After Several months of its release, does the Galaxy S4 claim the title of 'best smartphone'?
But 2013 is a tougher market than Samsung has ever faced: HTC has set a strong precedent with the beautifully crafted HTC One, Sony's presence is stronger than ever with their Xperia Z, and Nokia continues to push their Windows Phones such as the Lumia 920 and Lumia 925. Has Samsung done enough with the Galaxy S4 to keep it in the race? Is it worth upgrading over a Galaxy S III? What innovation have we seen from Samsung this year around? Is it still worth it, two months on? All will be answered in due course.
A big shout-out this time to both Samsung and MobiCity, whose combined efforts have allowed me to review not only the more-prevalent Galaxy S4 i9505 with 4G LTE and Snapdragon processor, but also the 3G-only Exynos octa-core i9500 model. If you're after a smartphone and want it fast, unlocked and contract-free, look no further than the guys at MobiCity to provide a solid service in many locations around the globe.
Specifications
As I mentioned above, this review will actually cover two different devices as I have both on hand. The i9500 is the internationally-available 3G model with Samsung's own Exynos 5 Octa processor, combining two quad-core processors together in a big.LITTLE setup; on the other hand the i9505 is the international 4G LTE model that packs Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 chipset that we've already seen in some phones such as the HTC One.
Regardless, here's the full table of specifications as provided by Samsung.
| Samsung Galaxy S4 | |
|---|---|
| Product Codes |
i9500 (3G) i9505 (4G) |
| 3G/4G |
HSPA+: 42 Mbps ↓ 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100 LTE: 100 Mbps ↓ (up to) 6 bands (i9500 only) |
| Display |
5.0-inch Full HD Super AMOLED at 1920 x 1080 441 ppi pixel density |
| Processor |
i9500: Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 5410 1.6 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU i9505: Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064T 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait 300 CPU |
| Graphics |
i9500: PowerVR SGX544MP3 i9505: Adreno 320 |
| RAM | 2 GB |
| Storage |
16/32/64 GB internal storage microSD card slot |
| Connectivity |
Wi-Fi 802.11 ac/a/b/g/n (dual-band) Bluetooth 4.0 A-GPS and GLONASS NFC Infrared |
| Camera |
Rear: 13 MP | 1080p/30 video | BIS sensor | f/2.2 28mm lens | LED flash Front: 2.0 MP | 1080p/30 video | BIS sensor |
| Ports |
MicroUSB 3.5mm audio jack Micro-SIM |
| Battery | Li-ion 2,600 mAh removable |
| Launch OS |
Android 4.2 'Jelly Bean' TouchWiz UI |
| Launch Date | April 2013 |
| Size & Weight |
136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm 130 g |
| Price | Unlocked & Outright: AU$709 (Buy now!) | £500 inc. VAT |
Design
Last year, when a Samsung Galaxy S III arrived in my hands, I slammed it for having a cheap build and a design that plainly didn't reflect the high-end cost of the device. Two months ago, the Samsung Galaxy S4 was unleashed on the world, and not a huge amount has changed in the year between devices: the design is largely the same, only featuring small changes that slightly differentiate it from its predecessor.
Along with various design changes between the Galaxy S III and Galaxy S4, the latter device has also managed to receive a slight fat trimming, slimming down to a reported 7.9mm from 8.6mm. I'm always skeptical of these measurements, because it's unclear exactly where they measure the thickness from, so I checked both values using a micrometer at the devices' thickest point (at the camera with its slight bump): the Galaxy S4 is actually 9.0mm thick, down from 9.3mm on the Galaxy S III. In the hand both devices feel reasonably thin (the Galaxy S4 body is actually 8.1mm thin), and you probably won't be able to ascertain any real difference between the thickness of them.
