Gadgetory

welcome to top shelf I'm David Pearson on this show we bring you the best in consumer electronics past present future this week in a stunning twist we're talking about the samsung galaxy s4 it's probably the biggest phone launched by any a company other than Apple ever and I've spent a week with the phone now and here's how I feel about it Samsung's basically synonymous with Android now people don't ask for android phones anymore they ask for galaxies or the galaxy phone now Samsung's out with its latest galaxy phone the galaxy s4 and this time instead of trying to take the Android crown it's just trying to keep it the galaxy s4 is almost exactly the same size of the gs3 it's a tiny bit thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen in a bigger battery which is impressive but the untrained eye it's still pretty much exactly the same device and next to HTC's gorgeous one that's a bad thing the gs4 just doesn't feel like a high-end smartphone device it's still made of slimy slippery white plastic with silver edges that just don't feel good to hold the device is ergonomic and does fit nicely in your hand but it's just unpleasant as if your hands are always dirty and sweaty as you hold it lots of people didn't mind that on the gs3 and it's not any worse here but I wish Samsung had stepped up its game in response to HTC's gorgeous design from a pure hardware standpoint there's really no contest between the gs4 and the one or even a phone like the iPhone 5 or the Xperia Z but in most other ways samsung's new phone holds up it starts with the screen a 5-inch 1080p display that's absolutely gorgeous it's a super AMOLED panel which means it has slightly over exaggerated colors in contrast but it's so dense and so bright that it just looks great the camera 2 is a big step forward this is the best camera i've ever used on an android phone period it's 13 megapixels it's sharp and it's accurate with great color reproduction and just fantastic photos but where the camera really gets wild is in its software features there are just so many things you can do with the GS force camera you can erase photo bombers create gifts take panoramas and a whole lot more easily and right within the camera app itself it's not as good as a dedicated camera especially in low light but it's as good as any smartphone camera I've used from a sheer things this phone can do perspective no other smartphone even comes close to the gs4 in addition to all the standard galaxy s and note features there's some new stuff here too air gestures lets you wave your hand over your phone to scroll through pictures or down a webpage which is neat but the real use I found for it was waving over the phone to answer it or waving to change between songs wire listening to music air view is the same feature we've seen on note devices before letting you hover over a calendar date or an email to see a preview of its contents without having to tap in but it now works with your finger those two things don't really change how you use the phone in general and they do get in the way sometimes they're nice to have around when you want them but they're really not game changers there are a bunch of eye tracking features as well most of which don't work all that well smart scroll is supposed to track your eyes up and down a web page and move things as you go but it doesn't work all that well smart pause pause this video when you look away from the screen but even when that does work it's sort of obnoxious smart stay figures out when you're looking at the screen and keeps it on while you read or watch a movie and it does work but you mostly don't notice it that feature was on the note as well and you also get the multi window feature from some of the note devices which is pretty happy I could pretty easily do without all of the way as Samsung wants you to interact with your phone but the new software and apps that come with the gs4 are actually pretty great there's an IR blaster plus the watch on app which together control your TV and cable box plus search netflix and other apps to help you find things to watch I like the apple lot and I found myself using the gs4 is my remote control more often than not there's also s health which gives you Fitbit like tracking four steps you take calories you eat your mood and more it's cool but it won't be really great until it's accessories come out in a few months there are many many many more apps to most of which you probably won't use much there's group play and story album and so on and so forth but Samsung really does add a lot to the Android experience and even with everything it can do the galaxy s4 offers great performance and surprisingly solid battery nearly everything is fast and smooth though there are a couple of awkward jitters that make it seem like Samsung hasn't quite worked out its software kinks yet you'll get a full day's used from the battery without any trouble and with a little bit of babysitting I could get well into the next day as well I'm happy to charge my phone every night personally and as long as I did that the gs4 never gave me any trouble the galaxy s4 is a very good phone it's fast it has a great camera it has a gorgeous screen and it has some really useful software features it has too many software features and can be overwhelming and confusing as a result but the phone super customizable and can eventually be suited to your but even with all that I just can't get over the fact that I don't like using this phone it feels cheap and unimpressive especially compared to HTC One and don't forget the HTC One has plenty of impressive features to the gs4 is a slightly