The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the year's hottest phone, perhaps even more feverishly anticipatedthan the latest iPhone. It's the follow-up to the smash-hitSamsung Galaxy S3, probably the best smart phone out there. And Samsung has decided that if it ain't broke, don't fix it -- just turn it up to 11.
With a mindboggling array of features and market-leading specs, the S4 packs a lot of power in your pocket. But is itdifferent enough from the S3 to get us excited?
Design
The S4 sports a roomy 5-inch screen with a slim bezel at each side. The screen plays videos in crisp high-definition detail, at 1080p resolution -- like your TV -- with 441 pixels per inch.
The S4 packs an awful lot into its incredibly slender frame.
That's more detail than the iPhone in a bigger screen, ideal for watching movies and TV shows. Though as we found with the similar HTC One, those extra pixels per inch make little difference in practice -- you can't see the iPhone's pixels anyway.
The S4 has a large 5-inch screen surrounded by a silver edge, with a plastic back and overall design that echoes the S3.
It's slimmer and lighter than the previous S3, measuring 7.9mm thick. The back of the phone is a textured plastic casing that comes in black or white. It's slightly flatter than the curved back of the S3, but with its rounded edges and single home button it still looks very similar.
The S3 drew flak for its pop-off plastic back, which is light and durable but just doesn't have the premium feel of glass, aluminium or Nokia's single piece of polycarbonate. We expect the plastic back of the S4 will divide opinion too.Like the S3, the S4 has a single home button under the screen. Rumours suggested the S4 would do away with the home button, but at least you have the comfort of knowing you can always hit that button to stop what you're doing and go back to the start.
Phone fans will be disappointed that the S4 looks so similar to its predecessor. It's a dilemma familiar to iPhone owners: how can you show off that you have the latest phone if it looks the same as everyone else's?
Specs
Under the screen is a mighty powerful chip -- but it depends on which country you live in as to which chip you get. Some lucky souls will get to experience Samsung's own eight-core 1.6GHz Exynos 5 Octa processor. That's sadly not the case in the UK. We're stuck with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.9GHz chip, with 2GB of RAM. Sucks to be us. Nevertheless, this is still a hefty bit of silicon, and the S4's gaming and multi-tasking performance should be off the charts. You can read more about Samsung's decision here.
As much as we love having all that computing oomph at our disposal, the faster chip will suck up battery juice like it's going out of style. Power is supplied by a muscular (and replaceable) 2,600mAh battery, bumped up from the S3's 2,100mAh battery. But with faster processor and bigger screen you can expect to charge the phone every day.
The battery is bumped up from the S3, but the bigger screen and faster processor still mean it has to charge every day.
The battery charges the old-fashioned way by plugging into a charger, or by wireless charging. Like the Google Nexus 4 and Nokia Lumia 920you can juice the S4 by dropping it onto a wireless charging pad, saving you from having to locate a cable. You still need to plug the wireless charging dock into the wall though.
You get a roomy 64GB of storage for your music and movies, apps and snaps, and unlike the iPhone or HTC One, you can add a microSD card for up to 64GB of extra legroom.
Samsung seems determined to have thrown everything into the S4 but the kitchen sink. You have an infrared blaster to remote control any TV, and an optical reader to recognise and record the text from business cards. And there's a pedometer cunning enough to tell if you're walking up or downstairs while it counts your steps.
Camera
Then there's the feature-packed camera. The main camera is a 13-megapixel job that films 1080p video. The controls borrow from theSamsung Galaxy Camera, showing you onscreen dials in the shape of a camera lens to adjust your snapping options.
The S4's camera has impressive specs: 13 megapixels and 1080p video.
There are various options for adding a little something extra to your photo: add 9 seconds of audio to a still photo for a bit of atmosphere, or create an animated gif in which only one thing moves and the background stays fixed. Drama shot combines a burst of pictures into one short moving shot, somewhere between a photo and a video.
And if there's an unwanted visitor in a pic, you can erase people from your shot right there in the phone -- handy for purging photobombers, passers-by and exes.
There's a low-resolution 2-megapixel camera in the front as well as the one at the back, used primarily for video chats. But it also works in tandem with the main camera for a dual-shot mode that takes a photo from each camera and overlays them. Just press the icon showing two cameras on top of each other and you'll get a shot with a smaller photo inset, perhaps if you want to show your reaction to whatever you've snapped... or something. If you can think of a reason you'd ever use this, send your answer on a postcard to the usual address.
New features
The S4 runs Android 4.2.2 software, the latest version of Android already shown off on the Google Nexus 4. To customise your S4 just download apps and games from the Google Play app store, where you can also download movies and music too.
The S4 has a handy tray of shortcuts to get to your favourite apps even faster.
You can place shortcuts to your apps on the homescreen, or add widgets that display information without having to open an app. And your favourite apps are right at your fingertips with a quick tray of shortcuts that swipes in from the left, as seen on the Galaxy Note 2.
The S4 has a translator feature that can interpret emails in different languages.
And there's a range of added bonus features from Samsung. For example, S Translator deciphers foreign tongues in email -- but the cleverest new features, and the ones that stand out the most from the S3 and other phones, allow you to control the S4 without even touching the screen. Your hand doesn't even have to be that close to the phone for it to recognise your gesture. Magic!
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