The Galaxy S4 (left) next to the Galaxy S III (right)
The phone does not feel like a premium, $700 piece of hardware
Despite the ergonomics and the small improvements that Samsung has made to the design of the phone, the major complaint I had about the Galaxy S III has not been addressed: the phone does not feel like a premium, $700 piece of hardware. It's made of the same, ridiculously smooth plastic that feels like it comes straight from the packaging of a children's toy, albeit with slight diamond patterns that you can see in the right light.
The Galaxy S4 (bottom) against the Galaxy S III (top)
The Galaxy S4 (left and bottom) next to the HTC One (top right)
What button is this? It's menu, the legacy Android button that was killed off with the release of Android 4.0 and a button that, for whatever terrible reason, Samsung refuses to kill. As many apps updated in the past year have coded an in-app menu button, as per the Android design guidelines, the button is largely redundant and better replaced by a recent apps/app switching button. Learning to make quick use of app switching greatly improves your productivity with a smartphone, as I experienced with the Xperia Z, but instead Samsung makes you hold down the home button.
Display
Like most Samsung smartphones before it, the Galaxy S4 uses a Super AMOLED display straight from the Samsung factory, although this time around - as you'd expect for a current-gen high-end phone - we're seeing a brand new and improved panel. Samsung is calling this panel a "Full HD Super AMOLED display", although we all know this to be a 5.0-inch 1920 x 1080 AMOLED display with an integrated digitizer and PenTile RGBG subpixel matrix.From the moment this display was turned on before my eyes, it was clear that this is the best AMOLED panel I've ever seen. From the perspective of crispness, you simply can't go past a 1080p panel when you have a display of five inches: 441 pixels per inch produces images so sharp that it's easy to mistake this display for a printed image, and it makes reading text on the display an absolute joy.
The truth is that, compared to the Xperia Z and HTC One displays, I can see the difference in crispness between a PenTile 1080p display and an RGB 1080p display, even at 441 PPI. Samsung's Full HD Super AMOLED lacks a minute amount of clarity and sharpness around high-contrast edges such as text and icons compared to, say, the Xperia Z, but whether or not you'll be able to tell is another question.
One area I was particularly impressed with the Galaxy S4's display was in the brightness
One area I was particularly impressed with the Galaxy S4's display was in the brightness and outdoor visibility. AMOLED panels are known not to be as bright as their LCD counterparts, but with this new-generation display from Samsung, a lot of my past complaints seem to have been addressed. When it needs to be, the Full HD Super AMOLED can push itself to be very bright, and where it doesn't, automatic brightness pushes it way down so you don't hurt your eyes.
Outdoors I had barely any issues with visibility in direct sunlight, which is thanks to very few layers of material between the light-emitting diodes and the outer glass on the device. By reducing refraction and reflection, and coupling this with a reasonably bright AMOLED panel and a few sun-reducing filters, the Galaxy S4 is one of the easiest phones to use where there's a lot of background light or strong sun.
There are a number of display modes included in the Galaxy S4's software that control how the display looks, but I preferred to set the screen mode to Normal, disable adapt display and turn off auto adjust screen tone. To my eyes this made the display look the best, but you do have the option to play around with a few settings and you may find you prefer one of the other modes.
Following in the footsteps of Nokia's Lumia 920, the Galaxy S4 includes a high-sensitivity touch mode for increasing the power sent to the digitizer, allowing you to use the touchscreen with gloves on. I don't recommend leaving the feature on all the time, as you can increase your battery life with it disabled, but where needed it will allow you to use your smartphone with gloves on. And even during normal usage without high-sensitivity enabled, the touchscreen is extremely responsive and easy to use.
The Galaxy S4's display may not be the best display going around, but it's a definite improvement over past generations of Super AMOLEDs, and you'll generally find yourself very satisfied with what Samsung has delivered in this department.
Software
There's a few areas to be annoyed about with the design of the Galaxy S4, but that pales in comparison to some of absolutely atrocious decisions made on the software front. Throughout the few months I've been using a Galaxy S4, it often amazed me just how horrible some of the software is, rarely improving on the software in the Galaxy S III.
