Gadgetory

business in the front WTF around back pocket now reviewed the galaxy s4 zoom back in the summer shortly after it was unveiled at Samsung's premier 2013 event in London and the task of reviewing it fell to the same man who'd just gone hands-on with the unit our own Anton Dino Jia he proclaimed it a camera with a phone slapped on it and said if you decide to go with the galaxy s4 zoom you won't be disappointed I agree with half of that and it's not the last half this is PocketNow I'm Michael Fisher and this is my review rebuttal for the Samsung Galaxy s4 zoom as a reminder the review rebuttal is not a rejection or a revision of pocket Mouse official review stance but a second look at a device meant to give added perspective sometimes these take the form of editorials and other times their videos check out Jaime Rivera's review rebuttal for the LG g2 at pocket now and follow us at all the usual squak boxes so you don't miss future installments the galaxy s4 zoom was launched on AT&T in the United States less than a week ago and when it arrived at our office it immediately conjured memories of our experimental weekend using the Samsung Galaxy camera as a daily driver much earlier this year that's not a good thing and sadly it's mostly due to the form factor AT&T says the galaxy s4 zoom has the best qualities of the galaxy s4 smartphone series combined with the best of a compact point-and-shoot camera but that's not true because one of the standout positives of the galaxy s4 is that it's light and thin at 280 grams and 27 millimeters thick the zoom is neither that's fine for a point-and-shoot but its unforgivably clunky for something sold under the galaxy s4 smartphone brand it's very big even for a pocket it's awkward to talk on as a phone and it's cumbersome to handle while texting or browsing especially when the camera Hardware fires up erroneously is it sometimes does and deploys that Canon like zoom lens right between your fingers there are ways of tacking a big camera onto a smartphone without venturing into absurdity like this Nokia's Lumia 1020 is a solid example the Lumia maybe a little on the ugly side but next to the zoom it's a beauty queen of course an aesthetic cost is the price you pay for a really great camera right well yes the zoom is aptly named it's resolution is a fairly standard 16 megapixels but the big deal is the big lens which is capable of 10 times optical zoom with Hardware stabilization for steady shooting that's a huge deal and it means you can have a lot of fun picking out small details in faraway scenes with this device it even performs reasonably well in low-light with Samsung's typical bevy of software options to meet the needs of almost any situation including a dedicated mode for food photography if you really want to be insufferable in public if picture-taking is your all-time number-one obsession and you absolutely don't want to carry a camera in addition to your smartphone then the galaxy s4 zoom is totally worth your $549 off contract or $1.99 on a two-year totally unless that is you look at all the compromise that's gone into making this thing Anton put it best in his original review this thing isn't a galaxy s4 it's an s4 mini made it to a Galaxy camera the screen is qHD the processor a lower power Exynos backed up by a smaller than usual amount of RAM and the Android build is despite its jellybean underpinnings pretty laggy at times thanks to that middling hardware and the things that look at first like conveniences often turn out to be nuisances like the ring control you're accidentally bumping all the time or half-baked like the shutter button that can't even bypass the lock screen to quickly launch the camera so you're left with the device that takes good photos and delivers optical zoom that you can't find anywhere else but which is uncomfortable and generally irritating to use for every other function broadly speaking that's not a great trade-off for the price AT&T is asking you could get an iPhone 5s a Nokia Lumia 1020 or a real galaxy s4 all of which deliver a superior smartphone experience and comparable photo quality in most cases yeah you'll be missing out on the fancier optical stuff but you're also not being forced to deal with the downsides of a camera masquerading as a smartphone which is what the zoom is I hate criticizing new hardware sometimes it seems all we do is complain that the modern smartphone landscape is nothing but an endless parade of featureless slabs so part of me feels compelled to automatically embrace a bold move like this but it's not enough to be bold the product also has to make sense and the galaxy s4 zoom doesn't unless you're gonna use it as a dedicated vacation phone you can swap your SIM into for excursions the zoom doesn't get enough right in my view to justify its existence I stand behind Anton to review on the whole but given the chance I'd give this device a much lower score of course I don't really care about numeric scores as a reader I much prefer the content of a review but I know a lot of you out there disagree with me so drop us a line down in the comments let us know what you would have scored the galaxy s4 zoom in numerically or otherwise if you were given the chance to review it and after that be sure and check out Anton's original review of the device which includes some awesome photos from Romania that's here on YouTube and at pocketnow.com but before you go anywhere please drop us a like if you did enjoy the video and stay tuned for a lot more from PocketNow until next time this has been Michael Fisher thank you for watching and we'll see you soon