more powerful device but the one is more enjoyable more impressive more refined they're both great options on carries around the world but personally I'd rather buy a one than a GSP so now that the Jesus for is out basically the phone market for the next several months is set everybody's launch phones in the last few months and really until the iphone there's probably not going to be that much more coming so I brought in Nilay Patel I managing at her hello sir I'm here and basically all of the phones in the world yeah and like so these are the phones that people can buy right and so unless you should excite these are many you should buy that's the stuff for that one except for this one yeah well so all right let's start with you so what's your phone right now what do you use so I have three phones you says and here's and this is speaks to the problem that's a thing that normal key in my pocket right now i have an iphone 5 okay i have an HTC One which makes sense that's what you need that's what you'd expect me two hundred I don't want to kill us so I have these two and then i have an HTC first and of them bizarrely the first is like my go-to what I want to like use a phone I pull the h2 facebook phone I pull that out of it so this happened to like a bunch of people in our office and it was everybody was sort of not that into Facebook and that suddenly was like ah I love this yeah like it's not Facebook that's calling to me it's that it's a it's a it's the right size basically it has LTE which the nexus 4 doesn't and I run stock Android which is a pretty great combination she just turned off all the facebook job I have the lock screen turned on it's actually nice I don't mind like looking at pictures from face it some prettier than what would be on your lock screen yeah and I and I actually don't like sense on the one okay so I have the one cuz it's a you know it's a great phone I think it's probably the best flagship Android phone you can get but i actually prefer to use the mid-range first and I recognize that I'm a weirdo because I have three phones but this I think this is currently my favorite from that i use interesting suit why carry three then cuz you're a crazy person says I'm a crazy person because the first has a terrible can't waits it's all trade-offs the first a terrible camera so i used the iphone for its camera and then they both have small screens so when I want to watch stuff I use the lights no one else should have this problem and fair enough uh I mean but they do and like that's sort of the problem with all of these right is like there are a lot of things I like about every single one of these phones like this is the droid razr maxx it has a battery that lasts four hundred years and that's really great but it's it's huge and ugly and has weird salt is extremely I will say we have to Motorola phones here we have the razr maxx and the razor end mm-hmm and the razr maxx you can make a really solid argument for this phone because of its benches last forever if you if that is your primary consideration you should get this phone but you should immediately put it in a case and not tell anybody that you ready to see this because it's tremendous exactly yeah that the weird Kevlar thing that then it stays shiny I don't know why motorola does the shiny thing this one is the razr m which is kind of the same size as the first which is great and until the first came out this was probably only small phone to buy but this color this particular pearlescent white to me is it's like the color of like middle-aged like elder middle-aged women like if you were like a 60 year old woman you wanted to buy a Cadillac you'd probably buy it in this color does that make any sense to you know that's not my almost none I I mean I just this is the old motorola like this mineral is going away this is hopefully all this is obsolete and and this is a design language that thankfully boy put them in last place fair you're gonna in google now the veil Motorola's gonna reboot the only one to buy here is that the max because the battery right well and that's I mean that the thing that's been arresting me is seeing with Motorola stuff is they've come out and said like we're gonna make phones that are a good size and durable which seems like the most obvious two things in the world to say about your phone but everybody freaked out the clue yes finally uh and yeah it's just sort of debris right but so it's what's if they're rebooting their build quality I think it's interesting to see how companies like HTC with the one right have gone really really far ahead with build quality and materials this is one of the few phones that showed two people were there like that's really hot yeah particular people who are very happy with their iphones right everyone just wants to touch it and yeah hold it is really cool the UH just feel like curve on the back and everything's just gonna feels great I wish the software is better that's why I'm using the first lengthy this I mean so the first term HTC and the white one actually feels way different than the the black one feels way different than the white women have really house yeah this is more rubbery and Matt this one's very matte look smooth and this one's very rubbery um but this is basically in poor HTC they just settled their loss of Apple they basically built in android iphone yeah and you hold this in your hand it feels exactly like the first iphone and read some combination of the first iphone in the 3g all the buttons are laid out in the same place the headphone jack home doing um i remember when we first saw the leak of this phone everybody was like nah that's just a