Gadgetory

this video is brought to you by the Corsair Voyager air the high-performance wireless media hub for your connected life visit Corsair comm / voyager - air to learn more welcome to my video of the samsung galaxy s4 which is sort of an unboxing and more sort of an overview after me spending we can change with the device and sort of what i thought of it so it's gonna be featuring my cat galaxy which is naturally not his name at all and he's not going to be in the video so i'd like to start with my plain white box which is a press box you don't get your galaxy s4 in a box like this and it won't have your name on it mine says Linus Sebastian on it which happens to be my name very very cool okay so slicks operating the camera today so feel free to direct all of your complaints about the camera work today too slick on the forum okay there's a micro sim starter kit I got at Ellis phone so it also gave me a bit of a chance to check out tell us his network because normally I'm a bell customer so it was not that interesting it was fine I didn't really have any complaints we've got a Samsung charger as well as a Samsung dongle it should be noted that you'll get the best charging performance using a genuine Samsung charger so that's something to note and then I got actually I added this piece of foam myself the phone was actually not in a piece of foam it was just in the box with all the other parts loose but they never intended to ship it that way so it's so it's all good so let's start with TouchWiz --is optimizations most Android users probably won't care too much about particularly things like up here where you can see either this is great so this is more like what TouchWiz users are going to be used to go back this is more like what TouchWiz users are going to be used to seeing right here with all of your toggles but now there's a whole thing where you can get like 20 of them and they're all up there you can turn on and off everything from Wi-Fi GPS and sound things that you would actually use day-to-day to things like they're smart scrolling smart stay driving mode all those kinds of things that you normally you wouldn't touch too much but of course you have the option of seeing the whole list or not seeing the whole list now there's third-party apps to do pretty much everything but not everyone's going to be capable of using them my mum for example just went to Android and I mean even something like installing an app is way beyond her so honestly if I'd had the choice I'd have been happier to give her something like an s4 if possible because easy mode would have made my life a little bit easier when it comes to helping her set it up so basically okay yeah yeah yeah will be applied to your home screens all of this stuff so it turns everything into nice big old people friendly buttons that they don't have to think about too much and you can pretty much set up for them once and then not have to touch it anymore I mean there's no way my mom calls more than like nine people so I could set all those people up there for her and also you have to do is swipe to the left to make a call and swipe to the right to put on the basic apps that I actually thinks that she needs to use now the proximity sensor is really cool now Samsung's integrated a lot of technology with the s4 that goes from profoundly useful to profoundly useless I think some of the highlights for me were s Translate which I didn't use day-to-day obviously but if I was traveling it actually works pretty well the only languages that I can speak and understand are really English in French and at least that mode worked outstandingly well the one drawback is that it does use data so if you're traveling unless you have a data plan there you might find yourself not using it that much the proximity sensor I also found was really cool the motion sensor so you can do things like call someone once you've got them open in your contacts just by here we go so I'm gonna call I'm gonna call myself once you have that person up you can just place the call by putting the phone to your ear it actually works but it's not exactly a new feature by any stretch of the imagination and with things like swipe to the right to call swipe to the left for text it's not exactly groundbreaking in terms of how much more quickly it's gonna allow you to use your phone which I found was sort of my experience with a lot of the Samsung features that they've added so one one one thing was waving to answer a call if it was just kind of like this or you just like pass over at once then I could really see the usefulness of it but the first time I tried to use it I realized you actually have to wave over several times you have to move quite slowly so for me I'd be faster just pick it up and go like this and answer my call I mean the the one implementation oh yeah and same thing with what sort of browsing web page and stuff like that so when you have the internet browser open I have like a Wikipedia page open here so you can yeah you can browse web pages like that but I ever since the advent of momentum based scrolling in browsers I don't really see a point in having something like that the one area where I found this really useful is normally when you're moving applications around on your device you would pick it up and then you'd kind of drag it somewhere whereas with this you can pick it up so you just press and hold and then you can kind of go like this to decide which page you want to put it on but you can see it actually sort of went backwards once when I accidentally did that for the most part it was pretty intuitive and I found that was the most useful thing about the motion sensor in front of the camera slick brought up an interesting point to me that if you have junk on your