Gadgetory

hey guys it's David at the verge and this is the Samsung Galaxy s4 its brand new flagship phone from Samsung so the first thing you notice is that it's not actually that different from the galaxy s3 it has kind of the same design ID the same even feel in your hand it's a little slimmer a little lighter but basically the same kind of feel there are a bunch of things that are different though the screen is bigger it's a 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display and it has a pentile pixel layout which we don't love but the screen looks great and it's super high-res and really shouldn't cause any problems it's also more powerful than ever it has the Exynos 5 processor and either comes with that or a Qualcomm chip depending on the region you're in comes with 16 32 or 64 gigs of internal storage plus a microSD slot and it's coming with Android 4.2.2 jelly bean which is the latest version of Android and not a lot of phones launched with that which is pretty exciting Samsung's trying to do a lot of crazy software things and they really need power to pull it off so one of the big things Tim some talked about is the camera there's a 13 megapixel camera on the back of the phone and a 2 megapixel camera on the front and that allows them to do a lot of different things one is this dual shot mode where you can actually see the front and rear cameras at the same time and they brought some of the Galaxy camera modes to this device as well so it's definitely the most powerful camera ever we'll have to test it out more to see how it actually does there's all kinds of wild software stuff on this phone and you can see just from all the things you have to enable or disable that there's a lot going on here one of the big things is called air gesture and basically what it lets you do is swipe through photos or scroll in your web browser without ever actually touching the phone so you can just scroll right through all your photos without having to touch and you can do the same in a web browser or you can scroll through your tabs and it's kind of a gimmicky thing but it does seem to work relatively well and it's cool if your hands are dirty or wet or what happened there's also air view which i think is even cooler so in the browser without actually touching the screen you just sort of hover over it and then you can pick what you want to see and even Flipboard has done some things with it so that you can hover over it and see stories within a particular section without ever actually having to touch it one of the biggest things and sort of the most surprising from Samsung is health they love putting us in front of things and and they're basically trying to replace Fitbit and the FuelBand and all these different things so there's a pedometer and a temperature and humidity gauge inside this phone and it'll actually track your steps as you walk or it'll track your heart rate by a device that works the Bluetooth or it'll track the temperature and humidity and it'll tell you all these things about kind of how you're doing over time you can see you know I'm weird in kind of an ugly hotel room so surroundings are poor and you can track the food that you're eating and all these different stuff so it's all built into here and they're selling some add-on accessories as well and it's just a pretty clever thing it seems like something that should have been built into your phone forever ago and it's gonna be interesting to see how this works there's also a group play Samsung loves doing things that involve lots of their different phones and in group play you can set a music or photos or documents or what-have-you to all of the different phones at the same time and it'll sync music so you can listen as a group and again we've seen a lot of these features on Samsung devices before and they're kind of gimmicky and we don't necessarily use them a lot but they're relatively clever features so there's also an IR blaster inside the device which lets you use this to control your TV and your whole home theater and they use some of the same technology they've used before they're using peel's TV guides so you can see kind of what's on TV and flip through and use it to actually control your set-top box and there's on-demand content all this stuff that you can watch on your phone and then push straight to your TV it's kind of approximating airplay plus a bunch of extra TV Guide functionality and it's pretty cool and other devices and as a smart thing to have here so that's really it this one's gonna be out on all four major US carriers in the second quarter of this year it's also gonna be on some regional carriers and be all over the world there's no word on pricing yet except to say that it's going to be a very premium phone and this is definitely Samsung's flagship device going forward and that is the Samsung Galaxy s4