Gadgetory

every so often a smartphone comes along with so many features even the jaded fickle detail obsessed tech media can't help but be impressed mostly but how many features are too many how much customization is too cumbersome how much Samsung is to Samsung and does any of it really matter these are the tough questions we're tackling on this special edition episode of the pocket now weekly the once-a-week podcast from pocketnow.com where we discuss smartphones tablets and the state of mobile technology in 2013 and today we're talking samsung galaxy s4 i'm michael fisher senior editorial director at pocket now and i'm joined today by senior editor taylor Martin good morning to you sir hey everybody or Cleveland Brown and I'm glad you finally did that and chief news editor back on the show after a very long absence Steven shank welcome back to the weekly sir thank you how's it going and that was inspired by the way Taylor was to tell you doing Thank You Brown impersonation better than anyone I've ever heard visit my weekly brought you my by fox by Seth MacFarlane's Comedy Hour you could be a stand-in you could be a boy stand-in for Mike what's his name like and Mike starts in age Mike Henry that's his name Oh anyway uh well you know I thought it was meeting and I just didn't know it what some by my schizophrenia Omri mm-hmm um we're off the rails already and this is why they call me the anti-poverty anti topic strikes again but we have some that's okay because we have some things to talk about they're not specifically galaxy s4 related Taylor and and Stephen and I had it like freaking 10 minute discussion about standing desks before we came on the air and I was I understand you've changed your you're set up a little bit taylor and taylor martin if you have not seen his videos at pocket now you haven't been watching pocket now because Taylor's it's some commenter on one of my videos was like that pocket now is becoming the Taylor Martin show was like yes yeah pretty much i get that comment a lot where where's Michael we need Brenda mmmm-mmm a man yeah if a single oh man for the first like two months I was that pocket out every single comment was like where's Brandon minimun get rid of this guy you got it earn the mint I know yeah you do and win them over slowly only get two kinds of two types of content or a comment well it's mm-hmm I haven't taken a sip of my coffee yet maybe how we do that yeah get sibilance yeah so I get two types of comments and that's where's Michael Fisher where's Brandon minimun or your hands are freaking huge so that's what happens when you have in my hands will get that way I've actually taken steps to like frame my hands properly because the the like depth of field on Mike the camera that i use is it does something weird so like if I'm holding a phone and the shot if I'm not careful it looks like I have this big meaty palm and that just kind of like wraps around the front of the phone you don't have giant hands Taylor I've shaken here whoa well I have a giant meaty palm and then my camera makes it look like I have a giant meet immediate palm on top of a giant meaty palm oh so my hand the first coming I got that was kind of like that was right after the s4 was announced it was I think the next day i did a video with the note 2 and everybody's like is that the s4 how do you have the s4 already why because your hands my hands made the note to look like the s4 apparently and i still get that comment now like is that this for i say you just embrace this thing put on some of those green the foam hulk hands yes and do a review like that see how many comments you get I had an idea like that a couple years ago I Hulk reviews but I never went through with it so its people ability matters the note 2 as it relates to the s4 it's funny because I've done I did one of those comparison videos this week is galaxy s4 vs no.2 and I found I had to do camera tricks the note 2 is such a tricky beast to film because it's tough to represent authentically how big the note 2 really is in the hand compared to the s4 so i had to do these camera tricks where I was like I was I had them next to each other and I do have them next to each other in a couple shots so if you want to measure it you can see it but the camera just something funny that where it just doesn't look the size disparity doesn't look as Extreme as it really is yeah I had the same problem with the first and the nexus 7 or nexus 4 well no really yeah because they're just they're similar in size but not really like there's a big difference in an old camera they looked almost identical right guys yeah yeah so yeah you gotta be you have to have a little finesse in the camera and I want to get to talking about the s for the camera still add 10 pounds two phones ya know it does something weird and it depends on the camera and to steal a friends joke it depends on how many cameras are actually on you but ya know I don't know it's aight aight i enjoyed trying to find ways around how the camera messes things up but i want to talk s4 and you guys wanna talk has four and it's suhey do it's exactly this is the problem I don't want the I don't want the fact that I've been spending too much time with the galaxy has 42 to further you know to further insight flames from the fanboys which are completely unavoidable but I've been kind of comment moderating very heavily on all that flour galaxy s4 content and so I'm kind of more burned out on on samsung defenders than I am on on the device itself because it's so funny like there's there's so much I like about this device so let's let's let's actually get into it this is I've got I've got one in the booth with me the other one is charging and i'm running another battery test on it you guys have read the you guys read the review you've seen the comparisons and stuff yeah right well sort of okay I've seen the headlines yeah at the gist of it right so Cass all the pictures and that's all the counts right that's exactly right right yeah oh it's variants so I want it because you haven't been on the air in a long time Stephen I and I miss your voice I want to know kind of your thoughts on the s4 in general and and and how it relates to the rest of the market in these crazy times before you start I also want to note one thing in Tony's post last night that he made for all of us where we all voiced our opinions HTC one vs as for right Stephen was the only one the only one out of eight to choose the s4 so I said I won't have yet it's there yeah yeah where'd Stephen wasn't free shot either yeah yeah so this was a collaborative piece listeners if you haven't seen him I was surprised to see it post it post around for ray at four a.m. my time Tony really went went early on it I was like oh cool okay Wow let's check this out and all of the editors on the team I think it was all of us right yeah contributed like two paragraphs and explaining why power which one we would choose because that's the real question of the of the entire like decade not really but it's the question of the year in smartphones like HTC One or galaxy s4 which one is for you and yes stephan zanter was definitely the most interesting i was like actually I I would have to be honest I was a little dismayed that it wasn't a more even balance because I'm glad that everyone was honest don't get me wrong I just wished that for the sake of the appearance of balance yeah for the little bit of PR that we had more sgs4 like proponents on the team and nobody's really against it but I think when when it comes down to the choice whatever you can read our explanations on the post but Stephen yeah why did you give the answer that you did and what are your thoughts on the s4 in general you know I think the problem with the s4 it's just not very cool I mean it's a fine phone it did pretty much what we expected Samsung to do you know spec wise and everything but it's just it's hard to get excited about it whereas the the one is I mean it may be you know rehashing some old ideas but ones that never necessarily got the attention they might deserve and putting them all together in one package it's it's fun it's compelling and I mean the only reason I was even giving the s4 the more consideration than the other guys is I am a big fan of micro SD and removable battery I know for some of you Taylor you were saying that micro SD take it or leave it but it bugs me that I don't have that on like my nexus 4 and with the one I can see that becoming a problem especially if this isn't if we're treating it as a phone like you know phone enthusiasts like us we're just going to use it for a while we're always going to be upgrading to the the new hotness it arrives then that's fine and get a new phone with new storage fresh battery but if you're going to be sticking with it for the long haul I can really see the lack of those options in the one becoming a problem another a year two years down the line so maybe the s4 is going to be more flexible a long one even if it's less you know mouth-watering sure that's what that's very well put and can we talk about those two features I think right now because that is so often I find myself discussing devices comparing devices and Samsung to its eternal credit always bust out the gate with like yeah it's a samsung phone so at this point it's almost a given that it's going to have a removable battery and it's going to have expandable storage that improves the utility of of its devices like tenfold but you know it's funny to me because I thought I was in the minority sorry I certainly thought I was in the minority when I wrote an editorial to this effect almost a year ago when I said listen these things aren't as big a deal to me and I don't think they're as big a deal too many people and then everyone come there was a huge back some backlash but that's the attack that HTC is certainly taking and I I just don't know how much they matter to regular consumers I I sometimes find myself wondering how much a regular consumer knows about micro SD even existing in smartphones yeah I think they're not a big deal until you actually need them it's a feature that you know if your battery is not losing its capacity if you're getting through a charge per day no problem it's not going to matter but as soon as you hit that wall all of a sudden it's a big deal yeah yeah i'm i wrote an article a few weeks back and maybe a month ago now and we've talked out about it before but my problem with expandable storage is that for me it does nothing the only thing i can store on it our pictures and documents and those are the two things that really don't take up that much storage granted pictures are taking up more and more storage but