Tech in Galaxy S 4 doesn't come together

Tech in Galaxy S 4 doesn't come together - First-look review: Galaxy S 4 stuffed with new technologies that don't come together

The Galaxy S 4, Samsung's latest and greatest, has a cute feature we'll probably see in a lot of phones soon: You can shoot both yourself and your surroundings at the same time, using the front- and back-mounted cameras. It's a bit like having a two-camera film crew follow you around.

But other than that, it's hard to point to anything that will set the world on fire in the new phone, revealed Thursday at an event in New York. The S 4 has what you'd expect from a new smartphone: a bigger screen and a faster processor. It may prove to be unfortunate that didn't stop there when it presented the successor to its hit Galaxy S III, because the phone has a grab-bag of features that don't come together as a pleasing whole.

Associated Press - Attendees try out the new Samsung Galaxy S 4 during the Samsung Unpacked event at Radio City Music Hall, Thursday, March 14, 2013 in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

The phone will go on sale sometime between late April and the end of June, from Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA, US Cellular and Cricket, Samsung says. If history is any guide, even smaller phone companies will get it, if not right away. The phone companies will set the prices; expect this phone to start at $200 with a two-year contract.

Samsung provided reporters with some hands-on time with pre-production units, which revealed the S 4 to be, in terms of hardware, a solid successor to the III. The screen is slightly larger, at 5 inches on the diagonal compared to 4.8 inches for the III and 4 inches for the iPhone 5. It sports a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, as much as you'd find on a high-definition TV set. This should mean that the resolution chase is over in the smartphone area: the eyes just can't discern any more pixels on these small screens. Competing top-line Android phones already have the same resolution, so Samsung isn't breaking new ground here.

The bigger screen is crammed into a chassis that's actually a hair narrower and thinner than the S III's. This is quite a feat. Samsung shrank the frame surrounding the screen to make room. Shrinking other internal components allowed it to make the battery 20 percent larger than III's, but Samsung isn't saying whether that translates into longer battery life — the added battery power could be eaten up by software and hardware changes.

The body is still dominated by softly molded plastic, and the S 4 doesn't really advance the aesthetics of its predecessor the way competitors Apple, Sony and HTC have done with their latest phones. Apple and HTC, in particular, have put a lot of sweat into machining metal into jewel-like enclosures; Samsung doesn't seem to care all that much about looks.

Samsung does care about trying to push the envelope on what the phone does, but it may have poked through the envelope, tearing a hole or two in it. It's probably not a disaster, because most of its features can be turned off, but first-time users could be confused.

For one thing, Samsung is taking the whole "touch screen" thing further by now sensing when the user's finger is hovering over the screen. In other words, you don't even need to touch the phone to make it react. Hovering over a thumbnail of a picture in the Gallery will reveal a bigger thumbnail, and hovering over one email in a list will show a preview of its first lines.

The idea is similar to the "mouse hover" feature on a PC, which sometimes reveals things before the mouse is clicked. Implementing it on a smartphone is trickier, though. On the PC, you have to use the mouse, so you'll discover the hover functions in the normal course of use. But since the feature is new in a smartphone and there's normally no reason to have your finger hovering over the screen, users are likely to discover this feature by chance. That wouldn't be so bad if all applications responded to hovering in a consistent manner, but very few applications react to it all. On the S 4, the "Email" app will show previews, but the "Gmail" app won't. The built-in "Gallery" app will show picture previews, but other photo apps won't. I suspect users will get tired of trying to hover with their fingers and give up on the whole thing.

The hovering feature also sets the phone up for another problem. In my testing, I found that the phone sometimes registered a close hover as a touch. In other words, the screen was overly sensitive, thinking I was touching it when I wasn't. This may be fixed by the time the phone is in production, but it's potentially an annoying issue.

The S 4 tries to divine your intentions in two additional ways. It has an infra-red sensor that looks for hand movements up to about 4 inches away from the phone, and it uses the front-side camera to figure out if it's front of the user's face. Thanks to the IR sensor, the phone's browser responds to an "up swipe" in the air above it with by scrolling up, and to a "side" swipe by jumping to another tab. This could be pretty useful when the smartphone is the lunchtime companion and you don't want to grease it up with foody fingers, but again, the "air swipe to scroll" shows up in only a few applications.

The camera is supposed to engage when you're watching a video, pausing playback if it thinks you're looking away. This didn't work in the preproduction unit I tested, but it's hard to imagine that this is a feature to die for.

