Samsung's Galaxy series of cellphones has been a huge success. While the first handset was not too big of a success, millions of people around the world bought the Galaxy SII and SIII. Samsung's wide variety of mid-range and low-end smart phones also caters to the people that want to save money on their Galaxy handset. Samsung has also been making unique variations of their Galaxy S phones by making them smaller, building them into or with a camera, putting gigantic displays on them, and many other different features. All these Samsung products on the market make Samsung one of the biggest electronics manufacturers in the world. The Samsung Galaxy S4, Samsung's latest mobile flagship, hopes to bring in many more customers than the previous version. Does the Galaxy S4 have the same wow factor as its elders? Can it stand up to other flagship smartphones like the iPhone 5s and HTC One? Is it really the next big thing? Find out the answers to these questions and more in the Tech & Company review of the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Hardware
A first impression is always important, and it is extremely important when you are looking to buy a device that you will be stuck with for two years. The Galaxy S4 sadly does not give a very good first impression. Its greasy, slimy plastic does not feel good in your hand at all. The S4 does not come in any bright or unique colors like Nokia's Lumias, nor does it have the premium finish of the iPhone 5s or HTC One. The fake aluminum band surrounding the device looks cheesy, and the checkered back's subtly brushed finish looks tacky. There is nothing wrong with the front of the device, but it does look boring. All it is is an earpiece, Samsung logo, display, microphone, and home button. If you turn on the S4, you can see the menu and back buttons flanking the home button. Nothing makes the Galaxy S4 stand out from the sea of smartphones on the market today. Its cheap and flimsy build does not make it particularly durable, nor premium feeling. You can even see and hear it creak when you twist it. We have gotten a few nicks on the S4 from a few drops on carpet, but you can also see a bunch of tiny scratches on the back if you have it in the right light. We have no idea where they are from since we only put the S4 on soft surfaces or in our pocket. The dual patterns on the back do not go together well, and the fake aluminum plastic band does not scream "sophisticated" at all. Samsung's "if it ain't broke don't fix it" philosophy is just laziness here. Yes people buy the Galaxy devices, but Samsung could do so much better. The Wave that Samsung released four years ago had amazing build quality, and Samsung had finally put better plastic on its brand new Note III. If Samsung wanted to, they could have put the better plastic on the S4 also.
Spec-wise, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is still one of the fastest smartphones you can buy. Its 1.9GHZ Snapdragon 600 processor might not be the absolute best anymore, but it can handle anything you could possibly want. The 2GB of RAM also help you multitask quickly, smoothly, and effortlessly. Compared to the competition, the Galaxy S4 is not too far behind. The LG G2, Nexus 5, and Samsung's own Galaxy Note III do have the much newer and faster Snapdragon 800, but numbers are just numbers. You might be able to barely see that the other handsets are faster, but then again, they are over half a year newer than the S4. The S4's performance is very similar to that of the HTC One. They both have the same amount of RAM and same model of processor, but the S4 is clocked slightly higher than the One. This 0.2GHZ difference does not make the S4 feel any faster than the One.
Spec-wise, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is still one of the fastest smartphones you can buy. Its 1.9GHZ Snapdragon 600 processor might not be the absolute best anymore, but it can handle anything you could possibly want. The 2GB of RAM also help you multitask quickly, smoothly, and effortlessly. Compared to the competition, the Galaxy S4 is not too far behind. The LG G2, Nexus 5, and Samsung's own Galaxy Note III do have the much newer and faster Snapdragon 800, but numbers are just numbers. You might be able to barely see that the other handsets are faster, but then again, they are over half a year newer than the S4. The S4's performance is very similar to that of the HTC One. They both have the same amount of RAM and same model of processor, but the S4 is clocked slightly higher than the One. This 0.2GHZ difference does not make the S4 feel any faster than the One.