Few changes have been made between the Galaxy S III's TouchWiz and the Galaxy S4's TouchWiz, so all the odd design inconsistencies remain. It's still very colorful, there are still odd gradients and drop shadows around the operating system and its apps, and it clashes badly with the Google-made apps on the phone such as Gmail, Search and YouTube.
Why does one button have a gradient when all the others don't?
Text seems to have been improved in this round of TouchWiz, likely to make use of the crisp 1080p display, opting for thinner lines which do actually look better (surprisingly). Most other elements, including widgets, are basically straight-up copies of the past version of TouchWiz optimized for a higher resolution display, so if you're coming from a Galaxy S III there's little to get excited about.
Moving on to some of the 'features' of the Galaxy S4, and at Samsung's launch event for the device they made a big deal out of the various sensing features that are available in the phone's software. The most impressive one was the Smart Screen, improved with the Galaxy S4 to make even more use of the front facing camera and its ability to detect eyes looking at the screen.
The fourth Smart Screen feature and obviously the most gimmicky of them all is Smart Scroll, which detects when your eyes are looking at the top or bottom of the display and scrolls either way accordingly. Unsurprisingly this feature is useless, as it not only fails to work in most situations, often detecting eyes looking towards the bottom of the display when I'm in fact looking at the middle, but it also only works in the stock Browser and Email apps. If you use Chrome or Gmail (also included on the phone), or literally any other app it doesn't work at all, meaning it's essentially just a feature Samsung can use to market the phone.
Unsurprisingly the Smart Scroll feature is useless
But the gimmicks don't stop with Smart Screen, there's also Air View, a feature that uses the capabilities of the highly sensitive touchscreen to display information when you hover your finger above certain elements. It apparently allows you to magnify text in the browser, preview information and images, as well as see extended progress reports when you hover your finger, but again this feature is limited to a few stock apps, and often I had absolutely no idea when I could hover my finger to make use of Air View.
This meant that when I had Air View enabled, I often hovered my finger over the display for absolutely no reason, expecting extra information to magically appear as I was lead to believe in the settings. It does work occasionally in apps such as the Gallery, but it's better to save yourself some battery and effort by disabling the feature and simply tapping on objects to get what you're after.
Motion, gesture and voice controls can all also be added to list of gimmicks, as it's plainly easier to control your phone normally than make use of the sensors for a few actions. Using the accelerometer to pan and zoom brings more problems than its worth, capturing the screen with a palm swipe only seems to work some of the time, and voice controls are still too inaccurate and too slow to bother using.
One of the better aspects of the Galaxy S4's software is Blocking Mode, a feature that turns off certain notifications between times you set, allowing you to get a good night's sleep uninterrupted by incoming calls or messages. I'm not sure why it comes with a persistent notification to tell you that it's enabled, but it's a handy feature if you keep your phone charging right beside your bed.
In the notification pane I also appreciated how Samsung included a bunch of quick setting toggles, in fact a lot of quick setting toggles that control nearly all the important features of the phone without you having to venture deep into the vast expanse of settings. The ability to rearrange them also comes in handy, so you can keep your most used toggles in the most visible area.
Oh, and before I dive into some of the apps you can find on the Galaxy S4, the out-of-the-box configuration must be mentioned: it's absolutely horrendous. Whoever decided that touch sound should be enabled by default must answer for their crimes against humanity, as the GS4 makes a ridiculous amount of noises from the word go.
Your basic apps included with the phone - Contacts, Messaging, Email, Phone, Internet, Calculator, Clock and Gallery - are largely unchanged from past iterations and should present no surprises or exciting features for those used to the way these apps operate on other smartphones. Most of them do a decent job at what they're supposed to do, although all of them are skinned for no discernible reason other than to change up what Google concocted in stock Android.
WatchOn allows you to control your TV via the infrared LED on the top of the device, and it seemed to work fine with a number of TVs and set-top boxes located around my house. The TV guide also included with the app is a little lackluster as it doesn't have support for Australia's cable TV networks, and the design isn't as good as HTC's rival app on the HTC One.
