Samsung Galaxy S4 has announced for Indian and Fans can’t wait to get their grubby mitts on one. We know many Galaxy S3 owners who’ve already swapped their phone for the upgraded model. We’ve heard a lot of talk about how the S4 doesn’t deem fit for a flagship title due to its looks and other factors, but we had to go in with an open mind, as after all, aesthetics are very subjective.
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Design and Build Quality –
In the countries picture and videos we’ve seen around the Internet, the S4 isn’t much of a looker and when you compare it to its predecessor, or is it? Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect, but after actually holding it in our hands, it didn’t seem so bad. The HyperGlaze coating on the body gives it a nice finish and prevents light scratches and fingerprints. The front consists of a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED screen with a pentile display arrangement. On the top is the front-facing camera with an ambient light sensor, proximity sensor and a notification LED, while the physical ‘Home’ button and the backlit capacitive ‘Options’ and ‘Back’ buttons are located below the screen. Despite the display being Pentile. It doesn’t really make a difference to the naked eye.
Coming back to the tour, to the left there’s the volume rocker, while the Power key is located to the right. The 3.5 mm headphone jack and a noise cancellation mic are located on the top, while the micro USB port and the second mic are at the bottom. The back consists of an 8 megapixel camera, speaker grill and LED flash.
The one thing that you definitely can’t get away from is the plastic feel of the phone. At 8.6 mm in depth and a weight of 133 grams. This set is very slim and light. Samsung has managed to shave off as much of bezel as possible, so all you’re really left with is this gigantic screen, and hope that customers will love it! The battery is removable, but the rear cover itself is dangerously flimsy. Apparently, the rear cover is made from poly-carbonate, so it should be more durable than t looks. The S4 clearly pales in Comparison to the design and aesthtics of the Galaxy Note, which has a much more premium feel to it.
User Interface –
The S4 comes with Android 4.0.4 out of the box, however, we have to deal with Touch-wiz again. Samsung has tweaked and changed a few things to give the Ul a fresh look. The lock screen is no longer a glass, but has water effects instead. Touching it creates ripples and you simply swipe anywhere to unlock it. They’ve also added a slide-up notification bar on the bottom that updates you on missed calls, unread messages, etc . The notification bar plays host to plenty of toggle switches, and this time. Samsung has made it scroll-able to accommodate more.
The Galaxy S4 is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core processor with 1 GB of RAM and 16 GB of on-board storeage. It’s blazingly fast and manoeuvring through the various menus, home screens as well as multitasking is a absolute breeze. While performance is top notch, we did have the occasional hiccup as the phone would catch its breath before resuming its dazzling speeds..
Media Playback –
Samsung have chosen the Wolf son WM1811 audio DAC, which is a huge step forwards from the Yamaha chip used in the S3 and is nearly as good as the one used in the Galaxy S2 and Nexus S (Wolfson WM8994). Music is handled directly by the DAC without any software oversampling and it produces rich and highly detailed sound. You can sort your music via albums, artists, folders, etc. A new addition, called Music, Square, scans all your songs in your library and groups them according to mood, which are ‘ Exciting’, ‘Joyful’, ‘Calm’ and ‘Passionate’. There are plenty of equalizer presets as well, Including a 71 channel surround mode. Samsung has bedded up their video player with every codec under the sun and anything and everything plays flawlessly. 1080p video works fine and their new Pop up play feature works as advertised.
Camera –
The Galaxy S4 comes wpuipped with an 8MP camera with LED flash and we put it through the paces in a couple of indoor and outdoor tests. In outdoor shots, the colors appear rich on the SGS 4. Sometimes the Shots were pretty bright as well, but some of the images were slightly over saturated. Nothing the average user would immediately notice, but if you’re using this is as your premier photo snapping device, you’ll see the difference eventually.
It should be mentioned that the S $ soesn’t automatically activate burst mode when the shutter button on the screen is pressed, a feature we loved on the Galaxy Note. Also some focusing issues prevented us from getting the desired result in burst mode. However, the macro mode on the S 4 wowed us. From being able to capture an ant on a flower, to a wasp just setting on a leaf, the macro mode did bring out extra bit in every image. 1080p video recording at 30fps is supported and there’s video amount of image stabilization.
Battery life –
The Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with a 2100 mAh battery. which is close to the 2500 mAh battery in the Note. During our usage, which included heavy gaming, video music, Wi-Fi, a couple of calls and a lot of burst shots, the Galaxy s4 easily lasted for a day . Remember that it does have a quad-core CPU and the AMOLED screen eats up battery pretty quickly if you have a lot of while color on the display . The battery life wa
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