The list of user interface innovations goes on, but they don't amount to a coherent new way of interacting with the phone. Nor do they turn the phone into something that's intelligently aware of what goes on around it. It's more like Samsung is throwing a bunch of technologies into the phone to see what sticks. Sometimes, that's how progress works, but consumers might not appreciate being guinea pigs.

The S 4 presents an interesting contrast to the BlackBerry Z10, which is coming out in a few weeks. Research In Motion Ltd. jettisoned the old BlackBerry software and rebuilt it from the ground up. The phone's hardware isn't as impressive as Samsung's, but the software is easy to use, and it's based on a strong idea: taking the pain out of communicating across email, text messaging and social networks. The S 4, unfortunately, doesn't have the same clarity of purpose. ( Associated Press ) 

 

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The Samsung Galaxy 4: What You Need to Know

The Samsung Galaxy 4: What You Need to Know - After several weeks of hype, Samsung made the Galaxy S4 official Thursday night. BTIG analyst Walter Piecyk, who covers mobile and telecom companies, attended Samsung's extravagant event at Radio City Music Hall. He told The Daily Ticker's Henry Blodget that he saw little difference between the new S4 and its predecessor the Galaxy S III.

"You're going to see a lot of disappointment today," Piecyk says. "People are going to say 'why upgrade?'"

The S4's larger screen could be the biggest selling point with consumers, Piecyk notes.

"There's a market for these big screens and Samsung is really taking advantage of that," he argues. "For people that like those big screens, Samsung is the go to guy right now."

Here are all the details on the Galaxy S4:

Hardware

The Galaxy S4 will have a 5-inch full HD display and a plastic body. It runs the latest version of Android called Jelly Bean with Samsung's TouchWiz "skin" that adds several more user interface tweaks and software features.

The hardware design doesn't look that much different than the Galaxy S III, but the device is noticeably thinner and lighter than before. And even though Samsung stuck with a plastic casing, the materials don't feel cheap. It's not as ideal as a metal and glass body, but it's definitely not terrible either.

Software

On the software side, the GS4 will run Android Jelly Bean, the latest version of Google's (GOOG) operating system, but Samsung added a slew of extra features on top of it. The camera app has been completely redesigned to match the interface on the Galaxy Camera. And there are several new shooting modes, including one that lets you automatically "erase" a blurry figure in the background.

The Camera

The phone's front-facing camera can tell when you're looking at the device and automatically adjust the screen brightness based on the kind of content you're looking at. It will darken when you're reading an e-book, for example.

New Finger Waving Feature

Samsung also added a feature called Hover that lets you hold your finger a centimeter or two over the screen to view extra content. This was most useful in the email app. When you hold your finger over a message in the inbox, you get a pop-up preview of the message. You can also use a waving gesture over the screen to scroll through photos or songs.

"The swipe feature was a little glitchy," says Piecyk. "That might not be a great selling feature for the phone right now."

Eye-Tracking vs. Tilting

And yes, the Galaxy S4 does have that rumored eye-tracking feature for scrolling through pages, but it doesn't work quite as we had imagined. When looking at the phone, you have to tilt the device to make the page scrolling. It didn't feel very natural when we tried it though and it's still easier to use your finger to swipe on the screen.

Samsung says the GS4 will launch in the second quarter of this year and will be available on all four major U.S. carriers. Samsung did announce pricing or a specific launch date.

Got all that?

The Specs

Now for some more gritty details, software features, and hardware specs on the GS4:

• 16, 32, and 64 GB storage options
• Micro SD slot for expandable storage up to 64 GB
• 2 GB of RAM
• 441 ppi screen resolution
• Samsung would not comment on the processor speed, but did say it will vary by region.
• 4G LTE (where available)
• Fitness app called S Health that monitors your steps, diet, etc. There's also an optional Nike FuelBand-like accessory that connects via Bluetooth.
• ChatOn app for screen sharing with other Galaxy devices
• "Smart Pause" feature that stops a video from playing when you look away from the screen
• Voice commands while driving via a Bluetooth connection with your car ( Daily Ticker )

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Samsung's Galaxy S4 emerges to do battle on Apple's home turf

Samsung's Galaxy S4 emerges to do battle on Apple's home turf - Samsung Electronics Co premiered its latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, which sports a bigger display and unconventional features such as gesture controls, as the South Korean titan challenges Apple Inc on its home turf.

The phone, the first in the highly successful Galaxy S-series to make its global debut on U.S. soil, was unwrapped at Manhattan's iconic Radio City Music Hall on Thursday evening. Some industry watchers were clearly dazzled by its features, setting a high bar for Apple to surpass.