i can't store my music on it because i listen to Spotify that's where all of my music comes from right you know and Jaime was telling us that you know you and move your Spotify files over to an SD card but for the sake of saying I listen to Spotify I don't you listen to my own music necessarily my movies I rent them or i buy them from the Play Store or I watch them all netflix and and so like and when it and also when it comes down to replacing all the milliamp hours that you're draining watching these things on your device you carry around a variety of external battery packs right yes an arsenal people isn't yet so you're just like a walking lithium polymer cell yeah like people see me at the coffee shop that I go to regularly and they're like hey you can I charge my phone there's an outlet here you have your computer yes sir awesome we see the wall that coffee shops so much stuff that red thing you should get your sponsorship going here I know just like I should have sponsored by gunnar optiks right my cpa owns the place so we're close friends I'm closer at everybody Holmes it and works there so by the way the tax people i sent my tax stuff to two weeks ago haven't returned an email in 14 days taylor i might have to talk to your cpa yeah he's much this that's okay that's okay i'm in trouble so that's all right so here's here's the thing we the utility that the s4 brings in in terms of that battery and microsd card i was going to say can't be understated but you know they overstated rather but it really can be because i thinkin series don't don't care as much about about removable memory as the tech masses to all right and I can agree with that yeah and and but the battery of course the battery is something that's completely different and that's that's a feather in Samsung's cap for real across all consumer categories i think but yeah i'm holding my tongue on all the battery talk because I've got an article in the making and I'm making I guess scheduled for next week about this kind of battery packs versus removable batteries oh you're doing the same editorial I did a year ago I bet we'll do it better I don't know well we do the boys are at the same piece is any longer yeah that's a fair shot but longers are kind of better right it's yeah just like my review proof at 4,700 words whatever was but wow I wonder about how these how these features like this kind of feature approach translates to the s4 as a whole because yes Samsung has included these things this expand ability to you know appeal to a broad range of power users and is the s4 a power users device I mean what you know I don't know Steven I think you might not be the best person to ask on this because I know that you're not a giant fan of rooting your device is right no I love that I just I tend not to because I'm lazy but philosophically I am right on point there no me too i agree we were in the same boat but like I I don't know I feel like there are people out there who are going to go and pick up the s4 because of the global versions octa-core processor which we still have not played with yet it's not octa-core well now it is it is its dual quad-core it's lots of course yeah it's more than eight cores don't run simultaneously when it's that's what yeah but those get on that later right um what in terms of it having the great aspects or some of the greatest pecs most of the greatest specs it's it's like what I said with the optimus g pro you can throw every awesome specification into a phone but that doesn't necessarily make it the best phone specifications are only half the battle um and this sounds crazy and it's not because it's HTC but I personally would carry the first over the s4 holy why would you stick that is and what yet is this statement of the morning right there that's the podcast why well what if the s4 was the size of the first whoa muted my mic it's nothing I thought you were just dumbstruck question I was through my throat and then somebody asked me a question uh note I wrote the article last night and my last statement in the article I just have to read it because I want to read it it says we're loading here Apple despite what you've heard size matters and yeah it's the yet the HTC first is too small for me but I would carry over the s4 because i just i don't i'm a sucker for design and that's one reason i didn't like the optimus g pro it's like a ripoff of a ripoff of a rip off and rights just yeah yeah yeah the 5-inch GPL might be a more interesting phone the one in japan um i haven't actually seen them it does i have better build quality I assume it's the exact same thing but just slightly a smaller yeah probably is I don't mind the size like I like the note 2 but the note 2 is just kind of killing me because I just don't like the build like I like the phone itself I just everything on the outside is awful I hate it so it can we talk about build quality to tell her I don't want I don't want to step on your whatever you were talking about there but I ideal gate wanted to kill every one of your segues last week you did every single one year the segue Slayer I almost did it earlier too so I must talk about the build I really do because the I have a note to as well Taylor as you know and I I loved the note 2 I still every time I kind of go back to it I'm like oh yeah I remember why I like you like it just does everything so well and it just doesn't it doesn't care that it's a big dude you know it's like it's it's just god it's great and the s4 has taken some cues from the note 2 but it's made that it's made them better visually in the hardware and actually when you look at the s4 it doesn't look bad I mean it you know this some this kind of thick Nessus if I'd thickened that's the word this thickened mid plate the silver kind of faux metal running the the perimeter of the s4 looks good it makes the phone look thicker than it actually is but um it also looks high quality the midnight black finish looks really good the texturing under the eye typical eyes looks really good it's and even when you pick it up it's so light that you don't even care about it being light in metal that'll make some sense in in if you remember my feelings about the gs3 which is that this is to light it feels jincy it feels like a toy well the s4 is only maybe five or three to five grams lighter but that small difference makes it so amazed that it's kind of like lifting the ipad mini and being like oh wow this feels fake so the galaxy s4 like has some cool stuff going on for it in terms of build but i agree with you Steven that it's not as exciting as the one because not yeah I think if the s 3 and s 2 and even galaxy s never existed if this was Samsung's first flagship Android device smartphone we would be very excited about the s4 it's just that it's very familiar to us so Taylor what do you think about whatever I just said well I agree with the fact that if none of the other ones existed that yes we would probably be excited over the s4 or some of us i didn't get excited over the s3 i didn't really get excited over the original Galaxy S and not the s2 either I didn't own the galaxy s or guess to and I just didn't get excited over any of them and I don't know why it's not that I don't like Samsung I do but the design and it's just kind of it's never appealed to me at all but the fact of the matter is all the other ones did exist and this isn't the first or second time we've seen this design we've seen it a million times every galaxy device has the same device or the same design and mind you the Galaxy Nexus had it too ah I don't know if I can go with you on that man I i had the Galaxy Nexus and I loved it's designed so hard I did too but it's it's really simply an offshoot of the same exact design now the Galaxy Nexus was had that it had the thing of the tapered the convex screen it didn't have no buttons on the front it was teardrop-shaped on the back I think the guys gnosis was was actually one of Samsung's high points it was it in but if you look at the sides of the devices they in even the backs and ignore that it's tapered it's the same thing yeah but something about the net baby you've nor the parts that are at the same yeah if you ignore everything about it they're exactly the same um no I agree that the nexus was different and I liked it but it's the design has just been rehashed over and over it's just so this is why I was was not as excited about the for when it was announced because I will take issue with you not just on your Galaxy Nexus statement but on the on the galaxy s3 because the galaxy s3 was a real departure for them now I understand listen I understand you line all these up and an average person is going to be like yeah they all look the same but the s3 was a really significant departure in that they went to that you know palm pre place of the nature inspired by nature but rounded river pebble thing and whether you liked it or not I think you had to respect samsung for for going a different direction with their their line and maybe we kind of expected them to show a similar amount of boldness this year and they didn't and that's that's frustrating now the galaxy s3 felt very cheap in the hand to me but it won me over in large part initially because of the features we were promised and I want to get into that a little bit but I want to make sure that I'm not stepping on Stephen who I didn't know if he had a response to the design question yeah I think that part of the problem might be that in this industry especially we have this obsession on moving forward and that's important we want to see everything improved but it were always focused on companies what the growth of their sales are now what the actual sales figures are and I think that translates over into design here if something works for samsung and clearly it has the the sales figures to back this up why would it change it no we want something new but if it's working why fix what ain't broken exactly and I use that very phrase and like in the opening lead into my review and and from a business perspective that does make sense but I think you make a very good point we are future obsessed and you know maybe that makes a bit of sense but I'm doing consumer market is separated from the business side yes absolutely and but it is still important that you excite people it is still important that you inspire them and that's what the s3 did for me last year because i SAT there I at the time you know it's funny history was like repeating itself a little bit I at the time i was still in love with the 1x because it was the device that I just reviewed it was actually the first device I ever reviewed and I loved its build I love blah blah blah blah