hands and you don't want to touch your phone then things like the fact that the capacitive touchscreen can be operated even if you're not quite touching it which I personally found to be more of an annoyance than anything else and I did turn it off pretty much immediately because just trying to scroll around on a web page it was like zooming in on things and telling me stuff about it and it was like oh no that's not actually what I wanted but if you're just trying to answer your phone while your nails dry personally I paint my nails all the time then yeah I can see the usefulness of that but it wasn't something that comes up for me a lot so there you go the screen is widely regarded to be much better than previous pentile display such as on the galaxy s3 so while the matrix isn't necessarily one to one to one of every pixel color it is close enough that you don't have that same blurriness in the text and I personally didn't observe it at all and comparing side-by-side with the HTC One I don't notice that anything other than the fact that the vibrance is like I blindingly vibrant which is a lot of people like that I didn't notice any problems with it compared to LCD the lock screen has been changed as well for example you can do this which is obviously useful but that's not actually sort of the improvements so you can swipe to the right to get to some frequently used applications and whatnot and you can swipe to the left to get widgets for example which I personally thought was really cool it should be noted you like so many Android things like I mentioned at the very beginning of this video a lot of the improvements Samsung's making can be done with third-party apps but necessarily everyone wants to do that so let's get into the ergonomics and build quality which is something that everyone's talking about with this phone because the most notable thing about it is that it's not really that different from the s3 I do find it more comfortable to hold them the s3 particularly the more square shape of the side it was is less it digs into me a little bit less also the the rounded corners compared to the HTC One which has more sharp corners that I found dug into my palm a bit more I did find that more comfortable however the overall rigidness of the chassis which have seen argued both ways as a feature and as a drawback so you can see I can bend that phone does a couple of things so number one is it makes it feel more like more like an older phone when especially if you come from iPhone which I did I was an iPhone 4 user for a long time where you come from something like an HTC One which feels like just ah feels really really good so the s4 has that kind of going against it but I've also heard people say well come on it's the only phone right now with Gorilla Glass 3 which adds ruggedness and adds durability it's got a plastic chassis which means it'll absorb shock more easily when it's dropped so that's another prevailing theory as well and it enables Samsung to do their whole doesn't that come on at least it's harder to get off than the old one there you go you have to like really be dedicated to getting the back panel off if you want to and you can remove the back panel replace the battery which I don't see most people doing especially with those little portable battery banks I mean I carry ones like you carry one right yeah I mean especially with those around as a great way to beef up you he says he carries 200 to be to charge up your devices I mean that works really well microSD I didn't end up using but because I don't have one handy but I would it would have been nice it should be noted that the stock Android or the not stock Android operating system on this phone takes up six to eight gigs of storage and if you have a 16 gig phone it's not a lot of storage left for things like movies and music and movies particularly you are going to want to watch on the five inch screen on this guy because they look awesome there's your SIM slot right there which doesn't come out or go in unless you remove the battery which is kind of smart because they don't want you changing that around another than that the only other thing left on the back is the camera which is 13 megapixels and it's one of those things where you know you go go find side-by-side images on the interwebs because they're all over the place but in a nutshell the s4 is able to take way more sharp images than the HTC One which guys if you recall has a four megapixel camera only but they're ultra pixels their big pixels can take way more sharp pictures in broad daylight than the HTC One but the HTC one blows it out of the water in terms of low-light performance so it's all about what's more important to you on the side you've got your volume rocker which I found way better than the HTC one not nearly as good as my older iPhone 4 because of how hard it is to find it and correctly press it when it's in your pocket that's when I'm usually operating the volume rocker of my phone when it you know when I wouldn't be able to look at it and go like this so being able to tell tactilely where it is and which way I'm pressing it is really nice HTC One really suffers in this way you've got your headphone microphone port on the top as well as I already minard very very cool there there s watch or whatever it is they call it I didn't end up using it because I have a TV but I have no TV subscription no Netflix subscription no Hulu subscription no YouTube subscriptions now that YouTube's paid I have nothing so I'm not much of a media consumption guy I've watched two movies since my baby was born The Hobbit which was great except for the dwarves that were singing for some reason I had no idea what was going on with that and yeah it looks giving me a facepalm