S Planner is awful. Like really, really monstrously terrible. Download Google Calendar from the Play Store and banish Samsung's horrific excuse for a calendar app to Android app hell.
Samsung was lazy with the Galaxy S4's software
At the end of the day I feel like Samsung was lazy with the Galaxy S4's software: it's like they thought the Galaxy S III's software was good enough, so they'd just slap on some new gimmicks and let a phenomenal marketing budget do the selling work. There's no doubting that the Galaxy S4 will sell very well, but a chance to refine and improve the experience from the S III has gone missing, leaving the software in a disappointing, often bad state.
Performance
The Samsung Galaxy S4 i9500 may pack a state-of-the-art Samsung Exynos 5 Octa chipset, including two different quad-core CPUs, but my feelings regarding its performance are definitely mixed. On the one hand, it's an extremely fast and very capable processor that cuts through tasks with little effort, and on the other it feels like a prototype chipset that's not quite ready for the mass market of everyday smartphone users.As I primarily used the i9500 model during my testing, the majority of this performance section deals with the Exynos 5 Octa chipest, but rest assured that I'll briefly talk about what you can find in the 4G-enabled Snapdragon 600 model.
I stress that only one of these two CPUs can be used at a time, meaning only a maximum of four cores are ever used at once
The Exynos 5 Octa 5410 is the first chipset in a commercially available smartphone that uses ARM's big.LITTLE model, which combines a high-powered Cortex-A15 CPU with an energy-efficient Cortex-A7 CPU. In Samsung's design, were seeing a 1.6 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 CPU combined with a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU; the two CPUs combine to make it technically an octa-core chipset, but I stress that only one of these CPUs can be used at a time, meaning only a maximum of four cores are ever used at once, or ever seen by the operating system.
The supposed advantages of the big.LITTLE model revolve around power conservation, in that the chipset can switch from the A15 cores during high-powered tasks (think web browsing and gaming) to the A7 cores when tasks aren't so intense. The Exynos 5 Octa automatically does the switching for you, apparently choosing to use the A7s when playing music and idling.
Using the Galaxy S4 for regular phone tasks - whether it was the Snapdragon or Exynos model - the chipset certainly feels very fast, zooming in and out of apps in mere milliseconds and churning through games and webpages like there's no tomorrow. It's not really significantly faster than its predecessor, in fact in many ways you likely won't notice the extra power from the latest ARM CPUs, but it's definitely there when it's needed.
Interestingly, out of the two Galaxy S4 models I used throughout the testing period, the Snapdragon model actually felt marginally smoother to use. This is because there were strange, inconsistent and infrequent occurrences where the Exynos-touting i9500 exhibited lag, almost like the processor decided mid-way through swiping across homescreens that it would send tasks to the slower A7 cores, only to have it immediately switch back to the A15s after it obviously couldn't cope.
Out of the two Galaxy S4 models I used throughout the testing period, the Snapdragon model actually felt marginally smoother to use
Also, directly comparing the browser performance of Chrome on the i9500 to the Snapdragon-touting i9505 reveals that, in scrolling, the i9505 is simply smoother and more consistent with its performance. Switching between tabs is where this difference is particularly noticeable, as the i9505 renders the animations more smoothly and switches faster than the i9500.
Oh, and the i9500 crashed a lot, and I mean a lot. Usually the crashes would be related to opening the camera, switching cameras to the front camera, or using an app that was about to access the camera, but occasionally the phone would simply hang and soon enough it would be rebooting. I'm sure a quick software update could rectify these issues, but in the meantime it's absolutely unacceptable to have any smartphone crash on you on a daily basis.
While the i9500 may be hard to recommend over the i9500 from the point of its instability and occasional inconsistent performance, let's take a look at the benchmarks of both devices to see which one is actually faster.
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