blah and Samsung comes out with this s3 and I hadn't really paid much attention to sung for a little while at that point and what captivated me about the s3 was the gist avalanche of features samsung dumped on everybody do you remember when the area was announced like that everyone that live blogging from the event was like what is going on I cannot keep up with all the features samsung is just throwing at us there's a video for each feature and we know how weird Samsung events gets events get but that was the thing that I loved about the s3 was that there were so many incredible features that sounded just too good to be true I mean the s4 has a ton of new features is it just that they aren't as interesting no it is not that they're not as interested they're just as interesting and but my point is that Samsung is doing the same exact thing it did with you three it's it's announcing a bunch of awesome features that sound too good to be true and a lot of them sorry guys a lot of them are too good to be true ok I want to say that smart stay a good go ahead stay was they used even know that was those me I was just gonna say that the king of interruption interrupting you I was just gonna say that the lot of them are gimmicky they're things that don't appeal to me or even a lot of people that okay all right I go ahead I get you but conceptually speaking they some of these have to appeal to you right because like smart stay when smarts VII was announced I thought that was the coolest idea in the world the screen I had been dealing with devices for years who turned off the screen in the middle of me like reading a book or in the middle of me reading a web page because the timer went off and it was too stupid to know that I was still looking at it it's a smart stay brilliant idea but it it only it solves the problem and breaks another oh yeah how do you go would already have was it your battery life so you're keeping the display on longer which you're gonna do anyway but you're also running the camera and that's okay alright counterintuitive they ever known it's not gonna that's that's a sacrifice that I would have been willing to make my problem with smart stay is it didn't work right in the number one condition that you wanted it to work it didn't work right when you were reading in bed in the dark yeah known you were doing anything in the dark it couldn't tell you were looking at the screen and I asked at the Samsung Note 80 event if they had fixed that and they were like no we didn't make any changes as Mark Lee I'm like whoa okay and then at the s4 not only did they not fix it they introduced an entire suite of features that that criminally infringe on what I perceive to be the good the good customer experience they not only retained smart stay they built upon it with features that made me even more excited to try them like smart pause you're watching a video and you turn your head away it pauses the video that is smart as hell doesn't work unless the lighting is great I'm like what smart scroll all that stuff just doesn't work right go ahead I'm just a quick little tip for your screen backlight you know cutting out hit the power button when you're not using it and bump the the screen on time to like a minute or two minutes yeah the what I what I learned to do when I'm reading something is just leave my thumb on the display and scroll a little bit and keep reading and scroll a little bit and keep bringing in the display does a timeout all right I've learned to cope with the way things were before you've learned to be almost old no idea features are supposed to free us from these you know coping hacks yeah exactly exactly nervous oh right so uh so Samsung has really over-promised and under-delivered on a lot of these features and you know what if you're gonna if you're going to put them in the phone and just kind of not say anything about them and let people discover them for them for themselves first of all yes that's a dumb idea no company would ever do that but second of all even dumber is making a big deal out of features that do not work as you say they will that's just you pit do you think Samsung is unaware of these failings or simply is this like an apple and tena gate thing we're holding it wrong and it's our fault the conditions aren't ideal no I think it's somewhere between there I really don't think that Samsung is oblivious to this I think that they are I think that they're doing that thing where I'm trying to think of a proper analogy where it's like well you know I i I've come home from school and I've got homework and in six different classes and I really don't want to finish the job on any of them but if I do I do about half my homework for all six at least I won't get in that much trouble like its kind of that that kind of thing rather than just like focusing on one one or two things that it can really really do a good job on um they throw something at a wall ya see what sticks right that is that is their tactic but I and I get that and I understand that that's the thing it's just that I can't tell you how frustrated i am that they activate my imagination they get me salivating thinking about what life could be like because of their awesome ideas I can't I can't overstate it they have incredibly cool ideas at Samsung it's just this institution is off the way I imagined that they come up with these things is they have this huge giant brainstorming session maybe an all-hands-on-deck meeting or something like this 5,000 employees something in the cafeteria they're like give us your ideas what would you like your phone to do and everyone within like realistic I guess like I I mean obviously a phone can't cook your breakfast maybe it could if you overclock the processor enough but uh but um they take these hundreds of ideas and they do every single one of them they don't pick the best they do them all right it's like no good idea left undone write it and you can't my point is you can't do everything great um a former boss told me you know you do a lot of really good things but he said but you don't do everything great because you do so many different things jack of all trades master of none yeah exactly yeah focus on a couple things get them right and stop throwing everything that ever comes to your mind at a wall it's a solid point right and and it feels like and you know this is the point in the comments where we're at time code whatever 40 40 minutes or something like that or 30 minutes and the people are gonna be like oh here comes the Samsung ripping session and I think that my real point of irritation comes from the fact that if this stuff worked well this really would be a phone I would never I would never leave alone but why do I want to what do I want to pan around in my gallery photos by moving the phone around and like knocking my coffee off the table just to like look around photo you know those those motion things are the worst implementation ever seen like moving your widget from one page to another rather than just moving your finger move the whole phone yeah yeah like that that's a fascinating thing and yeah that that's one of those really extreme cases of where that it's like why does this make it to production why does anybody need this this sounds like that inaccurate like it's hard to use it's it's like that Teeter game where you have a ball on a plane you have to it's like them amazed it's like april fools keyboard joke yes yes exactly wait wait the april fools keyboard joke swiftkey it was swiftkey tilt yeah yeah okay yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and you remember the teeter game that used to come on HTC phones right but okay come on let's get to type with that ball and tilt your phone let me talk about is something with you guys air air view Stephen if you had much experience with a note too I know I was supposed to ask this care that you're better than no I have the first note but I just barely looked at the note 2 okay um and then first note refresh my memory does not have air view is that correct doesn't like that is incorrect it as it has oh no it does i remember seeing a little floaty thing i didn't own the node 1 so I'm it does not with the old firmware I have on it okay ya know it required a software update to enable is that right whatever the case air view is something I really came to love on the note 2 where you take the s pen out you hovered over the screen and the thing I used it for most often was I'm going to use my note 2 after this podcast I'm really excited riled up yeah but the thing I loved about is you could hover the S Pen over the bottom of a web page or a Twitter feed or whatever and it would it would scroll for you you didn't have to do the flick thing they didn't either i didn't find it or they didn't port that to air to spend less air view on the galaxy s4 so one of the best features of earlier didn't work yeah scrolling now maybe i didn't find it in my exhaustive tour of all of the movement options on the galaxy s4 I'm sure somebody will come out of the woodwork and say look it's this really obvious thing and then even if it's not there i mean the hardware is in place it could be always been able to soften into a future point right and if it is there it needs to be more obvious but the thing is the the port sorry and complete you don't need to cover you can just swipe your hand over the whole entire phone and scroll that's right yes you can just wave in front of it and it's like how is this anyway yeah now if you had a whole like desk setup and your computer was fit like with that that would be amazing like I'm getting leap motion and may I can't not wait because it's late it's amazing tell us what leap motion is are you kidding me no I'm kidding me it's just your based input for computers oh yeah I can sit here and write in midair like I'm writing with a pen and sign my name on a document on my computer it's kind of crazy that was pretty cool yeah it's cool but I don't understand the need for it on a phone I understand there is at least one use case there is at least one when you're cooking or washing dishes or doing something with your hands changing oil in your car it doesn't matter you lay your phone down and if you need to scroll through something you just wave your hand over the screen Julie that's like ants come up my phone screen yeah it like that works that's awesome and yeah great but in the same respect shouldn't we just coat all of our phones in the nano coating you're not worried about it probably and all funds should be waterproof and all phones should be done break upon you I think we should get back this idea of cooking stuff with our phone and replace like the Kevlar on