VERDICT: For the best smartphone today, look no further than the Samsung Galaxy
S4.
FOR : Great performance; full HD display;
excellent camera.
AGAINST: Average build quality.
India
got the GT-19500 variant of the Galaxy S4, which features the Exynos 5 Octa
5410 SoC based on ARM’s architecture. The chipset consists of four Cortex-A15
cores running at 1.6GHz and four Cortex-A7 cores running at 1.2GHz. Along with
that is 2GB of RAM and a PowerVR SGX544MP3 GPU.
One of the S4’s best
features is its new full HD Super AMOLED 5-inch display that has a resolution
of 1920*1080 pixels. At this screen size, that resolution means an impressive
pixel density of 441ppi, which makes the pixels virtually indistinguishable to
the naked eye. The colours are rich and vibrant, and you get the latest version
of Jelly Bean (4.2.2) along with TouchWiz. The many additions to the gestures,
thanks to the smorgasbord of new sensors, eat into the usable onboard storage
space, which is just 8GB out of the total 16GB.
The S4 is a
quad-band GSM handset with 3G support, Wi-Fi,
Wi-Fi Direct, GPS, microSD card
support up to 64GB, Bluetooth 4.0. TV out via MHL and NFC. This is the only
phone to support the newer Wi-Fi draft “AC” standard that’s supported by a
handful of high-end routers.
The phone has a
13-megapixel BSI sensor for the rear camera, and we even get a decently large
aperture of f/2.2. The camera performance is similar to that of the S3’s,
although the S4 handles metering better. Lastly, the phone is equipped with a
much larger 2600Ah battery, which gave us an imressive run time of almost 9.5
hours.
With a simple
candy bar from factor minus the tapering edges of the S3, the S4 has a uniform
build, making it more ergonomic. There is faux metal trimming around the edges
and the bezel around the display is slightly raised so you don’t accidentally
scratch the display if you place it face down. Besides the usual set of buttons
and ports, the S4 packs a barometer, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and
an IR sensor for gestures. The latter is a miniature version of the one used in
the Microsoft Kinect. There’s also an IR port on top alongside the headphone
jack, letting you see the S4 as a TV remote.
The Galaxy S4 is
excellent, especially in the media playback, camera tests and ergonomics
departments. All this awesomeness helped the S4 bag the Best Performance title.
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