Display
If you want to be a big dog in the Android landscape, you have to have a 1080p display. Full HD is now the norm for any smartphone that wants to be known. Although the sheer resolution makes for great pixel density, not all screens are created equal. When buying a smartphone, you should test out the phone to see how good the color reproduction and viewing angles are. From our time with the Samsung Galaxy S4, we can definitely tell you that it is one of the best screens on the market today. A five inch, 1,920 x 1,080 Super AMOLED display is what you'll be looking at while using the S4. One of the good things about OLED and AMOLED displays is that they have the deepest blacks out of all the displays on the market. They are able to do this, because black pixels on OLED and AMOLED displays are just the pixels turned off. The difference in color reproduction between the HTC One and the Samsung Galaxy S4 is very little. Only when comparing them side by side can you actually spot the differences. The HTC One has more natural colors, while the S4 slightly over saturates colors. Greens and reds are very over saturated, like the buttons for answering and ending phone calls. The blacks on the S4 are deeper than the One's blacks, which is one plus you get with the S4. This difference is very small though, and you can just barely see it in a side by side comparison.
The Samsung Galaxy S4's screen excels at all of your daily tasks. Everything is bright, vibrant, and crisp enough to almost make you think you are looking at a sticker. The one thing that the S4 is particularly great at is watching movies. The Super AMOLED display makes all of the background colors pop, and people's skin tones are surprisingly accurate. The dark backgrounds are very deep, and they make the experience even more immersive. If you are trying to watch your movie, or read anything else, outside it is a rather difficult experience. Even with the brightness cranked all the way up, the screen is just too dim and glossy to read things comfortably. The HTC One and iPhone 5s managed to be easily read even during the brightest of days. If you happen to be a big Pocket reader or check Instagram a lot, you will notice the yellow whites. The yellowness became very distracting in Pocket, and it is not as apparent in Instagram. This is only, once again, one of the smallest of nitpicks we have with the S4's screen. If the S4 is your only mobile device, you will not notice many of these flaws. It's only when you bounce between two or more devices that you can notice the flaws. The Galaxy S4 has a big, bright, and crisp 1080p Super AMOLED display, but it is not the best.
Performance
Every single year you hear how Samsung, Apple, HTC, and LG try to convince you why you need to upgrade. A bigger, brighter, crisper display, better camera, and more battery life are usually some of these companies' reasons. The one that actually makes people look at these shiny new phones is a faster processor. Yes phones are getting faster and faster every single year, and it does not stop at the Samsung Galaxy S4. With a quad-core 1.9GHZ Snapdragon 600 processor and 2GB of RAM, the S4 is one of the fastest phones you can buy today. That might be a given from all these big numbers and names, but numbers are not everything. What actually matters is how the phone handles tasks in real life. The S4 can handle basically anything you can throw at it. Multitasking between apps, syncing Google Drive, or even streaming video over LTE, do not make it skip a beat at all. Load times are quick in apps, and there are very few instances where you will see checkerboarding in the web browser. The signature lag in Chrome is still here, but it is very subtle. The stock Samsung browser, however, has extremely little to no lag at all. Posting 13 megapixel images through multiple social media services is a breeze, and checking through those services is an absolute joy. The Galaxy S4 is fast in most areas, but there is still some slow areas.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is hindered in a few areas because of only one thing: TouchWiz. TouchWiz, TouchWiz, TouchWiz, TouchWiz, TouchWiz. With every single smartphone that Samsung releases TouchWiz always seems to be the biggest problem with it, save for the cheap plastic. Back when Android looked incredibly ugly in the 1.5 to 2.2 days, TouchWiz offered a welcomed change from the boring standard Android interface. The icons were bright and playful, and the standard apps did not look so utilitarian. That is not the same case with the Android of today. Stock Android has turned into such a sleek operating system that TouchWiz does not offer much visual appeal anymore. Compared to the great UI advances that Windows Phone, iOS 7, and stock Android have brought, TouchWiz is so old and boring. The icons look like cartoons, most of the stock apps are completely gaudy, and it seems like Samsung wants to be making a Fisher Price smartphone. What is even worse is that TouchWiz manages to slow down the Galaxy S4. Yes, even with a quad-core Snapdragon 600 and 2GB of RAM, Samsung has managed to make the Galaxy S4 feel...so...slow at times. The phone dialer takes 1-2 seconds to open, it can't even keep up with scrolling through a set of 100 pictures, and a list of a few contacts also takes 1-2 seconds to load. Basically, almost all the stock Samsung apps make the phone feel much slower than it should be. If you look at the Google Play Edition Samsung Galaxy S4, everything is blazingly fast. Everything on the original Samsung Galaxy S4 is fast, except for the stock apps you will use every single day. When you pay $200 or $650 for your smartphone, it should not feel slow in any way. Come on Samsung. Give us a great stock Android phone that we can easily get in any store you have products in.