bad render of an iphone oh no it's rica i mean this this micro USB slot is really Jenky and bad i think it's super funny that it's just like yours there's there's slot but this is basically and I think the reason they could facebook wanted this phone is because all of those people who are using facebook on the iphone they're gonna pick this up it's gonna be interestingly familiar where is immediately familiar as hardware and then you get to your sucked into the facebook university or if you're smart you turn off and just you stopped a weird thing to me is like it seems sort of natural that people would want a phone more this size right think this just feels good and seems great but then the best selling phones out there are gigantic and like increasingly gigantically up the note to this is this is comically humongous this is like an SNL prop yeah and yet tens of millions of people bought this thing like that doesn't make any sense to me I mean and it bloops it literally it just it's like raindrops I so listen I don't understand what what they're doing or why they're doing it in terms of their hardware so this is all plastic that is made to look like brushed metal right so it's like the worst design trend of 2013 made to look like the worst design trend of 1998 and Samsung has literally been doing it that entire and this is just yeah and this is just their game and it's working and actually through the screen on this one is like very very green cuz it's a Super AMOLED panel um but if you want a giant screen this is the name of the game and people seem to want giant screens yes I mean I have enormous hands and I'm not super into the Strand screen but it's here I don't know if anybody's using the stylus I saw a woman the other day I was at a conference and she had an iphone case and the case had a stylus on a chain on it and I was like you should just get a note to like let's just let's just move away from whatever that problem in situation chain wallet of the 13 um I mean this is like this is optimized for giant screen I don't think anybody is buying this for its pen features right I think they're there and they're crazy I'm but I and so that brings up like the whole debate I had with the gs4 this terrible feeling phone uh was like do people care about design right because it's like a I'm from on one hand it's beautiful there's like a great screen it has a great camera and that's the thing that kills me about like eighty percent of these phones right is the camera just sucks like the first camera is miserable yeah that's off and GV sure the samsung cameras are bad and motorola's cameras are bad and they're just like this is a great camera and you know that's awesome but I just I hate holding and using this phone and then I constantly would just like put it down I would get an email and put it down and pick up the one and answer my email on the one but like am I crazy do people like these sell like crazy do people not care I mean I think that these have been i think if you look at the previous HTC found the one x um for whatever reason also really well-designed phone uh actually i mean i think it was less eye catching and less pleasing I think it was well it was just well put together it felt solid yeah but compared to something like this with such an enormous 5-inch screen that phone I don't think it seemed as like high-end okay I think the one seems very high-end in comparison yeah um compared to the gs3 which I see everywhere I mean the gs3 i think is do you bit quetta sandra yeah it's the one phone that like I see constantly people using honest I way and then to people with it this morning and there's like no difference here I mean now side by side uh except there's a system update ya know the reason I I remember seeing two of these this morning it's cuz I looked and I like I wonder if they have Gia's fours but I spent like 10 minutes and was like nope it's just three yeah I mean this has a bigger screen so with thinner before but this phone to me is Samsung has two tests to take a reboot of its design the same way motor oil has to write and i have to say our flagship phones need to compete on hardware design and polish with HTC with apple with nokia um because these phones are all really great in terms of their hardware yeah and how solid they feel and the gs4 to me literally just feels slighted and then you turn it on and I think everything Samsung does to Android is it looks like a cartoon yeah it's really overwhelming like just in terms of like visual noise and amount of features that you can screw with and just using this phone to me is it's it's basically what did you do to everything that I know right like why did you come into my house and move all the furniture well that's the thing they were like Samson comes in with all these different ways of doing stuff and it's Adamas I was pretty good with all the current ways I did stuff like I don't need you to scroll with my eyes down a web page right have fingers for that right yeah but I saw I think the question is the GRE is so popular that that is Android people right and so when they switched to a nexus 4 and they use stock they're like why did you come into my house to move all the furniture and I think that's one of Samsung's big strengths right now is that they've created an alternate Android experience people are very familiar with yeah i mean like tens of millions of people have TouchWiz and right ladies love the Wiz thank you maybe they do I mean a big poppa joe is a controversial reading this stuff huh it's a reference from the verge cast for the watching or if you missed it she'll go watch um I mean look I think this is a