the razor with cap lon yeah the eggs will get slide right off this is a million-dollar idea let's just throw it let's build a special edition HTC one with an s4 pro in it and then just let it let it cook right up here's the thing i have a question about write a statement to make about air gesture taylor you were absolutely right and i need to take a break from coaching about samsung to say oh damn it I gotta go damn it down oh and now I'm gonna come in a square loop sign of up be get it out of your sister I know kanae all right 15 minutes in I got a second section ah hey dad we need to need a producer you like typing with your fist angry at swearing you need those dream it's now the Hulk myths yeah no I want to say that Taylor you're right to bring up air gesture because it that is a cool feature that is implemented and fairly well a little annoyed that I have to get my dirty crusty hands if I'm like cooking or doing whatever close to that close to the screen like three inches away I'm gonna something on it anyway right exactly i wish it could be a little further away but but it is cool when you actually enable it and when you wave your hand aggressively over the phone and it's like it kind of drowsily wakes up it's like oh what oh yeah and like the screen brightened it takes like three seconds for the screen brightness like here's you here's your messages man you want to see those now sit okay I'm gonna take them back away that's cool and it's like the the stoner roommate on your account it is yeah it's like you want a grilled cheese Alex s4 is a stoner roommate oh that's cool yeah so uh and you don't want to touch the s4 when your hands are greasy because it will retain the grease so I don't want to turn this into another insult at the s4 but because it really seriously air gesture some of those features work really well and that's one of the really cool ones yeah you're can I can I jump back to interview just quickly I'm so yeah yeah of course it yeah yeah first I felt like you were about to segues right they interrupt you yeah I mean everybody ever view on the note 2 and the original note was was great i used it and it would be better if it were universal again you could preview anything like an email in Gmail there's a way to do that there's a simple way to do that but it kind of requires the input from third-party developers so I understand why it's not universal fine and it works great with an S Pen but there is no way that I can imagine hovering a finger over something is better than just touching it okay so I will speaking like yeah like hovering of S Pen is easy like you you can guess when you're going to touch the display like I don't know because I haven't done it is it any easier to just hover your finger or is it just as easy or is it ridiculous I mean it's about it's about the same it feels less natural because with two hands the s-pen requires that you have to hands-free but just by its by its essence when you are one hand like hover scrolling on the s4 it feels less natural because it's new right because you really have to get used to it and actually the sony ericsson I think beat samsung to this on one of those mid-range experience from last year did not yeah they did yeah and I remember everyone was making fun of it back then I'm like I don't I don't remember who was but people were really just having a laugh at the expense of that calling that a useless feature I'm like no this was really awesome yeah and on samsung it could be really awesome to tailor you make a great point I wish it were existed outside the stock apps also i already said this in my future video but I got I got the I got it wrong in the messaging app but it's annoying because like you hover over certain message threads and it will expand them if the message thread goes off the screen but if the message is just like okay or high then it doesn't need to be expanded but the phone doesn't respond at all then so it's like you it's like I can't tell you how many times a day I go up into the notifications bar and as see if air view is turned on or not this might be getting better in the future because right now this is you know pretty hard we're limited only on very very few models but i'm pretty sure that that the a gesture event is built into android at this point so if more manufacturers start supporting it will see more apps be able to recognize these things well that I would be awesome Oh be phenomenal yeah email Gmail especially and Lily google voice nothing that ever comes out everything that's awesome it never supports google voice what makes me so sad to find the redheaded use google is ms chat heads but even more does it more i might fix it who know babble might yeah actually banned it might but more important than google voice because so many more people use it and because mobile video is the play of the future youtube all these awesome features that samsung builds into it the video player like like pop up play and and what is it smart pause like it doesn't work in youtuber i feel like i didn't i hack it to work on on pop up play though can you do that off top your head taylor can you do you remember have you done that i don't know i never used it because it didn't work with youtube so i didn't try i finish use multi-window and and used it that way i feel like i did it i don't know somebody out there is just screaming at their at their headphones like yes you do can't do that yeah shake you learn paint I just found one with my I just found one of my old headlines pop up play on the galaxy s3 is preposterous comma awesome yeah agreed michael fisher from june um what are we talking about talking about features i don't i don't know but i feel like i need to give a little dis grant disclaimer I'm like heated about this because I've been discussing this very heatedly with my friend so the s4 in general what he's trying to decide between the one and the s4 the question of this season yeah and his reason above every other freaking aspect of the phone is that he can hold the phone up to his ear while it's text messaging someone so he's texting and just hold it up to his ear and call him that is an awesome feature as an awesome feature is that a feature that would completely just hands-down sell you on a phone it should I'm like dude it takes one tap on the screen maybe two to call him right but Bunny's like more to taps are just hold my phone up my ear and I call him as I'm gonna get that phone I'm like ah so I think calls anyone anymore right but so that is a that is a really good point actually because I don't think it's that feature necessarily that's captivating your friend now and I don't want speak for your friend but I'm gonna use him as a an archetype and just it is I'll just spoiler it is yeah got some really stupid logic so I understand I understand but for me that that feature where you just you're in the middle of a text message you like this is taking too long I just want to call this person and you just put the fund your head net calls that not only is convenient in that moment but I think it does something where it reinforces your perception of the phone as an intelligent companion a life companion if you will and it really makes makes using the phone more pleasant because you have more confidence that the phone actually knows what you want compared to like a more conventional device so I get why that would be compelling and I it's one of those many features that and that's actually one of the ones it works you're justifying his crazy logic I am absolutely yeah knocking round his but no I think it is important that you know I think that that speaks to what we talked about before and we won't talk about it again but that speaks to a really I like well thought out feature executed very well and uh you know there's that interestingly the reason he's leaning towards the s4 and he is kind of sort of not really what kind of a samsung fanboy but I mean right now he carries an iphone so he is open to other things but what really is kind of pushing him towards the s4 is that he got the s3 and the One X so we got the 1x first thinking hey this thing is gonna be awesome because I talked it up because I thought it was going to be awesome and it was good but it wasn't great it was ok and the s3 came out he also got that and he fell in love right so it's it's HTC's track record that's really kind of throwing him for a loop and not saying that he shouldn't like the s4 if he likes it that's his thing but his reasonings behind liking it or just funny how can I uh can I go a little broader hero kind of want to talk about what they all right thanks for joining us everyone will see you next know so I want to talk about the the implications of some of the things we're seeing with Samsung because Samsung not only first of all it didn't change TouchWiz like at all touch was the same TouchWiz we know and love or hate depending on your feelings toward cartoony but responsive interfaces so TouchWiz is still here but there are more content offerings there's the Samsung hub and Samsung is serious about about this like they are offering this hub has a movie store it is a bookstore it as a music store as a TV show store it hasn't I yourself into it right if they want you to use that Samsung Account they want you to buy your apps in your games from them your content and the visual language on the Samsung hub is very different from anything else inside touch with some people in the comments have said it's kind of a rip off of Metro I don't think it is a ripoff of Microsoft's design style it is something actually legitimately distinct it's definitely more hip than TouchWiz is but that's kind of tertiary or secondary I you am very interested in what Samsung intends to do some people are speculating that this is the beginning of a push or maybe even the middle of a push that Samsung is in 2002 get right to get away from Android oh gosh well I'm not going to necessarily agree with that but they have said that they're weighing their options few years ruin this is something everyone does i mean sony has their own store on the side here everyone wants to you know end run Google on the the Play Store content it's not gonna work people will change devices they want to get all their stuff from a source where you can use it on you know that LG phone you pick up next year they don't want to get locked in that is true but in the same respect Sony HTC and pretty much all of the other Android manufacturers collectively don't have nearly the mindshare or market share Samsung has this is true that they could literally say we're done drop the mic and walk away and they would probably have a significant number of people