Battery life on the Samsung Galaxy S4 was also pretty great. Most days we could easily squeeze out around 14 hours of moderate to slightly heavy usage. If you happen to use your phone very lightly, you should be able to get two days of usage out of the S4. Heavy power users can drain the Galaxy S4's battery very quickly. You might be reaching for the charger at around two or three in the afternoon if you are a heavy user. Since the back cover and battery are removable, you can swap between different batteries if you ever find yourself at five percent before you can reach an outlet. The S4 can not compete well with battery mammoths like the Galaxy Note III and Motorola Droid Maxx, but it stands evenly with the HTC One and iPhone 5s.
The Galaxy S4 is available on many carriers around the world, but the unit we used was a Verizon model. In the US, you can get the S4 on AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Metro PCS. For more than a few reasons, we were very glad that we had the Verizon model. Yes AT&T and T-Mobile's LTE networks are faster than Verizon's LTE network, but it is a different story with Verizon. Unlike the rest of the American carriers, Verizon's LTE covers almost all of the United States. Most of the areas that do not have LTE are forests, remote deserts, most of Alaska, and places that do not even have cell phone service. We managed to get full bars of LTE out in the northern Mojave desert. While taking a vacation up and down Central California and Southern Oregon, there were only a few places where coverage was less than ideal. They were mostly, like we said, forests and very remote areas. Our speeds generally hovered around 10-15MBPS down and 5-8MBPS up with peaks of 45 down and 20 up. Apps pulled down data quickly, everything was uploaded in a snap, and video playback was great. We did notice a few instances where video was extremely slow even with the best coverage, but that only occurred a few times. Call quality was decent, but not great. The people on the other end sounded okay, but it could have been better. We were understood most of the time, but background noise was not filtered out too well. This is only the coverage we experienced in the areas we visited, so make sure to check a Verizon coverage map if you do not know how well Verizon is in your area. If you do live in an area with good Verizon coverage, which you probably do, then the Galaxy S4 can handle all your data, call, and texts needs smoothly.
Camera
The camera is one of the most important features on a smartphone. Most people use their smartphone's camera almost every day for numerous situations. Whether it's from capturing a moment, showing what new thing your child learned to do, or just showing off something cool, people always reach for their phone's camera. With picture oriented apps like Instagram, Vine, Flickr, and mobile photo processing apps like VSCOcam and Snapseed, cameras are becoming even more important. With such a heavy load on the camera, can the Samsung Galaxy S4 stand up to the pressure?
The answer is kind of. The S4 can take good pictures, but it is not easy. Let's just say it's complicated. It can take good enough pictures most of the time, it can take absolutely gorgeous shots often, and there are there are many situations where the Galaxy S4 struggles. One of the more difficult areas for the S4 is in macro shots. In the right light, you can take beautiful macro shots with the Galaxy S4. Colors are accurate, the picture is sharp and clear, and there is little to no noise apparent. The biggest problem with macro shots are getting them in focus. Phone sensors cannot get too close to their subjects for macro shots, but the S4 can't focus as close as other devices. When attempting to take the same shot with an HTC One, fifth generation iPod Touch, and the S4, the iPod and One could focus noticeably closer than the S4. It is a small difference and only noticeable in comparison to other devices, and it is not that big of a deal. If there is less than ideal lighting, the S4 has an incredibly hard time taking macro shots and it is really not worth trying then.
