Gadgetory

hello everybody welcome to a special edition of pocket now live we are talking galaxy s4 predictions we've all been waiting for the galaxy s4 since the galaxy s2 came out so this is a momentous event coming up next week Michael and I will be in New York to see what Samsung has up its sleeve and we're just gonna hang out because we were going to talk about the galaxy for any way galaxy s4 anyway so we thought we'd record it and make it a pocket now live and we've got a bunch of people here from pocket now we've got Tony we've got hi May but we've got Michael hello and we have Steven ahoy hoy now before we get started I was wondering if Tony could do his dance for us but first if you don't know what I'm talking about I'm about to show you turns out tony has a really good dance move that he did in the bloopers yes and it's gonna play it here for your enjoyment wait he doesn't think yet with his arms yep oh you get out no the dance the dance of the guy did when the other guy was bothering at the back at the sign that was like the perfect dance man oh yeah that's everybody was fightin oh yeah well that's all that's all everybody gets for a second I thought you had made it animated gift and animated Anton dancing good we'll make it a man i'll be like this non-stop he that's a good idea that should be your byline photo from him from now on it should be can you set up twitter avatar as a animated gif i will most probably you can you can yeah I thinking are good at the Internet I think that's what you do so anyway let's get to the business let's talk about our galaxy s4 predictions and so there's some obvious stuff and then there are some surprises that might happen and every time we see some surprises some features that make the device one up or two or three up the HTC One any xperia z so let's just get started to talk about what do we think this phone is going to have what is a sure thing i think particular quarterly want us to talk yeah i do cuz yeah alphabetical and then by height ooh oh I'm the first in both categories oh okay the obvious thing is that we know from CES that there will be four point 99 which is a five inch super amoled full HD screen that is for sure we're taking that for granted and then I don't mean interrupt I'm going to that's neat because we've never seen why shows you say we've never we've never seen at 1080p Super AMOLED screen so it'll be a it'll be a screen of the first type no but the question is do you guys think that it's going to be pent allegan like whenever they came out with the 720p they had the they had lead they had the wvga version of the galaxy s2 already non pentile and then they went back to pentile with you know guys I don't think it matters anymore because at that high of a BPI rating you won't be able to distinguish jacked images or jack text even if it's bent I'll write as a decent point you know it's an irony but for example if i compare an image on the on the s3 which has a higher pixel density than on the note 2 for some reason i see images better on the note 2 with a lower pixel density than on the s3 that's just a note to the size of your car drew but no I there are degrees of pentile right because I remember being very irritated with my galaxy nexus pens I'll displayed horrible horas it's not just the RGB G it's the arrangement the shape that they put the subtitles in exactly yeah pentile is not the dirty word it used to be yeah it's it's gotten better so that screens going to be awesome they're they're kind of going with the bigger with every generation which is interesting the galaxy s2 rests its lovely heart was a lovely 4.3 inches and then we went to 4.8 inches now we're going to five inches and flirting with the the Galaxy Note a little bit in that in that upper sighs and that's if I may the question that I have most going into this and going into the future really for samsung is how can they continue to how do they insulate those two brand you know because the Galaxy Note line is they care about that a lot and you know they're not going to be bringing an S Pen to the galaxy s4 because they want to insulate those those two product categories so how do they when do they stop with the galaxy s well they don't stop because the note 3 according to rumors and also according to what I think will have an even larger screen they'll go beyond 6 inches so the difference will be still there between the s4 and the note 3 the question is what happens when the note for note 5 will be so close to that note 8.0 and there's no more line between phones phablets and tablets you have a floating buffer zone at the moment that keeps moving farther and farther nor is it I think I think Michael put it best in his review is just you know the note 2 is just unapologetic and its size and it's just gonna get bigger I mean if Samsung is gonna put an earpiece on the no date they're not gonna care about giving you a six inch pro with the note 3 words is the way it's gonna be no holds barred no plausible let's let's talk about the other obvious stuff what kind of CPUs is gonna have we're going to see the octa-core okay so there are the so far there are two main ideas circulating on the internet we have the of course Exynos octa core processor which was also launched at CES and then at one point there were those rumors of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor now as far as I'm personally concerned I couldn't care less about processor and about Graham because we've reached a point where where android is so fast and these devices are right there that it doesn't really matter whether if it's an eight-core it's a dual quad-core or it's a simple quad-core processor now one question to you Brandon I mean both you and Michael were able to test the Snapdragon 600 both at CES and also in the HTC one I mean that you really notice a difference because the rumors are that you get a Snapdragon 600 in the United States and the Exynos 5 in Europe I think you know