follow them now it wouldn't be as big as Android because there are people who use samsung specifically for Android but they could not be they wouldn't fall off the charts I don't think I think they would have enough following to kind of establish a start yeah base right that that's the question can they start this movement and we start to see it in some of the public vernacular already like you we've talked about this a billion times but now Android is no longer you know it's not droid that's synonymous with Android its galaxy and your to a greater extent it's even Samsung I have people asking me more and more often regular people from the real world outside of our tech bubble who are like oh is that the new Samsung like oh yeah i have a samsung phone it's like I'm like okay we're talking about the iphone but it's like yeah but oh my samsung phone like the android doesn't even enter into the conversation and samsung is not doing anything to disabuse that notion at the galaxy s4 event the word android was not said once this reminds me of one of the comments that we got on that piece compare are getting our opinions on the one versus the gs4 one mentioned that they thought we were all siding with the one because we don't want to backup Samsung now that it's it's the popular choice it's you want to you want to support the underdog and I was totally thinking that when I was writing my my opinion in the first place are we just ganging up on samsung because they got so big and powerful I don't I'm not personally I'm not know because I haven't really cared for their devices for years personally speaking yeah I've always been a hater hey so yeah so i'ma send me fresh meat out of myself ya know it says right on my twitter profile that I'm an appreciator of underdogs so absolutely i could see how you could draw that conclusion and I get that completely and you know maybe next year if some amazing confluence of circumstances occurred to throw Samsung in the dumpster you know maybe I would be a champion but I would only be a samsung champion for that product if the product was incredible to me that I'm going to get a financial thing I'm only going to get behind something that's great I'm not gonna just back it for the sake of packing and all I've never completely agreed ya ever and yes I've been an HTC fan since android started my first android phone was HTC my second android phone was HTC my third was I think Motorola and then HTC HTC HTC yeah I mean and it's not because i'm a fanboy I just they appeal to my needs they know what I'd like yeah so I go with them assume that's not to say any galaxy device isn't great I carried the note 2 and I loved it yes still love it I case still carry it that's just oh go ahead well yeah H don't finish htcs don't finish no I don't want you to finish I'm stepping on your your non segue so HTC is not being as aggressive with this content play because they have more to focus on they have more to deal with they just need to get to somewhere in the vicinity of Samsung's success in conventional terms so they're not really as aggressively pushing this idea but it interests me that Samsung is devoting so much energy and effort into making the Samsung hub making its own sub ecosystem and not just that changing the look of things I should have asked them about this but I didn't they brightened up the dialer like the dialer is phone isn't it weird like it's it's stark white on it is almost featureless there's almost nothing it looks like a like if jitterbug made a smartphone that's what the dialer looks like it looks like a Windows Phone not not exactly but but to the know the extent of the minimalism yeah what I'm getting at right it looks like if like I forgive me it looks like if like a second-grader like drew a picture of Windows Phone that's what it looks like um but but it's interesting because it doesn't look like Android and nothing some people have some very smart people have made this point over and over and this speaks to what I was saying before like about Samsung getting away from Android nothing in touch with even looks like remotely like a modern version of Android then it's so jarring when you do experience the occasional raw layer of stock Android like when you sign into the phone and it's like oh hey Daire are you a google user and I'm like oh right this is what hollow looks like this is this design language and it frankly wouldn't surprise me at all in in a couple years to see Samsung go Tizen and just just leave Android behind but the question I agree with you Steven is can they establish enough of a an ecosystem for themselves and I i don't think the hobby i really think they're trying to make a play for this if they don't do it overnight like just BAM we're done with android then yeah they will if they're like hey this is our first tizen phone and we know come out the store right yeah and six more and then you know they've got a whole lineup of their 50 different screen sizes right and then they're like hey we're done with android right these will be our final android phones if you want samsung Goa Tizen I couldn't see why it wouldn't work they're not going to walk away with every single Samsung you do they have now which is why it would be stupid to just drop Android but having a plan B and having it in place before anything ever happens to Android is probably the most forward-thinking progressive and and self-preserving thought samsung could possibly have right now because they are growing so large I see it as guest saber-rattling it's it's is making a play to seem more relevant than I mean the Samsung is a big deal but it doesn't have to control everything you know it's okay for a platform to be controlled by another party I mean the whole the pc industry for years was content to have you know microsoft turning out windows Dells not trying to make its own operating system of course dell has seen better days so it's not the best example in the world but i don't know can you imagine if we were this adamant about the pc market oh they release of computer that looks exactly like last year's model or last month's model you know it's kind of ridiculous how crazy we are about this stuff it's like more appealing shade of beige right yeah right like this is something that you carry with you this is not something just sits on your desk and you want something that is on your desk to look pretty but I carry build is more I'm computer with me almost everywhere I go is it your smartphone pretty much yeah no so yeah answer calls i just opened my macbook lit and hold it up to my head it's just anyone who does there's an image i'm glad that we got back to hardware for a second because i want to just very briefly touch on my favorite accessory right now do you guys see my video on the s view flip cover the doesn't mean i think is beautiful check that out i will say it samsung knows how to do accessories their flip covers the best idea ever every phone should have a flip cover i I all right listen listen listen every phone this is a multi-point port one right Bertie phone little members argue with me flip covers are the worst things ever or were the worst things ever they were a dumb idea that were flimsy they were stupid looking they were everything bad about everything until this one came out that is my argument because the old ones covered up your camera lens if you folded them back they covered up your screen when they were closed you couldn't see anything through them they were tacky they were dumb the phone didn't know whether they were on or off the s4 flip cover fixes all that you've got a nice window carved in there when you close it you get a little preview with your date and time and your notifications you can talk with the flip cover closed I could you do that on the old one yeah alright nevermind and the phone who knows when its open or closed yeah those are some complaints like you couldn't take a picture that was a big one because I always found myself holding the note opposite of how normal they held it in landscape to take a picture because the flip cover would hang down anybody I've got in the way of how you would hold the phone because it was just really awkward so yes that I understand and not turning the display on when you flip cover open that was also kind of crazy why not do that right but other than that other than that other than the yes I mean I use I use a set up cover so to speak on most of my devices if I could get one for the nexus 10 right now if the Nexus timber actually mine I would yeah I've got one on my iPad Mini I would have one on my Nexus 4 if I could yeah I don't like cases cases with flip covers or not the same thing but but were you gonna say Stephen I'm wondering on the the s4 flip cover can you when you have it open is it like flush against the phone does it or doesn't sort of irresistible so like when you when you when you fold it back and you're using the phone and one hand yeah yeah is it flush against the phone or is it you know because of the tendency to close is sort of buckling a little bit it doesn't like buckle no not necessarily it definitely wants to be it does it neither wants to be open or closed it kind of wants to be at a 45-degree angle which is annoying which is why I shouldn't have a magnet in it which is why it's not worth the 70 bucks that Samsung jesting is the easiest right now what there are some retailers already selling it for much cheaper i think clove has it for like 40 euro or something like that only yeah it's a piece of gambling but no but it changes the way you interact with the device to a large extent for me it recalls memories of the flip phone days of yore I like moving components on my technology it's just the way I am and i also like displays that know when a physical object is near them and change their behavior accordingly like if you're a notification hound because this window is so small on this cover when you pull out your s4 and look at your notifications you press the side button it's only illuminating that little bit of the display all the rest of the display is black so in theory that should do a nice you know that should give you a nice extra five percent of battery life over the course of a given day which is pretty cool you can also answer calls right in the middle of excuse me without opening the flip cover you can like you get a little notification in there and you can just swipe it I got I got a google talk message in the middle of my sentence I got distracted somebody sent me a link to a BuzzFeed article but reasons kids are pretty much just tiny drunk adults that's an awesome headline i like it i just did be clear you could do that with the s3 wait