If you happen to be a very social person that goes out with friends a lot, you are probably going to take pictures of you and or your friends. The rear-facing camera handles pictures of people very well. In normal shots the S4 would overexpose and over saturate pictures often, but it did not do this with people. We lost our sample people pictures, but they came out pretty nice. In every condition except low light, the rear-facing pictures of people turned out crisp, detailed, and skin color and clothes colors were accurate. The front-facing camera, however, is a completely different story. Yes the selfie production center of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is not very good. In pretty much every lighting situation, skin colors are completely off, noise is everywhere, and the camera can never find the right white balance. Another bad thing about the front-facing camera is that it splinters any light in the shot no matter what angle it is. If you try to move away from the light or cover it up, there is just a splintery outline haze around it. When you find the most amazing lighting for taking pictures in the world, you might possibly be able to take a decent "selfie". The S4 can't compare to the front-facing camera on the iPhone 5s. Other Android phones also share most of the same problems as the S4's front-facing camera and all the recent iPhones are still the, how you say, "selfie kings".
And we end our camera section here on normally framed shots. You know, you see something interesting and take a picture of it. You want to show your friends and family that super amazing mural at the restaurant you ate at the other day. We are very happy to say that the Samsung Galaxy S4 can take absolutely amazing shots at normal focal lengths. Everything from murals, to statues, phones, drinks, landscapes, nature, cloudscapes, and flowers looked gorgeous. Flowers always looked bright, crisp, and detailed with indistinguishable imperfections. The sky is usually a little white washed or blown out, but landscapes always looked their best. The S4 managed to capture the most intricate details of all the buildings we saw. Our pictures of some parts of Hearst Castle in central California looked fantastic, and you could see every molding detail on the buildings. The portrait of Jerry Brown in the Sacramento Capitol Building had surprisingly accurate colors, great white balance, and you could even see the brushstrokes on the painting. Even shots of random knick knacks in a poorly lit room looked crisp and more than decent. The S4 sure can take great and amazing pictures, but it is just takes a little bit of work to get there. More times than not, we had to lower and raise exposure to take a good picture. The S4 can usually get the focus right, but it can not do it all the time. We often had to tap all around the screen to get the right focus. Overall the S4 has a great camera that is definitely one of the best Android cameras yet, but it is not necessarily the best cell phone camera. The Nokia Lumia 1020 beats almost every phone with its 41 megapixel camera, great optics, an amazing camera app, and its ability to take amazing pictures in literally every situation with only a little work. The iPhone 5s is the amazing camera phone that is on the other side of the 1020's coin. It does not have a great camera app or a ridiculously large megapixel count, but it has great optics and some of the best photo processing software on any phone. The 5s might not be able to take the best pictures in the world, but it will be able to give you a decent or great picture all the time. Low light shots might not be great, but the noise levels are minimal and passable. The other great thing with the 5s is that you don't have to work at all to get these great shots. Just open, click the camera button, and you have a better picture than most people. You didn't have to mess with the focus, exposure, white balance, or take a billion pictures to pick the best from. It just works. You'll be happy with the S4's cameras, but you might need to do a little work to get there.
Software
The Galaxy S4 has ran Jelly Bean since it was first unveiled it ran Jelly Bean, and it has been updated to Android 4.3 Jelly Bean as of today. As usual, Samsung has slathered a big serving of TouchWiz over Google's software that has hidden most of Google's hard work. You can hand someone a Nexus 5 and an S4, and they probably would not know that they ran the same operating system. Some of these changes are useless and ugly, but others are actually quite useful. Let's dive in.
Over the past few years, not much has changed with TouchWiz. If you look at the Galaxy S, SII, SIII, and now the S4, you could barely tell that they had different versions of TouchWiz. Samsung's TouchWiz pretty much masks any trace of Google design. All the stock apps are different and do not adhere to Google's design rules at all. Most of the time, these apps look like Fisher Price toys. Cover up the Samsung logos and put on some huge funky orange case, and you just might think you bought a Fisher Price phone for your kids. But no, it's not a kids' handset. It's the flagship device that you just dropped $200-$650 on. Most of the stock apps, clock, calendar, contacts, phone, calulator, and all the S pieces of junk are annoying. It's even more annoying when they are so slow to open and use. Each one of these apps takes at least 1-2 seconds to open and sometimes it is more. All the S Samsung bloatware is even more annoying.
