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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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