Gadgetory

how does one of the most successful Android manufacturers follow up one of the most popular Android smartphones of all time and grandiose fashion of course as we learn from Samsung's display at the radio city music hall event in March but since we've had a chance to get our hands on the fourth generation of the galaxy s brand it's time to give it the all-important review treatment I'm Taylor Martin this is pocket now and this is our full review of the AT&T samsung galaxy s4 those expecting a major upgrade and design and hardware were sorely disappointed with Samsung announced the galaxy s4 in March it bears the all-too-familiar design and build we've come to expect from Samsung and externally very little has changed between the third and fourth generation Galaxy S devices some may consider this upgrade uninspired while others applaud Samsung for focusing its efforts on other more important aspects of the phone the phone itself looks great more mature and refined than last year's model while packing some serious specification improvements Samsung managed to make the galaxy s4 lighter and slimmer and almost every dimension even despite the larger display that alone should warrant some applause in the hand it feels decent but in substantial at only 130 grams it feels somewhat Hollow and almost too light as if it's a mid-range smartphone rather than a truly premium smartphone if you are turned off or unmoved from the hardware of the galaxy s3 it's unlikely that the galaxy s4 will strike you any differently it's still the same ultra slick lightweight plastic only with a slightly more squared shape but with the galaxy s4 legs and truly inspired hardware or design it more than makes up for in specifications the front panel is a 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display that's easily among the best in its class it's bright vibrant and offers relatively wide viewing angles this display also features the incus blacks you'll find on a smartphone today other specifications include a 1.9 gigahertz quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset 2 gigabytes of ram 16 32 or 64 gigabytes of built-in storage with the option to expand up to an additional 64 gigabytes with a microSD card a 13 megapixel primary camera around back 2-megapixel front-facing camera and LTE connectivity along the top edge is an IR blaster for use as a universal remote and it comes with a standard connections NFC Bluetooth and Wi-Fi b/g/n keeping the show running is a removable 2600 milliamp hour battery if you are coming from a galaxy s3 or even a galaxy note 2 the software on the galaxy s4 will make you feel right at home but it won't take long to begin noticing some changes and improvements for instance the notification shade has been updated with a host of new toggles as well as a quick settings page access by a two-finger swipe down from the top of the display a la jellybean the lock screen now also incorporates widgets thanks to android 422 but not all the new software features are unique to jellybean in fact the vast majority of the new software is Samsung's own handiwork building on the impressive features introduced with the galaxy s3 such as smart state the galaxy s4 comes with a horde of motion and gesture controls using air gesture you can swipe through pictures in the gallery app or scroll and web pages without ever physically touching the phone hovering your finger over an album in gallery or over a text conversation will preview the content not unlike air view with the S Pen on the note series and that only does the display stay on as long as you're looking at it or maintain orientation based on the orientation of your head but now local videos can pause when you look away and tilting your head in the web browser will scroll the page it's not that all these new features are bad so to speak it's that not all of them work as desired for instance with a quick glance feature enabled the display will automatically turn on at times you don't intend to peek at your phone many of the features are half-baked and only work in a small set of specific scenarios outside the typical use case some features cause more frustration than anything else fortunately all these new features can be disabled in the Settings app provided you can locate them in the new convoluted and tab layout many of these new features came at the expense of a principle TouchWiz was once built upon simplicity or a simplified user experience of late it seems Samsung has thrown simple user experience to the wind in favor of every half hazard yet sort of cool and marketable feature it can conjure up surprisingly the 1.9 gigahertz quad-core krait 300 cpu paired with the Adreno 320 GPU isn't enough to keep the galaxy s4 purring smoothly all the time randomly throughout our period we were met with various instances of lag on top of that the excessive animations don't help put any pep in the S 4 step either still the galaxy s4 had no trouble cutting through synthetic benchmarks like a hot knife through butter the network performance on the s4 was mostly great in the Charlotte metro area we were able to maintain strong coverage in most areas and data speeds reflected just that topping off at around 30 megabits per second down and hitting up to 17 megabits per second up where the galaxy s4 suffers however is call quality the earpiece speaker performs quite well but in several instances callers on the other end had trouble hearing us in quiet areas with a strong signal we found battery life to be surprisingly great on the AT&T variant of the galaxy s4 managing about a day and a half of light to moderate usage in spurts of heavy usage especially with the brightness cranked up the battery did seem to drain rather quickly but the standby time balanced out well with the usage time finally the galaxy s4 camera although upgraded to a 13 megapixel sensor is mostly hit or miss on the software side there's no shortage of features there's a scene dedicated to virtually every possible scenario and oodles of different shooting modes but the output of the camera is not always so praiseworthy an absolute perfect lighting the s4 manages to capture some great shots colors are vibrant details and sharpness are great and images are pretty well balanced but the instant lighting becomes an issue images are littered with noise and artifacts more so than normal to be concise in anything but great lighting the galaxy s4 camera is muddy and all the galaxy s4 is a fair upgrade from last year's model the hardware is better the specifications are improved the software has tons and tons of new features and it's all neatly packed into a smaller chassis but Samsung did cut some corners to reach his final destination not all the software features are ready for prime time and many come at the expense of user friendliness despite the few negatives the Samsung Galaxy s4 is almost certain to become an instant classic and it will suit everything from basic users to the most dedicated power user sufficiently we give the AT&T galaxy s4 and 8.2 out of 10 that's going to wrap up this review so if you found it helpful and enjoyed it be sure to give it a thumbs up and click the subscribe button below and follow us in all the usual places twitter google+ and facebook at pocket now you can find me on twitter at casper tech i'm taylor martin and i'll see you soon