that should have been far less
expensive according to reason alone.
Even considering that, the S4 is a lot of smartphone for your money
today. The lack of a big.LITTLE processor is a shame, as it looks to be a
great idea, but even without it the S4 embodies that phrase rather
nicely. The screen is bigger than that on the
HTC One, the battery is bigger than the
HTC One's or the one in the
Sony Xperia Z,
yet the phone itself is slightly smaller than either. Simply put,
Samsung has squeezed more into less - and that's why it wins it our
Ultimate award.
expertreviews.co.uk
Fabulous 5-inch screen 