right now you know what it wasn't that great and then the I also saw Skyfall which was just horribly disappointing I mean a Bond movie without a Bond girl people are like wrong nor she was the blonde girl yeah for like four minutes I mean yeah to imply that James Bond only needs a girl for four minutes is I think not a very fair thing to say about his anyway so speaking of media consumption we have a bit of an interesting thing to talk about in this video if you could throw that to me this my friends is a book I got it three months ago I have not even cracked open the cover so when audible.com reached out to us with an opportunity to do a free audio book for our viewers thing where if you go to audible.com slash Linus you can get a free book so it's basically a first month of your subscription free I was like okay so the one that I used my free block on was actually that one so my plan is to I downloaded the app on my phone so my plan is to listen to the book while I fall asleep and as slick knows normally I use Adventure Time to fall asleep I don't actually watch the show I just listen to it but I've made my way completely through it I'm done now so I need something else so I'm gonna listen to this book instead of reading it so guys feel free to go to audible.com slash Linus get a free audiobook download the app use it on your computer use it in your car do whatever it is you're gonna do you don't have to get good to great by Jim Collins which might not be what you're all interested in but you can check out not only New York Times bestsellers but also audible zone bestsellers I mean there trusted it's an Amazon service so it was easy to use you can't really go wrong all you do is like press the thing and then all right apparently it's music now as well but there you go guys check it out moving right along other bizarre features things like s-health to me are one of those things where it's like we fit where the sales pitch is use this device to be more healthy but the reality of it is is if you already had like the gumption and wherewithal to keep track of your life to the degree of detail that this application is going to require you to do it they want you like taking pictures of your food and recording calories and and it's a pedometer which is kind of cool it has humidity and temperature sensor which is cool but the kinds of people who would actually be doing that are the kinds of people who are probably already doing it anyway and are probably fit and active so I don't think that the s4 is going to be the difference between being someone who sits on the couch needs potato chips and the difference between someone that and someone who's like an active healthy individual I don't think that's gonna happen but there you go it's kind of neat there's accessories coming that'll make it easier to use and more comprehensive but I think finally we're gonna finish up with the physical features of the phone so on the right side you've got the lock button which is a way way better position than the top left of the HTC One because nine times out of ten I go to press this I mash the volume button so yeah there someone take a cue from that and the lock button is exactly how the volume button should be because it's easy to feel and it has a nice tactile press to it speaking of buttons Samsung hasn't done away with the three button approach to the bottom so you've got your that went away come back so you've got your context menu you've got your much to Google as children I'm sure you've got your context menu down here your back button as well as your dedicated home button there's one feature that I thought was cool but for some reason isn't working for me right now but if you hold the back button you can open up their multi window display compatible applications this comes over from the note 2 and that works really well because of the high resolution screen well I'm when I was using it but now it's not seeming to work for me right now for some reason but that's the way videos go is you want to demo something and it just kind of dies umm the camera the camera improvements are really really cool on this phone so there's a bunch of stuff that it does so there's all these different modes honestly if you're using it in stock mode you might be missing out a little bit but and I found myself doing that a fair bit just and I'll explain why best face is cool so it allows you to sub out bad faces this is great for when you're doing a group shot so when you have time to tinker with the phone and go oh I want drama mode which will capture a bunch of different pictures and then so you can see they have a little snowboarder is an example like that's something like a soccer ball flying something along those lines eraser takes random weird strangers out of the back the other one that I thought was great which one best best photo and best face are the ones that I found most useful however what I to capture the moment unless you're staging something or it's like a group picture where you're getting a bunch of people together I really found myself launching the camera app and taking a picture quickly go go go go go because you want to capture that moment and be the shutter speeds so fast you can just go pppppp you can do your own best picture and you can sort through it after on your own that's what I actually found myself doing however it's cool that it has all these features and I like that there I carry over from the Galaxy camera Samsung's talked a lot about Knox and the enhanced security that it offers there was a great article from just-in-case on Android police where he basically said look don't worry too much as basically what they're doing is they're locking it down for the people who aren't adept enough to get past it but