DISPLAY
This is the first smartphone to use an AMOLED display with a Full HD resolution. Measuring 4.99in across this gives it an on-paper pixels-per-inch figure of 441, up from 306PPI on the Galaxy S3. As always, it's worth noting that the display uses a pentile arrangement of subpixels - with two colours per pixel, rather than three – which means its actual resolution is less than equivalent LCD displays.
This is less of a problem on a Full HD display than it was previously. The incredibly high number of pixels-per-inch makes the lack of refinement, usually apparent on the edges of text, practically unnoticeable. Furthermore, the incredible contrast you get from an AMOLED display more than makes up for any small perceivable loss of detail.
Speaking of brightness, Samsung's controls are far better, with a brightness slider always present on the notifications drop down menu. This also lets you tweak the auto brightness settings, allowing you to have it a few steps brighter, or dimmer, than the variable default. By comparison the HTC One makes you dig in the menus to adjust it and offers no such tweaking of the auto setting
Having said all that, the biggest difference is simply that the S4's screen is bigger. It's not a huge deal when using apps day to day, sending texts, or hammering out a quick email, but for browsing desktop website sites, playing games and watching video clips it's a big plus.
SPEAKERS
The S4 may have a bigger, higher resolution screen than its predecessor for enjoying such content but the audio from its speaker hasn't improved by the same degree. The speaker is still a rear-mounted, mono design and so you have to carefully position your hands to avoid muffling it accidentally.
HARDWARE
In the run-up to the launch of any exciting new smartphone or tablet, much is made of the exact nature of the hardware contained and its processing power. For the Samsung Galaxy S4 the talk was of an eight-core CPU, though the reality turns out to be far more complicated than that.
Yes, there's an S4 (the GT-I9500) with a Samsung designed and produced Xynos eight-core CPU, but that actually consists of a four-core main CPU and a four-core low-power CPU, which the handset switches between in realtime to maximise performance and battery life. It's an idea that's been around a while, ARM calls it big.LITTLE, but it's good to see it finally implement on a quad-core flagship device.
But, and it's a big one, that eight-core Galaxy S4 isn't the one you'll be buying in the UK. Instead when you turn on your shiny new S4 the first thing you'll see is that it's a GT-I9505 handset, which uses a Qualcomm designed quad-core chipset instead. This is because the other model doesn't include 4G/LTE support, something that Samsung obviously feels is key for a new handset launching in the UK.
iven that there's no option to buy the eight-core S4, unless you import one yourself and pay full price for it plus a hefty import duty, there's little point in comparing the two in detail. We haven't been sent an I9500 for testing, but looking at reputable sources online it appears to be a little quicker with slightly improved battery life.
We'll be looking forward to seeing a big.LITTLE device released in the UK then, but the Qualcomm chipset in our version of the S4 is no slouch. It uses the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset as the HTC One, though the S4's runs at 1.9GHz rather than 1.7GHz. We couldn't detect any noticeable change in browser speed in real-world testing, but the GeekBench 2 benchmark showed the faster S4 edge ahead by 3,227 to 2,688. In use, everything feels incredibly slick, apps launch quickly and everything flows along, very impressive stuff.
The S4 also uses the same Adreno 320 GPU as the HTC One. It's a powerful chip and a huge step forward over the S3. We hit 50fps in the recent 3Dmark Ice Storm test, and managed almost 30fps in the far tougher Extreme version of the same test. We doubt anyone will make an Android game in the near future that will trouble this hardware overly.
BATTERY
Beneath the removable rear cover is a rather large-looking battery, with a hefty 2,600mAh capacity. That's over 10% bigger than the 2,300 and 2,330mAh examples in the HTC One and Sony Xperia Z respectively. The results though were even more impressive than that figure might suggest.
In our continuous video playback the S4 managed an impressive ten hours and 43 minutes, a score we'd largely attribute to its more power-efficient AMOLED display. The Sony Xperia Z has a 5in LCD display and it only ran for five hours and 48 minutes, while the smaller-screened HTC One put in a much more respectable eight hours and 32 minutes.
If battery life is a big concern for you then the S4 stands well above its main rivals then. In addition to this its removable back means you can switch out the battery if required. Samsung sells spare batteries and an official charger for them too, so if you fear running out of power, the S4 is the phone for you.
