Gadgetory

what's up everyone John Brent chief and TechnoBuffalo here at the full review of Samsung's latest flagship the galaxy s4 brings a ton of new features software and hardware into a pretty awesome package let's go ahead dig in and see if it's the right phone for you so want to start the review as I do now with all of our phones with a disclaimer I use this device for seven days as my daily driver the version we had to review a Sprint's version to support flare LTE network although unfortunately where we are in Southern California we didn't have any LTE support so all the battery tests I'm going to talk about are just representative of using Sprint's 3G network coupled with Wi-Fi so before I get to all the specs this is a phone it's got to make good phone calls and as is pretty true now with most new devices coming out phone quality was pretty awesome call us on the other ends reported hearing no popping blipping blah ping or any sort of white noise and it sounded pretty awesome I had a lot of requests talk about the speakerphone I speakerphone was pretty average it was a little bit tinny it wasn't as loud as some of the other phones that we've tested recently but certainly was suitable if rely on speakerphone for business calls or conference calls you may want to look at an external speaker option so let me refresh your memory what the galaxy s4 is packing all these specs for the US version so it is shipping with Android 4.2.2 so hats off to Samsung's for getting that out the door you're gonna want to check with your carrier for pricing and availability though it will be an option on all four major US carriers as well as some regional carriers as well so from a dimension standpoint it's five point three eight inches by 2.75 inches by a pretty thin at point three one inches and it weighs not that much four point five nine ounces so the big story here in one of the differentiating factors versus the outgoing s3 is this gorgeous screen it is a full 5 inch screen which is the 1080p resolution at the 441 PPI using Samsung's pretty awesome Super AMOLED plus technology Samsung's done an incredible job with their screens over the years going back to the original Galaxy S and they've just gotten better each time this really is a culmination the screen here is absolutely gorgeous we'll talk about that in the screen section of the review so battery it's been powered by a 2600 milliamp hour battery it's got a 1.9 gigahertz quad-core chip I have to pick up the International Version it'll have a 1.9 gigahertz quad-core 1.2 gigahertz quad-core it's actually two quad-core chips making it octa-core but all the US versions are going to ship with a single 1.9 gigahertz quad-core chip it's got 2 gigs of RAM storage you can get it either 16 or 32 but either configuration you can expand that with micro sd and you can get to that microSD card in the back you pull off this plastic back you can get to the microSD card the SIM card and a fully removable battery so the camera here is also well improved as is this software that's gonna power the camera it is a 13 megapixel sensor that can shoot 1080p video with a single LED flash down below and on the front we've got a 2 megapixel sensor for all kinds of front-facing camera that's gonna come into play when we talk about the software of the phone so it's not the interesting things here it's got an IR blaster on the front you can use it to control your TV it worked pretty well it's funny that most phones that are shipping with technology it's years old but IR blasters are coming back and they are very handy some other neat things here 802 11 a B and N you'd expect it also has support for 802 11 NAC I don't have anything yet that supports 802 11 AC but presumably over the next two years that you'll have this phone AC will become the sort of commonplace standard so there is full support for that other stuff you'd expect NFC and Bluetooth 4.0 are also here so let's start with the design this is thinner than the Samsung Galaxy s3 and uses a very familiar product it's the same polycarbonate plastic we've seen in most of Samsung's products I'm kicked out for what it is the back of it is a very thin plastic but I will say when the back is placed onto the phone it sits pretty flush with the battery so you don't have any sort of push on it so the sides also now take advantage of some metal esque accents they're not really metal up they definitely make the phone feel more significant in the hand it's flat on the side there so we hold it on the side the phone does feel more substantial than the outgoing s3 model the phone feels really light which is very surprising considering all the hardware that's packed inside of this it's got a really familiar feel to the s3 the note 2 and it borrows design influences from both of those this is really typical Samsung through-and-through if you're a fan of the s3 the s2 the note or the note - you're gonna like what's done here nothing new in the design standpoint it's a little bigger and a little thinner than the s3 so one odd thing the back almost has a greasy liquid type fuel to keep looking at my hands make sure they weren't super gross just the way the back is made that was it feels like there's a coating of something on it took a little a while to get used to the last sort of interesting thing the phone doesn't sit totally flat once it's on a table there's a little bit of a shake in either side have you been on playing games doing something like that definitely be aware there's gonna be a bit of rock in there when you use your phone this is a really high quality device it's a premium phone doesn't always feel like premium build quality but shouldn't you compare it to the iPhone 5 or the HTC One while the phone is certainly in that class for specs performance wise doesn't always feel the same when it comes to hardware in the way the phone actually feels in your hand but having that plastic design just has been trade offs you do get a removable back which lets you access that battery if you want to carry an extra battery with you for me