Review : Samsung Galaxy S4

If there’s one handset that challenges the iPhone’s dominance on the minds of customers, then it has to be the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Sure, the HTC One is well loved, Sony has found form again with the new Xperia range, and Google’s Nexus 5 offers simply the best value for money of any top tier unit, but in sheer volume of sales the S4 has got them beat.

Released in the summer of 2013, the S4 is packed to the gills with bespoke features that Samsung has somehow crammed into the elegantly thin frame. In many ways it’s a strong iteration of the wildly successful S3. The screen is marginally bigger at around 5 inches, and while this does feel large and somewhat cumbersome in the initial hours, the glass acreage soon becomes a comfortable place to interact with the device.

In fact the first thing you notice is just how much of the phone is screen. The side bezels are minuscule and the lower portion of the unit where the home and two softkey buttons live is also small. This does cause a few issues as you need to readjust the position of the handset quite often to be able to hit the back button. Over the first few days I found that I touched it by accident with part of my hand pretty regularly, which became something of an annoyance. Putting a case on the unit (which I would have done anyway, as phones are expensive and get dropped a lot) instantly solved the problem by shielding my fleshy thumb from the button. After that I found the S4 a very enjoyable experience.

All that gorilla glass gives you a portal to the internet that makes watching Youtube videos and playing games a far more enjoyable past-time than it is on my iPhone. The colours are rich, text definition crisp, and the handset is very fast in pretty much any task. The size also makes reading books, articles, or general web browsing far more enticing than on lower-res or inch-challenged rivals. Over the two weeks with the device I definitely found myself using the S4 more for these sort of things than my old iPhone 4S. Actually, going back to my little stalwart after testing bigger phones can often be a little disconcerting. I adjust in a day or two and then it’s business as usual. But after the S4 my iPhone now has the permanent feeling of being too small for many of the things I want to do. I realised that I never really fire up my Kindle, Pulse, or Youtube apps on the iPhone, instead saving it for my iPad. With the S4 this wasn’t the case. Interesting.

CAMERA

One of the main reasons for my love affair with my 4S is the amazing camera. The camera on the S4 is very decent, producing photos that look rich and sharp. It also comes with a multitude of modes that can turn a normal shot into a GIF, multi-exposure image, or (bizarrely) put an image of the taker in the corner. In practice they can be a bit hit and miss. The multiple exposure setting is a kind of action shot, meant really for high speed action. The thing is if you move too quickly then it can’t quite catch the moment, too slowly and you end up blurry. When it gets things right though, the results are quite fun.

Here’s a couple of examples of what can be achieved quickly with just the in-built modes.

The typical user will probably play about with these modes when they first get the device, then set them aside and stick with the excellent auto mode. Which would be no bad thing.

Here’s a couple of standard shots that show off the camera in normal use.

FINAL THOUGHTS

In the end, for most of us, all we want from a phone is that it’s easy to use, fast, takes cool pictures, and has a good screen. The S4 delivers on all these demands, and stacks a lot of extras on top. There are a number of special features such as eye tracking, and touchless control, but these all felt a bit clunky and pointless. Then there are the elaborate, but again in many cases superfluous although admittedly fun, camera modes. All of this takes up space on the storage and would be a big downside if it weren’t for the fact that Samsung includes a micro SD card slot so you can cheaply expand your internal space. Not many manufacturers do this any more, so it really is an important feature to note, especially if you want to carry your music or video collection around on your phone.

The S4 also has a removable battery, so you can replace it when the phone gets older, or carry a spare if you’re a heavy user. You might not need one though because I was very impressed with the normal day-to-day battery life, rarely finding myself below 20% when it was time to go to bed.

I wasn’t convinced about big phones until my recent experience with the Nexus 4. The Galaxy S4 has taken that curiosity and turned it into a full blown love. It’s hard now to go back to the iPhone, knowing that out there somewhere is an S4. Yes it’s plastic, but so is the new iPhone 5C. Yes it’s big, but it’s also slim and light, so this becomes an advantage. Yes it’s Android, but that’s another major plus these days. The S4 is simply an excellent phone that’s great to use, and the screen is lovely. In truth, this was the hardest one so far to send back.

Review: Revisiting The Samsung Galaxy S3

While the Samsung Galaxy S4 is currently top of the heap in the Android world, it’s worth noting that the previous incarnation – the S3 – is still available from most carriers, and at very impressive prices. The technology may be a over a year old, but that doesn’t mean it should be forgotten just because of the shiny things that have arrived since. There’s plenty of life yet in the old faithful, especially if you want a few more notes in your pocket at the end of each month.

Much has been made of the plastic construction on Samsung phones – although maybe that will be less discussed now that Apple has joined the polycarbonate revolution with the iPhone 5C – but I have to say that the S3 doesn’t feel cheap at all. In fact in the pebble blue colour that adorns this review unit the handset looked and felt just like metal for the most part. In many ways the construction argument is somewhat distorted, as most of us will put our expensive new handsets in a case almost immediately, and keep them there for the duration of our contracts. From that perspective all that really matters then is whether the screen looks good and the apps work quickly. On both counts the S3 is still a great phone.

The 4.8″ Super AMOLED display beams with colour and crisp images, showing off its 720p capabilities particularly well when viewing videos or reading news-feeds, where the text is sharp and clear. Navigating through the various home-screens on the Samsung Touchwiz interface is snappy and responsive, with the older components still holding up strongly. In fact with the latest 4.3 Jelly Bean version of Android announced to be released for the S3 in November its conceivable that the device might actually get faster in the coming months. Now there’s something you don’t see in technology very often.