If you look past these stock camera apps, there are the two Samsung apps that we found useful and a somewhat improvement over the stock Android versions. The camera and gallery apps are some of the best pieces of software that Samsung has put on the Galaxy S4. The stock Android camera app is pretty simple; it has just enough settings and modes to get the job done. The Samsung camera app is quite the opposite with enough settings and modes to get almost any shot you want, and some modes you don't really need. The modes you can choose between are Auto, Rich Tone (HDR), Panorama, Night, Sports, Eraser, Animated Photo, Drama, Sound & Shot, Best Face, Best Photo, and Beauty Face. The functions of each mode are pretty much self explanatory in their names. Best Face and Photo take five pictures and let you choose the best, Animated Photos look like .GIFs, night mode works well in night, sports helps with movement, Eraser takes five pictures and lets you "erase" people or things from your pictures by combining the shots, and Sound & Shot let's you take, well, a picture with sound. Most of these you will probably never use, some of these you will use, and some of these are very hard to work with. We tried to take a Drama Shot of some skydivers at a normal, acceptable distance, and the feature was too finicky and cumbersome to get the shot. We missed the skydivers completely even when we started attempting to take the shot early enough to be prepared for it. You missed the skydivers trying to take your super cool shot while everyone else managed to get a great normal shot of them. One of the few problems with the camera app is that the burst mode is slow. Unlike the iPhone or HTC One, you can't take an unlimited burst of pictures. On the S4, you can only take 20 pictures at a time and you have to wait three seconds to take any other photos. A lot can happen in three seconds. Other than those few nitpicks, the camera app is very nice. The Night mode unsurprisingly improves night shots well, and HDR also helps in night and takes better daylight pictures. Exposure and white balance settings help to counteract the blown out whites in daytime pictures. The gallery app gives a very productive way to manage and share your pictures. You can easily make new albums, move and or copy pictures into other albums, and you can get a list of all the places you can share your pictures just by pressing the share button right above the picture. If you choose to edit the pictures you get all the normal settings, and you get a drawing setting which is nice when you need to point out something. This drawing feature came in handy when we needed to show people how to use their phones if we were far away from them, and sometimes interesting things in our shots.
Samsung's software is just barely a passable user experience. It is extremely ugly and immature compared to stock Android, but the average consumer probably does not care about this. There are noticeable performance issues with it, but most people are patient enough to not notice all of these issues. Most of the bloatware is useless, but some people don't mind scrolling through an endless app drawer. The camera and gallery apps are very useful and efficient, and they will make the average consumer and shutterbug happy. Samsung might fix the performance issues with software updates and they might choose to fix the design of the stock apps, but they probably won't. If you do not like the look of the Samsung launcher you can always install a launcher like Nova or Apex from the Play Store. There is a pretty good chance that you will not mind the Samsung software, and if you do it will not be a big deal.
Wrap up
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is Samsung's most important device of 2013. It's the company's flagship set to compete with the iPhone, beat all the other Android phones, and sit in the hands of as many people as possible. The S4 is not the mega-camera, or super large screened phone to fit into any niche. Samsung wants it to be for everybody. It has a great screen, great camera, and speedy performance. Months after the S4 launched it is not the best phone or highest specced phone, but it still competes well against the crowd. Some phones might beat it with more color accurate displays, prettier software, better builds, or better cameras, but the S4 does all of these things well enough to be competitive. It is still one of the best phones of 2013, but just not the best. Can you brag about your S4 to your friends? Yes in certain areas. Will you be satisfied with the S4 for the two years of your contract? Probably. Will you be jealous of other people's smartphones? Probably, but everyone else is too. The S4 also has great support from Samsung and its great popularity lets you have a wide array of accessories, which you cannot get from most Android phones. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is definitely one of the top three Android phones on the market today, and it will make a great daily driver for pretty much everyone.
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