i answer without answer without opening the flip cover but if you couldn't see who was calling yeah we could just answer with your voice he likes 19 I answer NASA answer just answer the phone and then I see uh I can see my friend he was he uses his phone to play music in his car and that was turned on by default he got an update and that was turned on by default after the update and he didn't know what was going on now he's listening to music in the car and somebody call it a dancer and they just start talking he's like um I didn't mean to call you and they're like no I called you he's like oh well I didn't want to answer like and stuff like that would happen and it also plays and pauses the music so he's playing the music and sometimes it'll just say like the right thing or the right combination of words will happen in a song and the musical Paul's or it'll skip a track and he's just like ah and he couldn't figure out how to turn it off because there is no just straightforward way how to turn it off it's in s voice settings but he's never used s voice oh that's another thing I want to talk about the samsung when the s3 came out Samsung's had i think it was like their second or third attempt at revitalizing the the settings menu or they they like changed it up and it was so complicated like their settings menu was organized so oddly and i remember talking to ryan Biden Samsung's marketing head for samsung mobile us or Samsung Electronics I can remember at the moment but he was like yeah we've we've definitely already gotten some feedback on that and your feedback is well taken that's basically all he would say and I was like cool man well thank you thank you for hearing me out on that he's a cool guy and then the s4 comes out and it looks like Samsung really did try to simplify the settings menu some more by instituting some tabs that seems to be the new thing that OEMs to do they like to put tabs in the settings menu but it doesn't make any sense like under my device you do have things like smart screen and air view under connections is network stuff like that makes sense but you cannot find your phone number under my device that's under more and then it's under about device and then it's under status you can't find information about your battery and storage under my device because apparently those things are not part of my device they're also under more it's just like the my device tab is like criminally miss named and there's some some strange stuff going on there i don't know i don't usually don't get like amped about settings menus but that's not a fun settings menu to be in between between LG and Samsung I think they're competing for the most convoluted confusing poor user experience settings menu possible right because LG's was separated by networks and connections sound display and then like an other tab that is everything like why why a sound and display why are they separated into their own task where that yeah I like why not have a tab for I feel actually hide behind that I mean like if you had a tab for display and a tab for sound like okay sure why not put them together well because they're not the same thing right one goes to your ear ball and one goes your eyeball yeah but it's just your job involve dear vol Oh Tommy air boss just it was just like it they picked some random things to give their own tabs it must have been some reason yes we can't fully grok I mean they didn't just use these at random no they didn't like I'm sure they did they threw some darts at a wall with different settings on the the paper and they're like you have that one and you know I want to talk about one of the principal advantages of the first of all i know we we don't want to get too deeply into HTC one vs s4 again because that's just a never-ending conversation despite i want to say real quickly than this unless you read our article well yeah well i just go to the comments then it's just a never-ending debate but the thing with the s4 is that it doesn't have front firing speakers which is disappointing but i gotta tell you guys the the improvement on the speaker had cannot be overstated i have sounds am I going to say that the show that's a dumb I'm sorry to keep repeating that but it's true they have really boosted the amplitude on the speaker and made it quite loud on the s4 samsung did this presumably by moving the speaker down from its top position on the s3 down to where the note 2 has it but it is very nice to have a loudspeaker on a smartphone that's kind of along very nice a particular thing but I want to ask you guys about the about the camera here because this is an area that we sometimes mobile sites sometimes get criticized in because we are certainly not a I think some of us have more photographic alacrity than others but some of us really don't know what we're doing with cameras and I'm just kind of trying to view it through the eyes of a normal consumer who's going to buy one of these phones so I examine it in as much detail as I can but I was on the phone with Taylor with a test call from the s4 and I was out in Boston on a beautiful day taking photos which is one of my favorite parts of my job is reviewing a camera on a camera on a smartphone and I'm like Taylor Taylor what is going on with this like I I can't get the whole thing in the frame at the time I had the s4 the four to three yes I had the s for the note to the s3 the HTC One and the Lumia 920 I had them all and the majority of those phones would capture a whole lot more image they had a much wider field of view then the s4 did and he's like it's probably cropping I'm like oh okay probably that was what it isn't I go into the settings and I find that the default setting out of box is 9.6 mega pixels at sixteen by nine you could step it up to 13 megapixels at four by three but there was no option for a 13 megapixels at sixteen by nine now is there a math reason I'm missing for why there's no up no such option that's a reason that's the shape it's a safeassign sir yeah that's the maximum output of the resin output resolution of the sensor the only way to get 13 would to be actually make a wider and shorter sensor which is not practical because they source these sensors by the millions yeah so to get 16 9 what that means is your sensor is actually larger than its saying it is and they crop it down aha like an 8-megapixel that takes 16 9 photos is probably a 13 megapixel sensor with a maximum output of eight because it's doing max ate at 69 that's just the way I I think that could be do kia had a really nice graphic about this when they released the 808 to show because they know is an unusual shape of the sensor it wasn't a standard aspect ratio I think but it was designed so that it could do either pretty well it was still going to crop for both for 23 and 16 and 9 well yeah everything on that sensor crops because you can't take like it's got out what 42 megapix want to go on takes it alone yeah 41 and it only takes a 38 that's the maximum is like is it its default resolution is not a standard a spry ratio okay so slow alright so that that makes a degree of sense and I will admit that this is outside of my Miley this is why we get comments like you guys shouldn't be reviewing cameras but it's like no that's not true because so many people in the vast majority of people who buy smartphones are also not photography aficionados they just want to take a nice picture I can tell you whether this thing takes a nice picture or not and if you don't believe me look at the pictures yourself you know whatever but it fascinated me that I was stuck in this situation where every shot I took with the galaxy s4 I felt like I was too close to my subject I needed to back up by two feet to get the same width did field of view as the other devices and I don't know does that bother anybody else is it just me it can't just be me right I think what what that is is that's actually not the cropping that's actually feel you write that yeah that's your your your focal length that's what that is so you're actually getting explain this I just ballpark to the numbers and actually according to some other people i got that actually pretty close to right oh yeah the yeah the HTC One has I think it was a like a 25 millimeter focal range i think is somewhere in that ballpark like 25 28 something like that and the the s4 is somewhere like 33 35 something like that so it looks like you're a lot closer it's closer to what your eyes actually see what annoys for i think i don't know what the the focal length of the eye is there there's like a true to life but I can't remember what it is oh we gotta get a message here whatever Taylor went over Taylor's on the show you can't you can't like surreptitiously like text online on the skype chat whoa hey there's a link to this awesome this article from May twenty-fourth of last year but that's the southern end means our nixle here's showing the total sensor size of the PureView sensor and some of the others from cropping discussion here that's cool I should put that in the links of the description of this podcast your you're lucky you're lucky that I don't like just just yell it like a yeehaw or something it's I don't know what it is but lately like my southern like my roots have been coming out listen to bluegrass all day and just chew on some hay and a rockin out your truck I got some swollen yeah laughs alpha so so we're gonna have some more time with the with the s4 here there is there's so much that we we haven't gotten to we have to start sort of thinking about wrapping it up here but I I'm still kind of getting a hold of things the lag situation is not as not as bad as everyone is is sort of making it this sort of happens when you when you introduce any criticism of a device that a lot of people are motivated to defend in that you will say something like I can't quote myself exactly but you say something like there was a little more lag than I expected from a device like this but you know it's not nothing that's going to bother you in day to day use and it kind of seized on that and and and next thing you know 40 commenters are like how could you say that thing is Lackey beyond belief you're the worst ever and then the conversation changes to something you don't want it to change too so what's interesting though what I've found the reason I bring it up when you can mitigate the lag a bit by turning off some of Samsung's features wait surprise surprise exactly right and so yeah it's a guy thing why is to mimic so is the system image is 1.5 gigabytes is it really yes it's 1.5 gigabytes it has point five gigabytes of software on their the the stock 4.2 dot two images like I think like a hundred