as Michael talked about in the review the DNA is fast and it's capable but it's not without flaw and sometimes it does stutter a little bit and I think the snapchats that's the x4 pro is it the s4 program right so the Snapdragon 600 is just like a little bit faster than that so that you kind of cut out some that lag maybe know the best processor can still be bogged down by unoptimized software go ahead time sir no I just want to say you all know the note 2 and the note 2 was the first samsung phone which had the same processor in Europe and in the u.s. so I think that Samsung would shoot themselves in the foot if they came up with the s4 with an Exynos processor in Europe and the qualcomm in the US I don't think they're gonna go back there I think that whatever processor will have is going to be the same across all regions I'd have to agree with Tony there and when I'm kind of worried about is we've seen a lot of benchmarks that give credence to this a snapdragon theory but we haven't seen any really thing but rumors suggesting and be the exodus we haven't seen you know that was it mally GPU in any of these fish mark results yet yeah now I think that we we've come to a point where I seriously do not notice the difference between the dual core snapdragon on the s3 that i have on these AT&T variant and the XO knows that i have on the note 2 which is quad-core i honestly do not notice the difference they did a good job at keeping those you know equal and and let's see there were some early benchmarks that said the Exynos was slightly faster but the snapdragon version was almost faster like launching apps and day-to-day browsing the web so they're they're very they're very close to one another one thing's for sure though if they do this octa-core thing I think it's going to have a neat party trick I you know it's the ideas it's going to have two sets of four cores one for light duty one for heavy duty and the truth is that ninety percent at a time you're going to be on this light duty batch of course and so your battery life is going to jump a lot but then you're gonna be able to tell your friends you have an active cord that's nothing it's not really true because it's not like an IBM cell processor in the ps3 where all those eight cores are working together like magic it's kind of a marketing thing you sound like if you're talking about the Tegra 3 where you're being marketed a quad corn you're actually getting a single core yeah probably less I yeah totally let's jump to design what do you think this thing is gonna look like welcome mmm samsung recently left to its own defense and an article in an interview with CNN which i think we talked about on the weekly yesterday where there who's saying here's why we use plastic we need to use plastic to scale appropriately we need to use plastic and we we can't use metal for these reasons basically so I don't see there being a giant leap in hardware design here these they're going to stay plastic shape though so we have seen some signs that is going back to an S to kind of look rather than the really smooth pebble design of the s3 yeah and if that happens in my opinion that was the only thing about the s3 that actually excited me was that if the design yet felt cheap in the hand but at least the design looked like they were trying to do something different if they go back ps2 I gonna be sorely disappointed you know you know it's interesting that Samsung is copied apple and just about everything except the gs3 but then the question would be if they're going to follow the trend of Apple in not switching the design of the X of the s4 and just adding more hot more better specs and a better you know software which was a rumor like two weeks ago so like an s3 body with different with a BP yeah yeah you know they'll probably switch one thing here they're probably make this the display a little larger within the same the same bezel and just add more you know beef your respects and stuff I you know you never know i mean how more could you differentiate this phone i asked myself that question i mean what's next seriously you think i look Amy your piece sorry you know use if they use across the galaxy s3 and the achieve s and the note to like it's the same earpiece little money oh yeah you know it was the same on the s2 but what they did was in the s2 it was black colored instead of a metallic colored it was actually the same earpiece when you guys think about this this technology that will follow your eyes as you're scrolling which kind of seems weird because when you got your phone out you've got your thumb right on the screen you can just do that right but with eye tracking make life better let me try first because I'm gonna be the shirts we're gonna be my shortest answer I'm gonna kill that switch right out of the box I've got a creepy long I found the house the smarts they feature creepy so first thing I'm gonna do is disable them and that's why I'm looking at me phone I like the smart stay I I might give it a chance until I have to you know drink advil or something you make makes you make sure you're in a well-lit situation because that thing is only only working and daylight and not by night when it would be logical for it to work a good point it's a gimmick ultimately it's gonna sell a couple phones but like Tony said who's gonna be using this thing in the long run if it's you know constantly goofing up in low lighting conditions or lazy eye it might be a gimmick but let's go back to smart stay for a sec because Tony you turn it off what about Michael and I made you guys keep it on and keep it on and and doesn't help I you know I just it's there I switch it on and every now and then I noticed the display turns on no that's cool you know but it's like still a gimmick for me as your battery life goes boo boo boo correct well I haven't noticed the difference honestly no I mean like I i keep my display timer so long that it doesn't really matter but I'd smart