Gadgetory

hey what is up guys I'm Kay PhD here and the Samsung Galaxy s4 will easily be one of the most popular phones of 2013 no doubt and when Samsung builds up that much hype for any phone like they do with the s4 especially when the predecessor the s3 is so popular we kind of expect the s4 to be a really good phone and a lot of people see the Galaxy s4 as an evolutionary update to the galaxy s3 and understandably so because of the naming but after my time with it I'm seeing it a bit differently I'm seeing the galaxy s4 as more of a downsized reconstructed note to hear me out so the galaxy s4 is more square than the galaxy s3 first of all and although it has very similar dimensions Samsung will tell you that it's slightly thinner and slightly lighter so that's true but you won't really notice these differences if you're familiar with the galaxy s3 you also feel right at home with the button layout and the port layout because they're the same on the galaxy s4 and they're also the same as they are on the galaxy note 2 but overall the phone just looks and feels just different different in the way the Galaxy Note 2 feels different from the s3 mostly because this design again it's more square and then you check out the insides you already know that you can take off the back the thin flexible plastic back of the galaxy s4 to reveal the internals and that will reveal a removable 2600 milliamp hour battery and a micro SD card slot and the speaker micro SIM card etc now compare this to the galaxy s3 on the left and the galaxy note 2 on the right and there is even more reason to consider the s4 a restructured note to the speaker is now down in the bottom at the same place the battery is also now lower in the chassis and the microSD card and micro SIM card slots are now above the battery instead of below all these like the note 2 not the s3 also on the galaxy s3 the edges were so tapered that you had no real edge of the phone to grip and that was a bit of a problem for me but with the new s4 design you actually have that metallic band around the phone that creates an edge to grip before the tapering starts it's a small touch and it's something a lot of reviewers look past as a cheap attempt to look more premium but it actually really changes the feel of the galaxy s4 in the hand you hold it so on the hardware side of things consider this guy a compacted Galaxy Note 2 that's just the way it feels in the hand and the way it's built on the software side of things though this is familiar Samsung territory so here on the galaxy s4 we have an updated TouchWiz on top of Android 4.2 jelly bean this time so first of all since it's Android 4.2 now you get a bunch of new google features like for example the quick settings in the notification bar that Samsung so generously colorized and added to they're accessible with a two finger swipe down from the top of the notification bar and you can basically customize them to let you one tap toggle any feature on the phone which is actually kind of nice it's convenient and you also get Android 4.2 S lock screen widgets and the first one I install it as dashclock of course because it's beautiful but yeah plenty of apps are supported you can swipe to the right to open the camera or swipe to add more lock screen widgets there a welcome addition that the Galaxy s3 and note 2 don't have yet and then there's the rest of TouchWiz so Samsung stuffed this phone to the gills with software features inside of TouchWiz a lot of them will make for great commercials and gimmicky tricks and neat demos so this one is very demo able which is very good for Samsung but in the end a lot of these features probably won't be used by the average user so for example air view is new it lets you hover your finger over an album in the gallery to get a preview of the photos inside it's useful it works but it's an extra gesture you have to learn and people are used to just tapping in an opening gallery anyway so I don't know if people will use that there's also things like smart scroll and smart stay and smart pause and all this smart stuff that's supposed to basically read your eyes using a front-facing camera and take action or adjust itself accordingly they all work most of the time but if you have them on by accident or you don't want them to be on you may find your phone scrolling up and down or pausing videos or changing orientation by itself when you didn't want or need it to do that so I ended up turning these features off after a while they got annoying and I just didn't need them and I did an explanation video of all these things so I'll leave a link right below the like button on this video if you want an explanation of all the galaxy s4 software features but basically overall TouchWiz has a lot of new added features that are like I said great for demos it's great for showing off to your friends or something like that but eventually I turn them off because they just weren't doing it for me I don't really need them overall though TouchWiz is still very colorful as we've seen on other devices and very very contrast II just like on the galaxy s3 and the note 2 and touch which is very contrasting because it's also on that M OLED display and speaking of that display this is no ordinary AMOLED display the galaxy s4 is rocking a 1920 by 1080 Super AMOLED plus display so that gives it a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch and it does have a pentile sub pixel matrix but nobody can tell this display has far more pixels