STORAGE
Also behind the cover is the Micro SD slot, which can take a card with a capacity of up to 64GB. Such a card will cost you about £35, with a 32GB card costing around half that. The Sony Xperia Z also has this option, but it looks to be another point scored over the HTC One which is internal storage only.
However, the HTC One comes with 32GB of storage as standard, of which around 25GB is available for you to use. Comparatively, the S4 only comes with 16GB as standard, of which only a measly 8GB is immediately available for your use, we managed to quickly clear another 1GB, but we still reckon a memory card will be a good idea for most users.
Of course, many people prefer to store much of their data in the cloud now, and Dropbox is Samsung's preferred partner. The handset comes with two years of free storage with a huge 50GB limit. Disappointingly for anyone who's making a quick upgrade from an S3, buying the new handset doesn't reset the two year time limit on this offer. The S4 handily backups all your camera shots to your Dropbox account automatically when a Wi-Fi connection is available.
CAMERA
Samsung has opted for a 13-megapixel backside-illuminated sensor and the resulting images are excellent. There was plenty of fine detail to be seen in our still life tests and exposures were consistently well judged throughout the varying light levels. It was notably crisper than the HTC One's four-megapixel camera, you won’t notice on Facebook, but even a Full HD TGV they were noticeably sharper, with better refined lines. The extra resolution also helps when cropping images without resulting in too much pixellation.
Taking the camera out and about in the spring sun also produced good results. Its exposures dealt with the strong contrast created by the sunshine, and colours looked accurate. It also has a 20-shot burst mode that's activated by simply holding down the shutter button. The front camera has a 2-megapixel BSI sensor and takes pretty decent little snaps too.
ANDROID
Samsung has done well in releasing the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the latest version of the operating system - Android 4.2.2. There are many advantages to this, but we particularly like the highly customisable list of shortcuts buttons you can add to the notifications dropdown.
Of course, it's customised in numerous ways by Samsung's TouchWiz interface, but we feel it's one of the less offensive variants out there. For example, it at least lets you hide applications from sight in the app tray, so you can clear away those you don't use and can't uninstall.The new keyboard has a row of numbers above the standard layout, so you don't have to use a switch key or long press to type them. We'll be lloking at these in more details as we use the handset more, but there's nothing in the UI layout itself that will particular wow or frustrate those used to vanilla Android or another Android launcher.
EXTRA FEATURES
Samsung has packed a lot of extras into the Samsung Galaxy S4. So many in fact that it's unlikely that anyone but a smartphone reviewer or the most ardent Samsung smartphone fan will ever realise they're all there, let alone use them. It does mean though that there's bound to be something that you find useful, or even indispensable.
A quick overview of such features includes: S Health, which tracks food intake and exercise to help you improve your fitness; S translator, which translates speech or text into nine different languages; Knox Tracking, which lets you track down your handset if its lost or stolen.
There's also a far wider range of eye and motion tracking features than we saw on the S3. You can hover your finger over the screen, much like hovering your mouse cursor over a link on your PC, and engage high-sensitivity mode for use with gloves on. Eye tracking will now pause videos when you look away and you can even scroll up and down web pages by tilting your head up or down.
Then there's Group Play, which lets you share music, video and even some games with other S4 users, plus you can even use multiple handsets to create stereo or surround sound effects; plus a built-in IR blaster for controlling your home cinema kit.
We'll be expanding on all these as we get more hands-on time with the handset over the next couple of weeks.
CONCLUSION
It's hard to find chinks the S4's general excellence. The storage is measly and the mono speaker and lack of FM radio may be a downer for some, but despite these it's still a lot of phone for your money. We shopped around and the best deal we saw was a free handset for £31 a month with unlimited minutes, texts and 500MB of mobile data.
According to research and experience even these reasonable prices will drop steadily over the next six months. For the S3 this meant you could shop around for a phone late last year and find it as cheaper, if not cheaper, than many mid-range handsets that should have been far less expensive according to reason alone.
Even considering that, the S4 is a lot of smartphone for your money today. The lack of a big.LITTLE processor is a shame, as it looks to be a great idea, but even without it the S4 embodies that phrase rather nicely. The screen is bigger than that on the HTC One, the battery is bigger than the HTC One's or the one in the Sony Xperia Z, yet the phone itself is slightly smaller than either. Simply put, Samsung has squeezed more into less - and that's why it wins it our Ultimate award.