The S3 comes with two options for internal storage 16 or 32GB, but Samsung is one of the last holdouts in the Micro-SD card slot stakes, with one included on the S3 that can add up to a further 64GB of storage to your handset by the simple addition of a card. That means you can keep all your music on your device without ever having to worry about it affecting performance or requiring careful management of which apps you keep installed. This is a good thing, especially if you don’t have access to unlimited internet connections that allow you to stream your media.

One area where Android phones often fall down with alarming regularity is in the camera department. The S3 though, dodges this particular bullet thanks to a very decent 8MP shooter that produces pleasing, colourful, and detailed results. Here’s a few examples of images I was able to capture while out and about with the S3.

If I was being picky then I’d have to say that the button arrangement on the S3, and therefore on the S4, lacks the comfortable user friendliness of the software keys on the Nexus 4, mainly due to the large physical home button that the Samsung devices use. Of course this has never hurt the iPhone, and for many an actual button will the preferable to a virtual one.  Touchwiz is also a love it or loathe it kind of UI, and Judging by the hilarious amount of these units that have sold it’s pretty clear that many, many people love it. I’m just not really one of them. It’s not bad at all, but having seen the stock Android vision for the OS, it’s hard to go back to a proprietary version without feeling that you’ve lost something valuable. Of course these are minor gripes, and ones that I’m sure I would attune to if I used the S3 for a longer period of time.

In short, if you want a really solid, capable, top-tier phone then the S3 will do everything you want and at a price that will go down easier than most in these difficult times. Yes it’s the older model, yes it doesn’t have as many whizz-bang features as the new S4 or come in gold like the iPhone 5S, but at the end of the day it will still have some battery life left after you’ve listened to your music collection, taken some great photographs, wandered the halls of Youtube, and maybe even made the occasional call or two. Now that to me is what technology is all about.

Living with the HTC One SV

With Samsung currently dominating the Android market for phones, it can be easy to forget that not so long ago HTC were the big kids on the block. With models like the Legend and Desire the Taiwanese manufacturer quickly made fans of UK Android users, including myself who toted a Desire for couple of years. That phone was lovely to hold, had a great screen, but quickly succumbed to the paltry amount of internal memory. This left me having to avoid updates to large apps such as Facebook and Google Maps, while always having to juggle which app I could consider using in case it filled up the usable storage. Subsequent Android system updates that allowed some apps to be moved to the SD card was a welcome relief, but of course all the big ones didn’t offer this convenience. By the end of my contract I was glad to jump ship to iOS where the memory/storage issues didn’t cause the same headaches.

During my absence Android has quietly continued to refine its innards, becoming the dominant operating system on the mobile platform. It’s also resolved many of the issues that caused me anguish in the earlier days, so much so that I find my eyes wandering back to the greener side of the fence. It was with interest then that I took delivery of the new HTC One SV, a mid-range Android phone that seems a cut above some of the cheap and nasty devices I’ve come across in this area.

In the hand, a rather important aspect for a device you’ll be holding all the time, the SV is a slim, light and comfortable handset to use. Its gently contoured back and grippy plastic casing means you don’t have the constant subliminal tension that your handset is going to leap from your grasp at any given moment, which is always nice. Perhaps one of the things that aids this sensation of inertia is that HTC has eschewed the current trend of hilariously large screens and instead fitted a 4.3” one to the SV. I must admit that I’ve yet to use a 5” screen that I didn’t find cumbersome, but this size seems almost like the perfect compromise between pocket and eye friendly design. It’s big enough to make me look at my iPhone 4S with a sense of inadequacy, but small enough to mostly navigate with one hand. Downloading the new Google keyboard helped in this fashion as the swipe feature (entering text by dragging your finger from key to key rather than hitting individual letters) meant that typing was also accurate and felt like a little game every time I wrote a text message.

The screen itself is also a respectable effort. It’s not quite up there with the retina displays of the world, and you can see jagged edges to text, but its perfectly usable and the size means apps look clean and clear, with bright colours. The HTC Sense 4+ skin is still one of the better adaptations available, but as usual I dropped it quickly in favour of the Go Launcher which I used to customise my layout. This really is something you forget about on iOS, just how easy it is to completely change the look and feel of your device on Android. Within ten minutes I’d personalised the entire UI, and I could change it back again with a couple of quick swipes. Brilliant. All this fiddling didn’t seem to bog down the SV, as the handset was snappy and responsive throughout the time I spent with it. One regret is that the version of Android running on here is 4.1.2, but that’s not surprising when previously premium models like the Samsung Galaxy S3 are still awaiting their upgrade to 4.2.2. The SV does have a standout feature though, that of 4G compatibility. For those lucky enough to live in the rarified areas of the UK that offer this provision of fast mobile data this will be a tempting offer. Of course the handset can do nothing about the prices that EE charge for access to the mobile superway, the monthly payments for which I imagine they must be collect via a masked man on horseback waving a loaded flintlock pistol at the terrified customer.

Sadly the camera is nothing more than average on the SV. Images are lacking definition, somewhat washed out, and not always properly focussed. I say sadly because otherwise this is a very alluring handset. Many times I had my iPhone 4S and the SV sitting on the table and I’d find myself reaching for the HTC, and not just because I was reviewing it. I’m in love with the screen size, the light weight, and the possibilities that Android offer for tuning a UI to your particular preference.

The SV delivers on many levels as a workhorse handset, and if you only occasionally use the camera on your phone then I can’t see why you’d need to spend a lot more on a device. Those who want all the newest features that Android have to offer will be better suited with the Nexus 4, HTC One, or Samsung GS4, but if you just want a really good handset that’s pleasing to use and offers you a micro SD slot to store all your music on, then you wouldn’t go far wrong with the HTC SV.