that hasn't always been a deal breaker I just carry an external battery that I can plug into any micro USB port but some people they really like having that and also I really like having the option for removable storage having microSD is nice to have if you want to do any sort of routing it's great to have but also just for expendable storage bring your music along bring your pictures and if you want all your photos to go to Dropbox on your external card it's really a nice feature you can determine how much extra storage you want so really the more with the design it's got to figure out what to trade off to you if you want to have the expandable storage and you want to have a moveable battery then you're gonna have to enjoy the plastic feel the phone or at least have to deal with the plastic feel of the phone the plastic back that's not important to you there are other options but certainly that's something that you want your device to have galaxy s4 is gonna be the way to go alright so next let's talk about this gorgeous screen and this screen really is gorgeous and for me a 5-inch screen really is a sweet spot and Samsung hit this one out of the park images look absolutely gorgeous text looks crisp and clear there's no sort of pixelation that goes on with it videos of course you'd expect to look awesome games look straight up baller the screen here is just gorgeous I don't know how much to say about it what I can show you that's gonna represent it when you watch this back on YouTube but the screen here is really good I thought the screen on the s3 was good weight TSE the s4 it's very comparable to the screen on the HTC One and even the screen on the iPhone 5 if you want that beautiful crisp hi-def screen you can't go wrong here at the Galaxy s4 so from screen let's talk about software there's a lot to talk about here at the galaxy s4 let's start with touch with those Samsung is not really calling it TouchWiz anymore I'm going to just for the sake of it cuz it's easier to call it something so you really can't call it a skin anymore it's almost a straight brand new carrier version of Android and it's straight TouchWiz through and through from the colored icons the cartoonish look feel it is all here but what's also here isn't a ton of new features so when I say a ton you better bring out dump truck to carry all these new features because you're gonna need all the room you can get so some of the highlights here you've got a brand new notification panel with shortcuts in the lower you can access everything that the phone can do pretty much sbeam NFC smart scroll sync airplane mode air gestures all kinds of stuff I'll be accessible right then now which is really nice so I mentioned something called air gestures that's new here essentially what you can do is you can control different aspects of the phone by waving your hand in front of it so the best way I could demonstrate that say I want to move an icon say I want to move that calendar icon right there but I can hold it I can wave my hand in from the center and I go to the right keep going to the right go to the left and I go to the left you can do a couple of cool things with that you can answer the phone for example by waving your hand across it and actually does work you got to make sure that you're waving her hand across the top of the phone I first started testing this HIPAA wave my hand across the screen it wasn't working it's you got to make sure that you are hitting those sensors it actually does work surprisingly well so the other new feature here is air view if you hover over things you're gonna get a bigger view similar what we saw with the s-pen on the note 2 if I go and open up calendar for example go back to let's go to month view and if I take my finger which is not going to touch the screen I hover over a date it's gonna pull up some information to show me what's going on in that day it's a very handy feature use it for a lot of different things you can use it to zoom in on text on a website for example a new features should be coming as well and that is air view and it really does work very well some other neat things here that were borrowed from the note - you've got multi window view so you can bring up a quick view of icon so you hold down the back button it'll pop up let's say I want to do some chrome action and go ahead and open up Chrome let's say I want to see what's going on with messenger for example I can go ahead and bring that back hold on the back button take messenger you can drag it out here I pick the size that I want it I can move it down and now I could view whatever I want on to its separate screen you can switch them and if you want a close one you go ahead and just close it and you are all done and good to go kind of a neat feature it's nice to a nice to have I don't often that use it but it's definitely here a ton of incredible other new features as well things like s translate lets you translate from really any language just by holding the camera over it and there's really just too much to go through each one but they packed this with s specific features and ton of options so they really did a nice job with it so let's jump from the software to talk about the camera I know it's kind of software based but there's a lot to talk about here when it comes to camera did a pretty decent job in low-light did take a while for it to actually focus we did a full post showing camera comparisons versus the iPhone 5 the HTC One Lumia 920 so you can check all those out as well camera and normal light pictures were gorgeous air presented colors very well without really much artifacting in video we did demonstrations showing indoor and outdoor video footage was be very good most surprisingly I was audio quality the fidelity of the microphone was awesome it's difficult I'm in Southern California skies are a little bit overcast I am holding the phone in landscape mode with my fingers on the top and the bottom so it shouldn't be any microphone issues here at all you can see how colors look so when you go into the camera there are