Samsung on Thursday evening launched one of the most anticipated smartphone of the year at its Unpacked-event. The glitzy New York event with a lot of singing and dancing (reminiscent of the New York Broadway) gave us the first preview of the mighty Galaxy S4 and some of its uber-cool features. Despite the fact that most of its features were leaked before the event, Samsung didn’t fail to impress. Some of the features have never been seen on any other smartphone and will leave Apple red-faced. Here is our detailed analysis of it-
HARDWARE – This smartphone has got some mouth-watering specs, the display looks absolutely amazing. Samsung always has done a great job with its displays; 441ppi all-HD display is extremely crisp and vivid. Internal storage will range from 16-64GB but it has a MicroSD slot to ensure you never run out of space. It has 2GB RAM which was expected and has become an industry standard. It has a much needed 2600mAh battery, something none of its competitors have, though further details are yet to be announced about its performance. A 13MP back and 2MP front facing camera with a lot of tweaked software improvements.
SOFTWARE – This is where Samsung has spent most of its time and money. It really brags of some very innovative features which are top-notch; though it runs on the latest Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean as expected but it’s heavily tweaked. We reported some of the expected features like Smart-scroll, Smart-pause, Air view and Air gesture earlier and got an official confirmation on them. Some other features include- group play which allows the user to share files with other S4 users instantly and supports multiplayer games. S-voice drive- added voice assistance for GPS, Dual Camera shot which allow the user to take a shot from its front and back camera at the same time. Sound and shot feature which records a 9 Sec audio along the picture to make it more interesting and S-Translate – one of the best features according to us, is a multi-lingual voice recognition software that enables you to speak in one language and have the phone translate to another. It supports several languages including French, Chinese, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. S-Health – an app that’s tailor made to track your workouts, daily intake and weight, and monitor your blood pressure, and blood glucose levels.
DESIGN – Design is the only front where Samsung hasn’t experimented a lot. It looks similar to its cousins with little tweaks. A metal bezel around the phone gives it a nice finish and the plastics look a little more premium than its predecessors, but the changes are very subtle and nothing outlandish has been tried.
All in all it’s a feature packed smartphone with a lot of Software innovations and a lot left to talk about it. We can say now that Samsung is a few steps ahead of Apple in the high-profile race and Apple put its foot in mouth when it called S4’s Software outdated last week. The rivalry is getting more intense. A lot of details are yet to be disclosed by Samsung and we’ll keep bringing you latest news on it.