in that 5 inch space than any naked eye can decipher and that means razor sharp text images video everything I love it it's what we've been waiting for it which what we knew was coming in the upgrade to the s4 and it is the number one reason to upgrade to this phone from something like the galaxy s3 now because it's an AMOLED display it also has a few advantages over other 1080p phones for example in deeper blacks higher contrast and lower power consumption but all of that comes with the trade-off that this display is no brighter than the galaxy s3 so it kind of struggles in daylight when compared to something like the HTC One but that's of course another video now it's pushing these pixels with the Snapdragon 600 processor in the United States which if you don't know is an absolute tank of a processor just a performance monster benchmark killer and all-around great chip so it's going to score really high on pretty much any benchmark that you put it through and it's also going to get you great power consumption as well so I was able to get all-day battery life again about the same battery life as the galaxy s3 with the stock battery I was using the galaxy s3 on Verizon which was an LTE network and I was using the galaxy s4 on AT&T which is now te network and I was getting about the same battery life so despite the more powerful processor and the bigger sharper display you're going to get about the same battery which is pretty good for me all day now you can't talk about that galaxy s4 without a little bit about that camera and I gotta say it is an awesome one I'd say the best camera on any smartphone I've ever used to date and that's including the latest iPhone 5 the Galaxy Note 2 the galaxy s3 the HTC One the Lumia 920 this tops them all for me this is just an awesome all-around solid performing 13 megapixel camera for pretty much all types of situations the camera app of course is updated to the new version of TouchWiz so it looks a lot like the interface on the samsung galaxy camera now and again it's filled with all these tons of gimmicky TouchWiz features that most people will never even know they have in their pocket but a few of them were actually kind of cool so people like to get creative with their cameras you know so for example I fell in love with the animated photo feature that lets you take a few seconds of video clip and then basically animate just a part of it to form a jiff and there are so many unique ways to use is it's not even funny I was walking around New York City all the time just taking these and the only real problem is sharing them because pretty much only Google+ supports gifs that big but it was very cool to use that feature and I also take HDR's a lot so it was good to see HDR make another appearance in this new version no photo spheres unfortunately kind of sucks since we're on android 4.2 and everything but yeah I guess they can get away with omitting that I'll include a full resolution panorama I took in New York in the description below so you can see the real quality because YouTube won't really let me show you just how good-looking the photos this thing takes are but trust me when I say they are beautifully sharp and detailed with all those pixels and definitely good with the color department too it's a solid performer in low-light as well it's no Lumia 920 it's no HTC One and low-light but it definitely produces acceptable photos and pretty much any lighting situation which lets me give it the crown of the best all-around camera in a smartphone so at the end of the day there are a lot of things to like about the sonne from the 1080p display to the battery life to the note 2 like squarish design to the things like you know the little TouchWiz improvements on top of Android 4.2 yet then again there are plenty of things not to like for example the Settings app which took a huge step down and currently sucks with this lame tabbed interface that you can't even swipe through to get but it's really all about your values on when it comes to judging things like that and the huge question at the end of the day is is it worth your upgrade is it worth your money to upgrade from the Galaxy s3 or from other phones and right now the verdict is if you have to have 1080p AMOLED then yes this is the way to go this is the only way to go if not then you might be better off waiting the software features you see here are basically around the corner and a firmware update from the galaxy s3 and the Galaxy Note 2 and other Samsung phones but what about other phones like the HTC One or other 1080p devices well there are some benefits to the galaxy s4 for example it's made of plastic which is a pro because that gives you a generally better signal strength you get a lighter phone a little bit thinner and you also get very fast GPS lock with a plastic back but then again there are cons like it being a fingerprint magnet and feeling cheap in the hand so overall that decision comes down to what you prefer in a phone overall though I think this is a great phone I'm definitely enjoying every second I spend with it and maybe you will too this is definitely worth checking out I think I would go with the black version over the white version though just for the clean look and less fingerprints either way thank you for watching definitely subscribe and stay tuned for upcoming videos that relate to this one very very very very soon and you're definitely going to want to see those so I'll talk to you guys in the next video ace you