a lot of options here and a lot of things that you can do that mode button holds a ton of pretty crazy secrets if you hit mode you're gonna get regular auto beauty face it'll enhance facial features as well taking a portrait picture is kind of neat best photo will take a series of pictures and pick the best one best face will do kind of the same thing to pick the best face if you have sled and your family at always blinks or can't click it that smile is a pretty cool feature I can do sound shot you can take a picture and put a little bit of audio behind it so drama is another really cool one to essentially give you a trail of motion throughout the picture you can pick which trails you want to have in there which images you want to have and they're kind of neat and there's a lot of options here from HDR and animated photo really does a ton of really cool things so again Samsung did a really cool job with making sure all the features were here one of my favorites though is your eraser if somebody walks in the background you can actually just erase them right out and actually worked pretty decently all the rest stuff you'd expect over here panorama sports night mode and then back to automatic so one of my favorite features that sam something fun to hear at the s4 is ability use the front in rear facing camera so if you hit that button right there in the middle you're gonna get a view of yourself using the front and a rear so we'll go and get something or you can see John filming or I'll try and get it on me you can move it around anywhere you want if you don't like that circle that's there you can pick from a ton of different options so let's say I want a heart shape for example I can go ahead and put myself in a little heart and push that back down move it anywhere you want you can resize it to make it bigger or smaller you can shoot pictures or video like this which is kind of a neat thing to do if you want to you know video chat I want to take a video so we're showing your reaction to something kids react to galaxy s4 video or something I just a very neat feature so Samsung really just did a lot of stuff you notice that's the theme of the video Samsung did a lot they added a ton of features to the software side it really would stand to make it stand apart from other smartphones alright so let's go from camera and talk about battery and again we were only using Sprint's 3G network we didn't have support for LTE and unfortunately but battery was pretty impressive twenty-six hundred milliamps go a long way on this guy I didn't have auto brightness I'd actually set my brightness to about 75 80 percent my daily usage to take the phone off the charger about 7:00 a.m. in the morning I'll make about an hour and a half to two hours of phone call it's connected to Wi-Fi 90% of the day some pretty heavy instant messaging I have two emails being pulled down and checked every five minutes so replies a few minutes of video probably about 15 to 20 minutes Facebook Twitter rest of time it's just sitting I'll on my end of the day I usually have about 45 50 percent battery life which is a little bit higher than when I had another phone's HEC one for example which was connected to AT&T LTE network while I was here was about 10 percent less so I'm curious what that hits going to be once we check out a phone that has support for LTE LTE network that's by us but battery life don't worry about it actually was very good and of course cuz guy removable back just pick up an extra battery if you need it alright so next let's talk about performance as you'd expect from a 1.9 gate core felon two games ran made by Samsung it is stupid fast apps open crazy quick games load awesome there's no sort of lag when you're scrolling at all everything about this phone is really really fast the quadrant scores ranged anywhere from 12,000 to 13,000 last time we did it was about twelve thousand four hundred so really just an incredible performer this thing is absolutely blazing fast and handled anything that Android can throw at it and it did it with a plum so no she's performance at all a few on the phone is going to be cutting edge and you can just handle anything at all galaxy s4 is gonna be a great way to go all right so what's the conclusion on the galaxy s4 as you can tell it is an awesome phone packed to the gills with features if you have a galaxy s3s did you upgrade I wouldn't upgrade this phone is more of a galaxy s3s the software features are awesome some of them are going to be percolating down to the galaxy s3 if you're looking to jump into the phone you have an older generation from the s3 if you got a galaxy s2 and iPhone 4 or one of those through generation of devices this is going to be a great upgrade for you you're gonna get cutting-edge specs gonna serve you well over the next two years yeah ask yourself to what kind of person are you the kind of person that wants removable battery the kind of person that wants expandable storage are you the kind of person that either likes the plastic back from the way the get Samsung devices feel or you prefer that more aluminium solid feel you get on the HTC One or the iPhone 5 if you follow up to that latter category then the decision is very clear but if it's a former and you want some of those things galaxy s4 is an incredible option I enjoyed using the phone it was fast it was powerful stamps I hit this one out of the park I would have liked to have seen some new design cues here but sampling went through the old mantra if it ain't broke don't fix it and we've seen the sort of app we'll take that similar path with their devices so this phone gets a very solid nine and an editor's choice recommendation if you want to pick up a new phones get a sturdy well in the next two years look no farther than the Samsung Galaxy s4 let's do your guys thoughts do you agree disagree leave all your comments down below and please give this video a thumbs up we most definitely appreciate it check out TechnoBuffalo for latest and greatest tech news I'm John Rhett enger' I'll see you next video you