Reuters/Reuters - JK Shin, President and head of IT and Mobile Communication Division, introduces Samsung Electronics Co's latest Galaxy S4 phone during its launch at the Radio City Music Hall in New York March 14, 2013. Samsung Electronics Co on Thursday premiered its latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, which sports a bigger display and unconventional features such as gesture controls and will spearhead its effort to challenge Apple Inc on its home turf. REUTERS/Adrees Latif

The S4 can stop and start videos depending on whether someone is looking at the screen, flip between songs and photos at the wave of a hand, and record sound to run alongside snapped still pictures. But other industry watchers said the phone would not upturn an industry that lives and dies by innovation.

The plethora of new features "are good steps in this direction, but they can be seen as gimmicks rather than game changers. At this point, Samsung appears to be trying to kill the competition with sheer volume of new features," said Jan Dawson, chief telecom analyst at IT research outfit Ovum.

"For now, Samsung can likely rely on its vastly superior marketing budget and the relatively weak efforts of its competitors in software to keep it ahead."

The success or failure of Samsung's latest flagship phone - the fourth in a brand launched in 2010 - will be pivotal in the world's biggest smartphone maker's battle against Apple and smaller, and key to that struggle will be phone differentiation.

Apple may already be feeling the heat.

Just a day before, marketing chief Phil Schiller blasted Samsung and the Google Android software in rare interviews given to Reuters and other select media, underscoring the pressure that the iPhone maker is feeling from its Korean mobile-phone nemesis.

The S4, which Samsung preceded with a marketing blitz that drummed up industry speculation reminiscent of some of Apple's past launches, will be available by the end of April and rolled out to 327 carriers in 155 countries, including U.S. service providers Verizon Wireless, AT&T Inc, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA.

"Samsung has fulfilled the promise of their marketing that they are the tech innovators. It remains to be seen whether it's overload for customers, whether they can really take advantage of all these features," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.

The S4 will use either Samsung's own applications processor or Qualcomm Inc's Snapdragon central processing chip, depending on the country. But the Korean company kept mum on exact dates and prices.

SAMSUNG HITS BROADWAY

Samsung took a slightly different tack with the S4's launch, using actors and a full live orchestra to present the smartphone's various features via a series of skits - as perhaps befitted its theatrical platform.

That marked a departure of sorts from the usual slick, high-wattage shows favored by rivals such as Apple.

Investors largely shrugged off the launch. Shares in Samsung were down 1.1 percent in a steady market in early Seoul trading on Friday.

The stock has stood little changed so far this year, while Apple's shares have tumbled 20 percent as disappointing sales of iPhones raised fears that its dominance may be slipping.

Apple's U.S. sales outstripped Samsung's for the first time in the quarter ending in December, even after Samsung spent a record $400 million on phone advertisements here last year.

While the global smartphone market's growth rate is tapering off, Samsung still derives the majority of its annual profits from Galaxy phones.

Samsung said the Galaxy S4 will sport a bigger 5-inch display than the S3's 4.8 inches. But because the new display will cover more of the phone's surface area, the device itself will be the same length and slightly narrower, thinner and lighter than the previous generation.

The newest features involve different options for navigation. For example, if the phone senses someone is looking at the screen, the user can tilt it forward or backwards to scroll up and down a Web page.

That feature falls slightly short of what some consumers may have expected after the New York Times reported that the phone would be able to scroll automatically by tracking readers' eyes.

But what it can do is sense when it has someone's attention. When a video is playing, for instance, the stream will automatically pause if the person glances away and it will restart when the eyes refocus on the screen.

This is an update on an existing Galaxy feature, which powers down the display if it senses no one's looking at it, conserving battery power.

The latest phone also has a sensor that lets users move their hands to the left or right to scroll between different websites they have opened or through songs or photos in an album without having to touch the phone.

The idea is to make it easier to change the song playing without having to pick up the phone while driving or to avoid putting sticky fingers on the touch-screen display while scrolling through a Web page at mealtimes.

The phone will also allow users to hover a finger over an email inbox or a photo gallery to get a glimpse of more details of what's in the email or which photos are in an album.

Another feature includes the option to automatically put a copy of details from a photograph of a business card into the phone's contacts database or call a number in the business card.

Samsung is also promising an instant translation between 10 different languages for certain applications, as well as a separate translation application on the device.

The device also has a 13-megapixel camera, compared with the S3's 8-megapixel camera.

"They kind of cherry-picked features that other competitors had, and then packed them up all together into one device," said Gartner analyst Carolina Milanesi.

"The story though is more about who Samsung is and where they want to be. It is clear today that they want to play in an ecosystem game, their own ecosystem. The word Android didn't come up once." ( Reuters )

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