and fifty megabytes what does it have like a four minute long 1080p startup animation he like this lightning is a full feature length film why can you not think about that when you're making this stuff like so but nobody's using the feature let's just throw it away like I just cheap Yeah right but also I mean you know when you have a powerhouse of a device ours is the Snapdragon 600 powered one that we're getting the Exynos one or a couple days or maybe tomorrow you know why not throw everything in there i think is this is what they're saying it's exactly what we were talking about before but it does slow the device down like you turn off air view and and there is a not may be detectable to everyone but there is a small increase in performance you start to see some of those animations between closing and opening apps kind of get a little smoother so I don't know you shouldn't if you're going to throw features on that impaired performance maybe they should they should all work really well and smaller they should all be disabled by default oh but that is nobody's they discover them god I think it's funny though that we're complaining about it you know if you have these features on the animations between app switching isn't as smooth that's another one of these features that is killing our CPU cycles where you know trading one for another oh well that's true like if you want to develop remote and disable animations you really can have a zippy phone but there you go it sure does look like trash though yeah Sippie but it just did it jumps from scene to scene yeah stutters and quite quite jarring yeah I have to say that your your header image for the ps4 review oh gosh I'm getting some crazy noise over here well you ain't getting it over here so you just keep on talking you sound great my pebbles going crazy sorry oh it wasn't all my wrist and I thought it was anyway I hate that when that thing vibrates and it's not on your side like my house has fallen down it didn't before I got this new band the new band is what makes it just like is it yeah yeah now that was amazing I was recording audio one day and I had it sitting beside the mic and it was just sitting on the table and forget it oh my gosh don't anyway your header image the phone looks like it's like slate or graphic like uh oh my gosh why am I blanket looks like he's come at a chemical bath or something crazy so that we know the sunniest day that was the same day I was out taking photos and the Sun was out so bright and it just set off the texture on this phone really well I by the way I hate how this header image plays with our bands on the top and bottom that I think it looks stupid but I there's nothing I could do about it but ya did that texture if you get in the sunlight it really shines like it is a well like you say like you just like it just came out of a chemical bad that's awesome I just wish the hyper glaze wasn't on top of it because this phone even more than other more than the s3 is so easily scratch abul and picks up grease like it was made to pick up finger oils and this is the part where you know everyone everyone calls a reviewer like a sweaty slothful like french fry eating dude but it's not I'm like my hands are clean but when i touch the s4 the s4 thinks my hands have been in the middle of some like bacon and cheddar potatoes I don't know how best to go baby oil bath oh that's funny um what the I was just gonna jump to something else I was I was kind of going into listener mail to see if there was anything else going on there Oh guys Excelsior's SSD trade up program maximizes your tech investment speaking of spam nice um Steven what you were saying about Flash being cheap there are two sides to that yeah flash chips I guess NAND chips that we see like built-in storage is not nearly as cheap as say a microSD card this is very true yeah so there is that um now but I mean it's there's so much of it though if we're talking about difference between a hundred Meg's and a gigabyte that's just a fraction of what the total space is on a 32 gigabyte phone I think they can afford that sort of luxury with the the operating system we still have plenty I mean isn't like the surf where it's taking up like forty percent of the total storage by the default apps and os but it's close hmm they said it's just I mean but the storage before like on a 16 gigabyte device you get like that the storage the system image isn't four gigabytes but you might only get 12 gigabytes of user available storage so there's that that's just the system image like when everything's packed up not after in relationship yeah yeah you know what we need we need like a we need to do this on ustream eventually and we've been thinking about this for months and months but i will up i would love a comment feed right now because we're gonna be talking about the s4 on the outer pocket now live tomorrow and we're going to be getting reader comments and questions and things like that it's going to be fun and i think next week we're also going to launch a reader intensive review series starting with the s4 so we're going to get reader comment on this listeners and but we would love to institute a system where you can comment in real time on the podcast and i am going to try and make that happen FYI so yeah i was going to ask you when we were going live yeah well we'll be doing that do not worry and almost i have experience with that then we can't curse so much and edit it out and well actually I so I don't think that the live show like we can edit it out later to preserve our itunes clean tagging whatever but the live broadcast i mean we can do kind of whatever we want hey no hey accept town hey Griffin I ever got it that's uncanny favorite person right now let me look at I'm a listener Melo here and you know I think this is may this may be indicative of of where our readership is coming from in terms of devices because I'm looking at our listener mail and there are many new pieces of listener mail and thank you listeners for bringing them in sending them in shooting them to us but little did he know that they're all meet with fake accounts Taylor Martin a gallon a lead William mark so the thing is this though none of these pieces of email not a single one references the galaxy s4 wow that's actually impressive is not impressive like you would think that people impressive in a weird sense god it's on so and that brings me due to a question that I will use to kind of wrap us up here guys and listeners I'm sorry we'll have to get to your mail on the next show because i have to go shoot yet more videos of the s4 i have to i get to i get to but this brings me to it to a question guys like we've talked in large part this past hour so about kind of how disappointed we are in the s4 how much it got wrong some of the things they've got right but i think the real focus here for a lot of people in the jaded tech media is that this is not bringing what we wanted look at all the things we wanted to the table outside of things like the display and the and and so on but how how well do you think this is going to sell this is a real soft ball of a question but i actually want to hear your honest honest responses starting with stephen because taylor gets to wait this time i can see no world in which all of these problems we've been nitpicking about have a significant impact on galaxy s4 sales it's going to sell like golden hotcakes i mean the average user is there going to be impressed by all these all the hype samsung's we doing about this they're not going to care that things don't work as well as they should because well you know we have these problems with a smart stay and all that they do work and people will see that and there's going to assume oh well i'm doing something wrong but the phone is is fast and looks nice so i can live with it i'm not going to make a big stink about it so i think it's gonna sell fantastically this is going to be another galaxy s3 the incident of those yeah well yes yeah definitely it's gonna still still it's going to sell really well but the extent of what those features are going to be used are when they're being pitched on the device there in the carrier store being pitched on the device and when they're showing them to their friends yeah yeah that's the extent of what ninety percent of samsung's new features are going to be used and they will open up to demo like that exactly um yeah that there enough to sell the device and that's really i think all samsung really cares about for now maybe maybe an update will fix that but right now from what you're telling me and from what I've experienced myself with Samsung devices I really feel like those features are built to sell not necessarily to use every day day in and day out but just say hey look what this can do and bam its marketing it's it's marketing that is a fair point and you are absolutely right that it is these features do work well enough to demo in the retail store they definitely work well enough to demo to friends I do enjoy one of them one of them it works well enough they worked well enough to hold a show like a Broadway show to show off the device because no nothing works well enough to sell that evening of disaster every launch event should be like that yeah but you know like one of them no one of you I want to talk about that I just touch on that very briefly one of the most understated features about this device is when you get close to the screen the lock screen responds to your presence it responds to your like to your proximity and there's this little Firefly like sprite that follows your finger around as you dance around the lock screen and that like that is that we don't think I even mentioned that in the review like it's so completely innocuous it's so the 40 million thing on the list of things this phone can do but that is the number one thing that people have shown this device to have been impressed by like oh my god oh my god it's following me that's exactly my point but yeah it samsung knows marketing and that's why they're doing so well they know ads they know how to get the device in the carrier store and the most important part of that getting the people behind the counter to sell it yeah they have all these features that they can show off on the HTC One what is someone behind the counter going to show you the hardware is great blinkfeed blinkfeed yeah Zoe right boom gone yeah and so in those are not demo friendly features they're grateful use they're not great to sell yeah exactly so you look at those three things versus the stack of about 50 or 60 maybe 70 or maybe even 10,000 things the galaxy s4 does over the HTC One that's where it's going to perform