If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it; a piece of conventional wisdom that applies to everything but technology. Anything within the gadgetsphere must be constantly changed, tinkered with and improved upon. You can’t just make a smartphone as excellent as the Samsung Galaxy S III and then continue to sell it for five years.
You need to update it with 4G, a 1080p screen, an eightcore CPU, touch-free control and add in the ability to tell you when you’re coming down with the flu. But you’ve got to make sure it still feels like the hugely successful S III, only newer, better.
So, perhaps a more apt piece of wisdom would be ‘if it ain’t broke, keep it aesthetically the same but significantly upgrade its hardware and functionality’. Just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? As hot as… a piri piri tritium milkshake.
EIGHT CORES? REALLY?
Yes and no. While the S4’s Exynos 5 Octa processor does have eight cores, they don’t all fire at once. It’s more like having two quad-core chips: one uses lowerpower A7 cores to accomplish basic tasks, while the other, composed of four 1.6GHz A15 cores, rumbles into life when you want to play a demanding game or render an effect on to some video. The idea isn’t to provide more power than you could possibly use, it’s to save battery.
YOU CAN NOT TOUCH THIS
The S4 is a touch phone you don't need to touch. It works like this…
AIR GESTURE
If you’re a butcher, you’ll know the frustration of missing an important call because you can’t touch your phone with meatcovered hands. No more! Thanks to the S4’s ingenious fingertracking, you can answer calls by wafting your bloodstained paw above the screen, change music tracks with a sideways flourish or scroll websites with a downward wave. Hygienic.
SMART SCROLL & SMART PAUSE
The S4 doesn’t just track your fingers. Like its predecessor, it can also track your eyes, but in a more sophisticated fashion: it will now scroll through webpages automatically by looking at which bit of the screen you’re reading. And when you’re watching a video, the footage will pause if you look away. Sounds great, but what if you’re looking away to avoid seeing a football score, film spoiler or an advert for Pledge Lemon with zesty nanoparticles?
SPECIAL SKILLS
S TRANSLATE
The S4’s extra goodies include a compelling translator app that does text-to-speech (type your phrase in English, it’ll say it in Korean) and speech-to-text (a Frenchman speaks to your phone, it shows you the translation). You can also use image recognition to translate printed words such as menus or syndicated editions of Stuff. Worried about roaming charges? The translator has thousands of phrases stored in 10 languages, so you won’t even need an active data connection.
S HEALTH
From the distance you’ve walked or run, to how well you slept, to more sophisticated data about you and your surroundings, the S4 is able to constantly collect information about your exercise, diet and general health… and secretly provide that data to the giant pharmaceutical companies that secretly rule our world. Only kidding. Its life-tracking skills can help you lose weight, sleep better or train for a marathon.
CAMERA SMARTS
ERASER
Like a personal Stalinist airbrusher, it rids backgrounds of those pesky photobombers.
DUAL CAMERA
Puts the picturetaker in the picture using the 2MP front camera (stills or video). DRAMA SHOT Combines multiple shots taken in burst mode into one action-packed image.
OTHER AWESOME FEATURES
IR IMPRESSED
This season’s must-have accessory is something a little bit retro: an infra-red ‘blaster’ that allows you to use your smartphone as a universal remote. The Samsung WatchON app provides you with an EPG for full control of your telly, but you can also use it to control your hi-fi, set-top box, Blu-ray player and even some air-conditioning units.
WEIGHTY 1080
There was no way Samsung was going to stick anything other than a 1080p display in its flagship phone, and the S4’s Super AMOLED pentile display takes a seat at the big boys’ table with a pixel density of 440ppi. It’s also coated in Gorilla Glass 3, which manufacturer Corning claims is tougher than aluminium of the same thickness .
ASTUTE SHOOTER
We haven’t had a chance to crack the S4 open and rummage around its steely intestines, but we’d put money on that being the same 13-megapixel Sony camera module you’ll find in most of this year’s flagship phones. However, software features such as Drama Shot and Eraser (see panel, left) should help it stand out from the camera crowd.
A FAMILIAR FACE
At 7.9mm, it’s almost a millimetre thinner than the S III, but otherwise pretty much exactly the same size and weight. With a bit of judicious bezel-shaving, though, Samsung has managed to shoehorn a full 5in screen into the S4 (compared with its predecessor’s 4.8in display). Which is great, because who likes a big bezel?
OPEN GALAXY
There are two big reasons to prefer Samsung offerings over rival Android phones: they have removable batteries and microSD slots. These might seem trivial, but anyone with an 8GB Nexus 4 will weep at the thought of being able to add an extra 64GB for £30. And while you shouldn’t really need a spare 2600mAh battery, it’s nice to have the option.
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