solid phone everything about holding it look so the gs3 is really rounded off right it's mentally fit your hand and made a big deal about how it's naturally designed whether or not that's true is up for debate right with this film they just squared it off so you've got this incredible collection of like shapes yeah that are in your hand you've got rounded parts you got squared off parts you've got weird textures you've got this plasticky looking metal that is still plastic or metal coated in plastic God knows whatever is going on here everything about this phone is kind of haphazard right and it's really powerful and I was great processor and a great screen you know everybody is raving about the camera mm-hmm the cameras really good the software is really interesting I think it takes better pictures than the one in a lot of places I think it takes pictures of rival the iphone um but I don't want it you have to hold it in your hand to use the camera right and that kind of like sets it away from me right and I think that's really the that's where Samsung in motorola like they're in the same kind of place right uh their fortunes are way different I think Samsung saw a lot of these phones keeps all on gs3 sure but if they want to move up to that next level they have to have to rethink how they're actually making hardware right well in that kind of like makes me really excited almost because we're we're finally in this place where hardware sort of becomes the differentiating factor again which is interesting because it's like most of these phones run the same software and we've seen phones with really good hardware like the Lumia 920 here which I still love and I love this blue like every time its enormous that is enormities yeah it's it's large like compared to all the other friends here it is you said comically you could kill a human with yeah like there's no question it's a break um and so but it's it's beautiful it has a great camera but it's huge and it runs windows phone and like that sucks fine but no no for that but now I mean it whatever I'm wreck or soft but now we have you know the same sort of beautiful attention to design with you one but running software that people actually want and so now it's like oh maybe we can have everything but then this camera isn't great and that camera is great and so we're still in this like I put a weird trade-off eat place but I feel like we're getting much closer I think ultimately that the line is you're gonna look if you want an iphone your bottom right if you want a Windows Phone you're gonna enough with bulimia yep I think those are pretty clear yeah i think the HTC windows phones are i think that has a better camera than HTC windows he doesn't I think that's important consideration I'm well that's kind of the whole game with Windows Phone right yeah I mean it's like the rest got its got any windows phone so I think that's clear I think on the Android side it's you're gonna end up probably with a gs4 or one and I think that most of the JS for review is yours included i read basically land on that you're gonna end if you're buying a flash your android device these the ones are gonna buy um and the question is do you want the one that look who's software he want overlaying android right and who's bad heart like who's bad hardware decisions or trade off because you want to live with right do you want to live with a great camera and like kind of slimy feeling hardware and then this like cartoon software right or do you want um HTC software which i really mean shauna so i dislike sentence or do you want HTC software in a great piece of hardware right and a camera that's really good in low light right but then kind of not as good is good and it's you know it's a really good camera so I land on the one and i think that's that's why i have a one in my pocket even if i end up using the first all the time because that's that's the Android hardware I think that right now is just leading the pack far and away and I think a lot of people are gonna buy this phone and I think a lot of the tech press and tech reviewers actually like why yeah why because you know the one who's really HTC is like big last stand yeah to prove itself and I think it did I think if you look at the one as HTC's like comeback opportunity I think they've really put a line in the sand yeah we can compete and you know we didn't compete with a one acts and they're kind of obnoxious about it yeah and there's really I saw a bunch of HTC executives like a retweet our review nice because the last line yeah you said you're gonna buy one well um and you know wasn't just use pogin boss rig like right down the line everyone's saying you should buy one yeah whether or not that's gonna have any influence or facts on the market I think remains to be seen I think Samsung if they're smart they will look at what they've produced with the s4 and they'll say okay it's time it's time for us to take a really hard look at what our product is what we want it to be and yet we want consumers to get out of it and whether or not we're gonna compete based on just our sheer momentum and marketing muscle or whether we're gonna compete against some really really high in players in the part that worries me is I think they can probably still win just based on the marketing muscle but I want to come back to the first real quick before we wrap up I always want to so great well so everything is why like there have been rumors that HTC is making another one of these phones with the same ultrapixel camera is the one okay and that's I mean it seems like at that point like the hardware here is is good it's I like it better