Gadgetory

time for our road test of the galaxy s4 it's your basic tricked-out smartphone but it does have kind of a couple novelty features that we are looking forward to getting the opinions on from our real-world testers we have Massimo crystal and Kyle now each of you are gonna get this phone for a couple days I really want you to dig into it put your email on there it's okay we'll check it out now as you guys use this phone I want you to focus mainly on design features and usability just try to evaluate those three categories as well as you can I'm Kyle itani executive chef/owner of hopscotch in Oakland and I'm really excited to see how the galaxy s3 compares to ask for hi I'm crystal Silva the art director here at big fish and I like to raise caterpillars in my free time I'm Massimo free or esky VP of Sales and Marketing at back roads and this s4 test is going to give me street cred with my teens oh my gosh it's super super super light this phone in my pocket for a pair of fans that are like this is fine totally perfect you don't even know it's there it's so light it's really easy to get to the battery and get another battery in there if you wanted to carry replacement it also has a microSD slot right here so if you need an extra memory easy to put that in as well hey it just beats level the screen itself given the size and the resolution is beautiful I played some of our hidden object games on them and graphics are meant for tablet size screen and so everything looks amazing on here the screen makes it awesome but the actual hardware itself proved to be a problem the position of the power button here if I'm holding it like this my thumb would cover and hit this back button which have kept pausing the game I was getting really frustrated I like the size of the screen face in the color the resolution is really impressive plastic material I've heard some people wonder about that I mean we had it for a few days I don't know how durable it would be over the long haul because sometimes things get pegged around in the kitchen a little bit how many times what we do I was surprised by the eye tracking feature I like it so looking at the screen and then look away first whatever reason and it pause which was awesome i look back and it starts right up so it's useful for i'm actually talking to somebody but if I if I intentionally want to pause it by just that that shift doesn't cause it to happen that shift does so there there is a spectrum that I have to make sure i turn my head enough to initiate that I like this is actually really awesome yo BMO Cancellara una notte al vostro albergo there it is then you just pop that into a text and away we go the phone has this really awesome translate feature totally picked up my Italian translated it into English but if you just wanted to use this feature just so that it picks up different languages and you can use them for texting you can just go and grab this piece of text and drop it into a text camera has a higher megapixel in the s3 it also has a burst mode function where I can take multiple pictures at once and then just choose the best one for later so that I can just toggle between each photo and see you know what is focused the best I'm gonna go with that one and I just save it ah power button it is pretty smooth to be doing video capture and be able to have the controls not stutter very much you'd expect a lot of jitter when it zoomed in on video and there wasn't a whole lot of jitter that's pretty good I really love the mapping feature I mean it's a google map so that's fantastic very accurate you can get bike routes on it which is great the only thing I didn't like was the advertising on it it seems to take up a lot of the screen so that was kind of annoying but I think that'd work totally fine hey good morning guys and now they make sure you check the google document from last night the google docs are great you know they downloaded the dr appt very fast and then i just have all my documents right there on me at all times throughout the day and i can just go from one duck into the next and make sure that you know every cook knows what we're doing for the day and it keeps things really organized up here when you're wearing it for working out but the gym let's say it's really really huge so you'd have to wear it down here and at least with the software that i'm using you want to look at it so you'd be doing kind of thats so it doesn't really work for me oh you're playing the too we have a lot of devices here that we designed for android and iOS and so we constantly as developers have to be testing our own games the operating system took me a little getting used to coming from iOS considering i like a lot of Google products it felt like that and so all that was really straightforward I'm to find out what our testers thought of their time with the s4 all right let's start with you much ammo what was your overall impression of this month I love the size and I loved how light it the phone that I have right now it's a little difficult to navigate but I give it one thumb up and one over here okay crystal how about you the feel of it was really great i was surprised it was good to be plastic and the resolution of the screen made games look beautiful but it's just too big for someone sighs pockets i typically have okay interesting alright and then Kyle you were our potential upgrader how did it sit with you I liked it a lot compared to the s3 shape the screen resolution it's all an upgrade I don't know if I'd really like just go out and get it now maybe wait till I three new and then you know get the discount hunted or something but yeah it was it was good all right so give me your total breakdown buy or not buy uh not by not buy right now until the upgrade tell the discount okay crystal what about you now for Brazil for me for my husband okay it's a good gift all right I'm about to about how about you yeah not not for me either in terms of size i would go maybe if my eyes get any worse i would buy it but for now i'm sticking with what I've got so that to me just shows how tough the smartphone market is right now that the s4 is definitely a premium phone but if you don't have a reason to upgrade or a reason to switch from iphone for a reason to go bigger it's just gonna sit there we'll keep watching good luck ask for