better to people who don't know what these devices are when they walk in the store they just want a new phone the based on the same price point and this one does more it's hooky er yeah yeah so so we see this this distortion field I'm going to steal that term we see this distortion field online in the comments in in the articles a from our perspectives we see that the HTC One is a better device for you know specific use cases and what our needs are but these people who don't know anything about it at all they see the more features that's where their money goes and that's where Samsung sells 50 million of these things 60 this might be their best selling device to date I agree and do you think that this will be my last question here do you think that samsung will change its direction for the next generation of either note or s device do you think that they're feeling enough pressure from mainly the media because consumers haven't really been commenting too much outside of forums do you think they feel enough pressure to make the next Galaxy out of higher-end materials or do you think they're going to stick with their plastic plastic they have no reason to change interesting we are the we are the vocal minority yeah absolutely as that shows and soda sales numbers um their reasoning for using plastic is because it's so durable in and it isn't Lyla site resilient build phones cheaply they hold up well enough why make things more difficult for themselves right right you drop a one what happens that thing's gonna get dented probably do you ever what I'm told what do you have your one yet has it arrived today no but from what I'm told the one that I'm getting has a dent in it has a big pit in the bezel yeah yeah so so yeah right yeah there's that but also Samsung is very focused on making a light device like they their argument their philosophy is it makes sense if you're going this thing around all the time then it has to be as light as possible you don't want everyone is going to be as big as your head if money's better not pull your pants down when you put in your pocket what new closely a copy of our new quote yes whoa pull your pants down hold on actually hold on one second the doorbell hold on Oh fedex time Taylor's Stephen Taylor's expecting a shipment of new Android figurines for his for his videos lovely that man has to have like like 50 or 60 figurines by now so because this is fun hey Granger great now I'm not saying it's a bad thing all I'm saying is I'm sitting here in my studio which I formerly felt proud about but my fading angry birds need a little you know I gotta ask Brandon to send me some some more plush angry birds I don't have any Android toys I have phones lying around but you don't Reese call up here but that's not the same you don't you don't make make videos though so it's all right like you can you know you got your on the news desk like chain smoking cigarettes like like pounding whiskies slam and down coffee yeah really Tony with the cigars all right hey a tailor's back is it figurines or is it an HTC one it is an HTC One are we doing a podcast on boxer that's so awesome first date or podcast unboxing yeah listen to me when we hear the unboxing tool yeah Daniel off this home protector there is no skin protector there's later okay here that great sound yeah you hear the box ripping open yeah I'm glad it to one and not the figurines because I'm more excited about the one I would have been pretty excited about the figurines I'm not gonna lie and now you out of it did you see the list of ones I've all I did not bet it not oh gosh look at the link Oh time you bought all of these gonna listen you all right by the way by the way yes I love that I love I love that the HTC One is is somehow somehow upstaging the galaxy s4 podcast with this live arrival that's that's hilarious well yeah there's plastic it was plastic there was glass ago I heard it all right where's this big Dean these aren't big dings you guys had me all worried these are tiny dings okay want a device that that isn't mine I don't care oh there's a big dent in the back there you go god what a branded do kick the thing that I think you're just like through this thing in a wall let's see how it stands up HTC One durability test yeah all right it is funny just a little bit of like so the drape the durability test was originally part of after the buzz right it still is really but then I just woke up one day and Brandon had done this durability test video I'm like oh so I guess we're doing these now okay this is a separate thing okay so I'm good hey champ boom sound right there boom boom sound hashtag boomtown all right we have to we do have to wrap it up though Jensen I I'm glad that your HTC one is in me too I'm glad you will have so Taylor you I imagine you will be getting one of these galaxies as fours as well just because we need to get other people's eyes on hands-on with this device from other members of the team maybe just so that some of the heat can be taken off of me for like grabbing some / samsung even though five months ago everyone was saying I was a samsung fanboy so make up your minds jerks between editorials I switched between an iphone fanboy and an android fanboy so I between editorials in the same week yeah yeah the same day I do that last time like when I worked for phoneDog I had two editorials in one day I wrote one about you know positive Android and what about negative Android and you were I was I went from being an android fanboy to an iphone BAM even do you do you ever get any of this heat on the news said absolutely because I am you know all over the place doing you know windows phone blackberry on what not every people think that I have allegiances everywhere and against everywhere for less I was just gonna see it just runs right off me yeah oh man that's great but you see you're also do editorials i should mention and they are they're great i love your editorials thank you i wish the readers felt the same it has been good while i have you well we're talking about you Stephen it has been great to have you back on the air I'm sorry it was such a long time at menu and your karaoke mic sound great I would love to have you back on the show soon logitech knows how to build a quality video game accessory what can I say that's for that that's what I've always heard Dale was great being back the good good you know it was it was it was great to have you and tell me exactly uh tell me what part of Pennsylvania you're coming you're not coming friend so you come from Maryland where you're coming from no no I'm am in Princeton yes Jersey boy yes princeton new jersey I like it well it was good to have a little bit of jersey on the back yesterday a little bit though you never want too much you know you know you know you can / it's like Boston you can overdo it you can overdo it on the on the heaping helpings of each city um or state whatever geography Taylor are you sure you just believe Walston setting up your HTC One are you Oh the Builder sorry Tommy no I was actually looking at an email from time warner and reveling in how much I hate their emails like your online statement is available but the the beginning part of their email that the subject is a count alert got alert everything's fine I'm like oh god yeah you owe us money I think it's a next month I think it's good the other thing is good that we're wrapping up on topic that's nice we're we're finishing as we start in a little bit and that is whatever that will serve as your weekly reminder that the podcast is a casual listening environment listeners yes yeah I I am on here because I'm meant to derail the conversation yeah Taylor Taylor uterus to give us bad segues into nonsense you don't ask me to be on the podcast expecting me to stay on topic that just doesn't know no now was it is that why you've asked me to be on the podcast for the past six weeks yeah yes pretty much also I like to hear about your Android figurines well these aren't Android know these you need to check them out I don't want to come out I don't want to check out not going to I'm actually just going to wait until i watch your next video so enjoy I'll give you one of them spoiler mostly want to put her but spoiler one is sigh dong so that in that case I'm never going anywhere near any of your those figurines I hey can I say it right now I hate Gangnam style what about the night video Joe I didn't I hate him style so hard that I didn't even get close sorry I know I'm that guy I'm the one guy who hates you're such a hater right oh god I got it because it's just there's no explanation for why I would ever have a scythe figurine but you guys I do you guys know what I'm doing tonight I don't you know what I'm doing tonight I don't care I don't because I'm doing something awesome I'm going to watch the the to the best two-parter the best episode maybe in the history of Star Trek The Next Generation at the movie theater tonight i'm watching the best of both worlds Part one and Part two at regal fenway 18 or whatever the hell it is so that means i have a video to shoot before i go that means second thing who means Stephen you get to be jealous it means a third thing Taylor I don't know shut up and it means it means that a lot it means a fourth thing in in truth it has been a pleasure to have you both on the show but we we do need to wrap it up and that with that we are going to go this is has been a special edition episode of the pocket now weekly featuring the samsung galaxy s4 find us on Twitter Stephen never tweets but he is at Stephen shank I'll listen to your tweets if you feel like meeting at me I I do it all the time mention you even though you're you don't you know less your heart Taylor Martin is that Casper texier sper Tek and I'm the complete opposite and tweet three million times a very frequently and as do i you can find me at captain two phones you can follow a pocket now officially at pocket now on twitter as pocket now and facebook google+ leave us a review on iTunes or xbox music and if you have some topics or questions for us or you just want to say hello we will get to your mail eventually podcast at pocketnow.com thank you for listening we'll see you next week hi everbody but I can't send you a link of the figurines that are coming in I will send you a screencap house in your jeans the earrings these are the ones that are coming in I needed more cuz I felt bad like yesterday I shot that wait wait wait we're doing that thing where we talk we have a conversation before we're on the air and then we have to have the same still to conversation after we go on the air what's wrong with that I like repeating myself I'm surprised this time oh yeah