than the gs4 it's not as good as the one and if it just had a better camera and was still this size it's still sort of mid-range specs it's not 1080p well there's a fan maybe like is that all people want like yeah what this found proves to me is that the raw spec race can kind of V over right this phone doesn't have a 1080p display it's not five inches there are times I wish it was bigger but whatever like I use it it's fine the only thing I wanted to have is a better camera like the processor is a little bit slower the screens a little bit smaller but none of that matters because what matters to me is how good the software is and I think Facebook and Google like they're two of the best software companies in the world and I think that come behind they like made a phone that's the cameras bad and if you fix the camera I think you make a really compelling argument for this as a primary phone yeah um so may I don't think and just to be blunt I mean like Facebook and Google are the best software company is worth I don't think Samsung and HTC rise the level of the best software companies on earth and the fact that they keep on wasting their software on top of Android is like very problematic today but I'm just saying that forever right well yeah and that's why I hope like I don't know maybe it'll be a motorola or maybe it'll be HTC or somebody to come out with like you know phones are getting bigger and bigger somebody has to have noticed that like hey there's this big gap back at this screen size we used to sell 10 5 millions of devices at once let's go back there it's a keyboards like is there a market for these is there a market for a phones with keyboards like those things might have just gone away people might just want vision aids I mean I know everybody if everybody's buying this phone I think the markets really speaking to look I mean I think phones are visual I think yeah um the argument that i bought this does look good on a shelf Oh spray it on a frame looks just and when the phone interface was all about pushing buttons to dial and holding up to your face to make calls made sense for them to get smaller and smaller as they get bigger and all they do is show absent play games it kind of makes sense for them to get bigger the question is you still gotta hold it in a hand and so if you end up in the note 2 and it's like that does that make sense there's a reason they pick basketball players it's a putting that's right and i think that there's there's a middle ground here i think the one is actually a pretty good size I haven't heard anybody complain about the size of the one it's just Samsung's relentless quest to build a bigger phone yeah that I think is is caught people's attention but I think we've settled on it kind of 4.7 25 kind of range yeah I think that's where things are gonna lad I hope sound yeah cool well thank you so much go back to your three phones I'm gonna play with my first eyes on facebook all the time each I'm so sorry check it out there all of those reasons look a girl I knew in high school just had a baby so happy I know that so no matter what of all of these phones you buy they have basically nothing in common except that they're all really expensive and really still too small and easy enough to lose and that could cause huge problems so we went and looked through the Android universe to figure out how to keep hold of your gs4 or whatever android phone you buy this year of all the things you can lose a smartphone is probably the worst they're expensive they're precious and more often than not they have a lot of our personal data on there also thin small and kind of slippery pretty easy to lose their have sold with us when things are really easy find my iphone is part of the OS itself and you're prompted to set it up from the minute you get your device but with Android things are a bit more complicated display Google's love of cloud services it doesn't actually offer you a way to track your lost phone android is open up and it gives the company's a way to do even more than what you can do with your iPhone and I guess we're gonna try some of them now lookout is really the gold standard for this kind of thing it has tons of features and matches all of apple's offerings it can even take a picture of someone who tried to unlock your phone and email it over to you the only catch is that for these features you're gonna have to pay to ninety-nine a month or 2999 a year there are cheaper options though cerberus lets you record photos and audio and even check for unauthorized sim cards in your phone where's my droid is also free but it's more designed for when you've lost your phone in your house or in the couch cushions as opposed to when it's been stolen or lost far away ultimately there are plenty of reasons why you might never get your phone back that's why it's a good idea to turn on automatic uploads to Dropbox for your camera and make sure you're always backing things up to Google you'll be able to restore a lot of apps and data to any new phone you get though unfortunately it won't get everything so look this may be harsh but the thing is devices come and go sometimes my choice other times by chance the most important thing as always is to make sure your data stays protected this is mine now that's it for our show thank you so much for watching thanks to nilay patel for being here and I guess sort of thanks to dan seifert for stealing my phone I guess anyway check out the verge calm for lots more on everything we talked about today and be sure and tune back in next week for a special live top shelf where we'll be talking about a few of our favorite thing see that