say to me was a really cool idea and the implementation was what failed with smart say but if they can implement this eyeball based scrolling well it's something that I've actually wished for for a while because I use the S Pen on the note 2 to scroll automatically by by hovering over the bottom of a browser screen or a Twitter feed or something and it's actually really convenient so the eyeball is really the next step it's just a question of implementation and Samsung has shown that they can roll out about 40 features into one phone but they can't really haven't really shown that they can make them all work well yet their work yeah oh so let's let's move on we only intended this to be about 20 minutes it's probably going to be about 30 minutes we've got 204 viewers which is awesome for those just tuning in this is just a roundtable hang up kind of thing what we're talking about galaxy s4 predictions because in just like five days we're gonna see this galaxy s4 and so we're talking about predictions let's jump to some surprises a samsung gonna come out of the gate with something that's like wow HTC is in trouble Sony's in trouble good question well let me let me start again first because this is a tough question no I don't think we'll see anything more special than the usual Samsung gimmicky features which are not gimmicky for everybody are you making for me smart stay the eye tracking scrolling they're going to emphasize a lot on that and we'll probably see a new version of TouchWiz which will probably look a little bit the same as TouchWiz nature UX but with a couple of improvements they're gonna emphasize a lot more on the design and they're gonna mark my words they're gonna publicize the camera so badly that everybody who thinks of an HTC One will immediately compare 4 megapixels is there to 13 yeah 13 yes yes well it's interesting that you brought up touch with his first turnin I think these are two different things you get a camera and TouchWiz because because we know we sort of know that the smartphone group inside Samsung is what drives TouchWiz innovation you're not going to see a new version of TouchWiz launched on a tablet you'll see it on the F galaxy s first and then it'll kind of disseminate so like I think that's more important almost than the camera for you I people like some of us because TouchWiz has aged pretty quickly over the past year I mean it's starting to look as cartoony as its previous version now with the new version of sense coming out looking a little more businesslike with new platforms kind of taking that minimalism and implementing it you know I mean does everybody else's tired of TouchWiz or am I completely off base here I'm not tired i like it and i hate the design but i love the fact that it never stutters that's me I know tired of it either but then again I'm not tired of iOS either so I'm that kind of guy who works with whatever he has same here same here I don't know in my particular opinion it's like you know for example what is there gonna be something awesome about the s4 compared to the one no we're you know we're at that point of innovation where you know processors get more cores and stuff but you don't really see a difference yet you know there's just so much an arm-based chip can do anyways um and so much that the apps can do in kernels and stuff I don't I don't think I'll see much you know I just I I want an HTC One but I could imagine Samsung's marketing in every bathroom of the whole wide world even a antartica and I just you know even if I want an HTC One I'm gonna want to miss three just because of the fact that bathrooms are gonna be full with that you know it's gonna be in your mind and in your friends mine and everyone yeah three I mean you're you remember when the 1x came out I wanted a 1x and I got the one action that I just dog Michael get me an s3 get me in a street just because of the ads true and yeah yeah well if that will prompt a certain amount of backlash too because I mean that would be that would drive somebody like me to instantly reject anything yesterday and say alright everyone else you enjoy your s3 and s4 is I've got my HTC One and you know i like it because it's special but i don't know you know we're talking about the s3 but that's what it takes to beat the one what if the ones actually are the s4 what are the ones actually be more attractive phone hear me it's smaller it's got those for some people don't care about the front facing speakers but i don't use headphones on my phone a lot I like to listen to stuff on the phone and that could make it a lot more attractive and we had the jury's still out on the camera the poor megapixel is going to cut it or not but I think it has a chance to be competitive you're you're making an excellent point and I tend to agree with you but let's not forget that Samsung has a humongous your base so regardless of even if the HTC One is out of the box twice as good as the s4 the s4 will probably sell three four five six ten times more than the HTC One exactly because Samsung is now riding the wave and HTC's unfortunately continuing that slow slow trend of going down yes fortunately I think you're right about that we should all remember that what happened with the one ex I mean reviews on the One X were just unbelievably good from from us from from other outlets I mean with the One X was roundly praised in 2012 it didn't really matter one Samsung's juggernaut got and you know God got up to speed and they started spending something like 12 billion on advertising you got a typo or is that for real that's what it said that's but before all of Samsung Electronics not just sort of loans okay I'm looking at this camera thing as a really interesting point of differentiation because you've got the iphone 5 which has a very very good camera as and the galaxy s3 is as good and then you've got like the Xperia Z which early indications are that has a very good camera Taylor's done some comparisons