for those power users we're still going to be okay we can still load custom kernels that don't do those security checks so you can choose whether you have the customizability or whether you have the locked down more secure device it remains to be seen how dedicated samsung really is to keeping things custom and how dedicated they are to making it and well more locked down let's get into a couple more of the motions and gestures just palm motion I didn't end up really using there's a couple of cool things here though so you can mute and pause playing sounds when the screen is on by turning it over personally this bothers me a little bit because I hate putting my screen down on anything but if I had a case for the phone then we'd be having a different conversation about it they have a case available that's actually pretty cool as a little window so you can see notifications speaking of notifications smart alert which basically will buzz when you pick up your phone if there's something new there you go I don't know if you guys heard that but then it doesn't turn the screen on which is like okay that's great Samsung you told me there's something new you didn't tell me what it was so now I have to press the button anyway which means I'm it's probably easier for me like habit wise I already just press the button immediately and look at my phone all the time anyway so so there's that what else stuff like voice control has always felt kind of goofy to me I didn't use it much if I used my phone when I was driving more than that might be something that I would use and I did find that the voice recognition for text voice to text was outstanding better than anything I've really used in the past although again I have always kind of found it goofy and I haven't really gone out of my way to use it that much but it was something that was actually usable unlike other stuff that yeah I've seen in the past all share is still here I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it their group play was really neat when I was at the Samsung demo and there were like five people sitting around a table with us forest you know playing poker turning every phone into a speaker and like you know well this is the center channel this is left and right channel I've never found myself in a room with more than maybe two galaxy users at the same time particularly of the same model and the way that Samsung segments their software across different devices has always really bothered me because from my perspective I would think from their perspective it would be better for them to have this technology be supported across all their devices so that it's like the Samsung experience as opposed to going well no the Galaxy s4 will have four point two and the galaxy s3 will have four point one and they will be different because of that I mean there's no reason they can't roll it out to the s3 and yeah I'm still bitter about my wife's galaxy s vibrant which was the first galaxy that never even got Ice Cream Sandwich because Samsung said oh well there's not enough RAM and yet third party app developers could do it so I don't know I mean using software as a way to differentiate platform to platform I was only slightly bitter about my iPhone for not getting Siri because everything else has been rolled out all the way up to iOS 6 so yeah even Apple for three-year-old plus devices is still rolling out all the software so it'd be great to see Samsung try to follow suit but I understand that Android is a little bit of a different beast in that way group play on the other hand for things like sharing music to wireless portable speakers when compatible stuff shows up is going to be really really cool I think that's pretty much everything that I wanted to talk about yeah I hope you guys have enjoyed this video at the end of the day if you're looking for a conclusion I will be sticking with my HTC one it's all about the trade-off do you want the more advanced features it's a faster processor 1.9 versus 1.7 gigahertz do you want the high megapixel camera or the ultra pixel camera do you want things like the gestures and the temperature and humidity monitor and s-health and all these features that Samsung puts in to differentiate their phones or do you want something that really has that that feel like it's a serious business to I mean this is the first I've said this before in my I switch to Android right in 30 days with the HTC One coming from iOS to Windows Phone 8 now to Android I've said this already but this is the first Android phone that I've really touched that feels like an Apple phone in terms of the quality I'm also it was a huge step backwards for me going to a rear-mounted speaker again from the boom sound just really boom sound but the front mounted speakers on the HTC One you know going back to cupping my hand behind the phone just really felt like like I'd like going a generation back in terms of the device so I'll take the ergonomic quibble so that I have with the HTC one it's not perfect I hate the location of the lockscreen and I really don't like the way the volume rocker works for the overall higher build quality although it should be noted that Beats Audio isn't something that a lot of people have asked me if the Beats Audio one is great it's not that great iPhone 4 has better sound quality through the headphones than the Galaxy s4 or the HTC One from my experience for that matter so I think that pretty much wraps it up thank you for checking out my unboxing and really it was more of an overview of my thoughts of the galaxy s4 let me know if you guys enjoyed the video by clicking that like button and don't forget to subscribe as always unless you're already subscribed in which case I don't know subscribe again or something bones