Air Gestures makes you feel like a Jedi, using an infrared sensor to detect gestures near the phone. This is great if you live somewhere with actual seasons, and might need to wear gloves sometimes. Other than that though, flipping through galleries without touching the phone feels kind of gimmicky. Air View (previews when your finger hovers certain things) sound cool, but I’m not feeling it as anything practical. These are all customization in Settings, which is a good thing, as all that IR sensor use can’t be good for the battery.
Speaking of infrared, my favorite software feature depends on it. Samsung’s WatchOn, a TV companion app that also acts as a universal remote. This came in handy when someone gave me an old TV minus the remote. The WatchOn software found the model easily and interfaced beautifully with our set-top box. I watch a lot less TV on the actual TV these days, what with Hulu Plus and all that, but the WatchOn software made the experience quite a bit smarter.
Less useful to me is Samsung’s new Easy Mode, a stripped down version of the OS for beginners. I am clearly not the target audience of this feature. I hate training wheels on tech for the most part. Additionally, as the whole point of TouchWiz was to simplify a complex OS (Windows Mobile, represent), the idea of it being so complex as to require an easy mode seems to be proof that it has overstayed its welcome.
“I still poop myself and I find this condescending.”
Getting back to useful features, Samsung also updated the notification panel to allow even more device toggling. As with the most recent versions of Android, a two-fingered swipe down takes you right to the toggle view, where all sorts of goodies are literally at your fingertips. Samsung’s implementation is actually a bit smoother than Google’s built in choice, and the S4 deserves full marks for that.
In terms of pre-loaded apps, there are quite a few. I mean, there’s a lot. A whole lot. BaconReader, 1Weather, CBS Sports, Drop Box, Optical Reader, Polaris Office, S Health, S Memo, S Voice, Samsung’s own app store, Samsung Hub, Samsung Link, Scout, Sprint Music Plus (making a total of three music apps on the thing), Sprint TV & Movies, Sprint Worldwide, Sprint Zone, Story Album, Trip Advisor, Voice Recorder, VPN Client, Google Wallet ,and the aforementioned WatchOn make for a crowded app drawer. Several apps aren’t removable (without rooting the phone), which is annoying but many are, which is an insane improvement over older phones.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my favorite feature, the little menu that you can call up on the left hand side of the screen. It reminds me of Mac OS’s Dock or Windows’ Quick launch. It’s not exactly needed with task switching, but it’s nice to have a second option.
As an interesting side note, this is the first phone where I’ve used the Swype keyboard the majority of the time. I found I was typing inaccurately (even for me) when not gliding. My hat is off to Samsung for including it.
Performance
The joy of the current cutting edge quad-core smartphones is that they work like a dream. We’ve yet to develop enough junk to bog them down, and that makes these phones awesome. The S4 is like the Optimus G in that going from it to a perfectly good dual-core device like an S III takes adjusting. It’s just that powerful. The power of the S4 means you can load the 16 GB of onboard storage with lots of HD video and actually enjoy it on the Super AMOLED screen (with 441 pixels per inch) without stuttering. Although all the power in the world won’t make this screen fun to use in direct sunlight; when taking walks in the Texas sun, I had to find a shady spot to adjust my Google Music settings and whatnot. That reminds me. This is a great music phone. Samsung bundles comfortable earbuds and the sound is crisp enough for users. The speaker is nice and clear as well. My only sound-related quibble is two-fold in that the default alerts are too loud even on the lowest settings and vibrate can be “heard” from one room over.
It doesn’t help that all of the pre-loaded alerts and rings are annoying as hell.
Call quality is, of course, a subjective factor that depends on the actual network. Techcitement’s Sprint review unit never dropped calls and everything was clear. However, Sprint’s 4G LTE network continues to disappoint. There were several times that the S4 was booted to 3G, especially indoors. It’s possible that this may improve with Sprint’s shutting down of the old Nextel iDEN network and using the bandwidth for LTE, but that means more waiting and in the meantime. Sprint users are paying for 4G and being beaten out by T-Mobile’s 3.5 G HSPA+.
One vast improvement on the S4 is the battery. A 2600 mAh battery works wonders here. Much of that power goes to fueling the chip and the screen, but even after that, the S4 had serious staying power. Most impressive was how long the smartphone ran after the “please plug me in RIGHT NOW OH THE HUMANITY” errors started. Assuming you don’t leave NFC, Bluetooth, and GPS running constantly, there’s no reason the S4 shouldn’t get you through the day. I would note though that you don’t want to leave the S4 in your pocket. All that power comes at a price, and that price is heat. The S4 can run really hot at times, much more so than the S III.
Comments are closed.