and it's it's awesome and then you've got the HTC One and the jury's still out on that 4 megapixels and I heard this in that editorial is is just not enough so I think Samsung is going to take insane insane image quality and high resolution and it's like wow look at this photo you can take and until the iphone 5s comes out that's going to be the best camera on the market and people care a lot about cameras and that's going to be a big point of differentiation true true i I'm I don't know that 13.1 megapixel sensor on the Xperia that's going to be the same sensor on the iphone 5s and on the s4 you know that Samsung buys the Sony sensors and apple buys the Sony sensors as well so that we're going to get the same camera on these three phones and then you got the HTC one I don't know I think HTC should really stop trying to convince us of whatever that camera can do in the liver but they haven't historically shown that they can deliver on what they say I mean they've got awesome design but then their implementation is really not as great as they say it is so I don't know exactly very good well I think we're going to wrap this up soon just some final thoughts from everyone a galaxy s4 what's it going to take for it to be your daily driver to have in your pocket for two three four five six months let's start with shortest to two or five six months nice room number there if we're starting from the shortest that would be me something that I was going to say is that I think the biggest surprise of the galaxy s4 launch an introduction into the world is that it's not going to be that much of a surprise I really think that Samsung is going to play it safe they have a model that works they are winning and all they really got to do is iterate the galaxy s3 is still an amazing phone they need to do something better than the galaxy s3 market the heck out of it market it against HTC and they and they win and it's it's a shame when it comfortable when a company gets comfortable like that but it's business they're not going to do some risky new feature that that puts that risk of people saying hey I don't get it what is this this is too high tech this is too weird from I think they're going to play it safe but I'm excited and I hope that that I'm wrong next in line in terms of order of height is Michael wow that's really i would go ahead Michael go ahead it'll get Brandon I think you're something up very well for me personally for the big Alex s4 if everything we're seeing is that will not be my daily driver if it is the result of pia the strategy that you I think rightfully predict interative improvements do not impress me in iterative improvements on a phone the galaxy s3 which I respected but which I never really loved in the first place will not get me to pocket it I like bold moves and I like something different and this this this unless it has a something really really special I don't see myself carrying again I'm a how about you okay in my face one of my biggest disappointments about the HTC One X was compromised um you didn't get expandable storage you didn't get a replaceable battery but then you have HTC designers being like we've had to do this so that the phone would be so thin and then you get the galaxy s3 and you know these guys just completely marked the designers from HTC by showing you a thin phone that could have everything so for me I'm getting a galaxy s4 just because of the fact that Samsung is known to not compromise that's just me and obviously you've got the marketing push you'll have a great camera you know for me it was like oh it's a beautiful HTC One but the camera sucks uh and then you get the galaxy s3 which gives you everything so that that I think best for is gonna be that and that it is going to be my daily driver that's just me a no-compromise device very good and Steven what do you think I think and we're getting to a point now where all these headlining devices from the various big companies are looking a lot the same spec wise so Samsung really needs to nail this guy in a design department means a little bit bigger than the HTC One so if they keep that bezel small and you know fits nice in the hand and for me 4.8 inches is already pushing how big I want a phone so simple I can make this guy feel nice to use that could make all the difference in the world and and and yeah that's a really good point because 5 inches even bigger than 4.8 inches you want mom and grandma sister and brother you want everyone to be like I can use this in my hand this doesn't feel like some cumbersome device that I can't slip into the pocket so that is a good point and Tony what do you think as I said I don't really care about specifications at this point in time so I think that it will take two things to cumulatively happen with the s4 first of all it will have to have a better design than the HTC One which I like and it will have to have a camera better than the one on the HTC One if Samsung delivers both of these two within the s4 not only one of the both at the same time I'm going with the s4 else it's the HTC One for me this year it's a tough choice it's a tough choice indeed but we will find out in five days guys thanks for for joining this is the first time we've done this and it was a lot of fun and guys that are watching sorry that we didn't make this participative said a word what's the word it is now participate able that's all we can make this participated what we just wanted to try something different please leave us a comment let us know what your predictions are and what it will take for you to carry the galaxy s4 in your pocket when it's released and if you think it's gonna beat the HTC One or if HTC is sitting pretty with the coolest Android device we've seen in a long time so that'll do it and be sure to check out the other version of pocket now live on friday at two p.m. where you can participate and come and hang out and talk you know all right with that thanks guys see you later