By Aakanksha Mirdha
At a packed event in New York’s Radio City Music Hall Thursday,after months of rumor frenzy and high-pitched hype, Samsung unveiled its newest flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4. At first glance, you’d be forgiven for mistaking the Galaxy S 4 for the Galaxy S III. The phone sports a very similar look and feel to its predecessor, in a slightly thinner body, with a slightly larger 5-inch screen. The phone has an updated 1080p Super AMOLED screen. Depending on the market you're in, you’ll get a 1.9Ghz quad-core processor or a 1.6 octa-core processor under the hood as well as 2GB of RAM. Samsung hasn’t been clear about the exact brand of the processor for the U.S. version, but it did say that it was a quad-core Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1.9GHz, which we believe may be the Snapdragon 600.
The Galaxy S 4 uses a new 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, bumped up from the 8-megapixel shooter on the Galaxy S III.On the front, the Galaxy S 4 sports a 2-megapixel camera. The Galaxy S 4 has a dual-shot mode, which lets you use both the front-facing camera and the rear-facing camera at the same time, for both recording and still captures. Samsung even jumped on the GIF train with the likes of Cinemagraph and Vine to create a gif-making mode, called Cinema Shot. It lets you take a short recording, and then determine which parts of the shot stay still and which parts remain animated.
Galaxy S 4 brings a handful of brand new applications to the Galaxy S family. The first, and possibly most important, is S Translator. S Translator is available in nine languages at launch, including Chinese, English U.S., English British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.Samsung’s Smart Scroll feature allows you to scroll through websites by tilting your phone. A Smart Pause feature lets you control the screen with your eyes. Similar to LG’s ‘Smart Video’ feature, the feature stops and starts video based on whether or not you’re looking at the screen. As far as NFC is concerned, the GS4 includes S Beam and TecTile integration, but Samsung also lets you pair with up to eight other NFC-devices to run a feature called GroupPlay, which lets you play the same song across eight different devices…
Here are the rest of the Galaxy S4 highlights to get you started.
Samsung Galaxy S4 at a glance:
General: Optional 2G/3G/LTE connectivity
Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
Dimensions: 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9mm, 130 g
Display: 4.99" 16M-color Super AMOLED HD capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (441ppi)
Chipset: Exynos 5410 Octa / Snapdragon 600
CPU: 1.6 GHz Quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 and 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 / 1.9GHz Krait 300
GPU: PowerVR SGX 544MP3 / Adreno 320
RAM: 2GB
OS: Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
Memory: 16/32GB/64GB storage, microSD card slot
Still camera: 13 megapixel auto-focus camera, face detection, touch focus and image stabilization, Dual Shot, Cinema Photo; 2MP front facing camera, video-calls
Video camera: Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, standard microUSB port with MHL features (TV Out, USB host), GPS receiver with A-GPS and GLONASS, 3.5mm audio jack, NFC, Infrared port
Battery: 2600 mAh
Misc: TouchWiz UI, Impressively rich video/audio codec support, built-in accelerometer, Smart stay and Smart rotation eye-tracking, Smart pause, Smart scroll, S Health, Air Gestures
Galaxy S 4 brings a handful of brand new applications to the Galaxy S family. The first, and possibly most important, is S Translator. S Translator is available in nine languages at launch, including Chinese, English U.S., English British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese.Samsung’s Smart Scroll feature allows you to scroll through websites by tilting your phone. A Smart Pause feature lets you control the screen with your eyes. Similar to LG’s ‘Smart Video’ feature, the feature stops and starts video based on whether or not you’re looking at the screen. As far as NFC is concerned, the GS4 includes S Beam and TecTile integration, but Samsung also lets you pair with up to eight other NFC-devices to run a feature called GroupPlay, which lets you play the same song across eight different devices…
Here are the rest of the Galaxy S4 highlights to get you started.
Samsung Galaxy S4 at a glance:
General: Optional 2G/3G/LTE connectivity
Form factor: Touchscreen bar phone
Dimensions: 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9mm, 130 g
Display: 4.99" 16M-color Super AMOLED HD capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels (441ppi)
Chipset: Exynos 5410 Octa / Snapdragon 600
CPU: 1.6 GHz Quad-core ARM Cortex-A15 and 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 / 1.9GHz Krait 300
GPU: PowerVR SGX 544MP3 / Adreno 320
RAM: 2GB
OS: Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
Memory: 16/32GB/64GB storage, microSD card slot
Still camera: 13 megapixel auto-focus camera, face detection, touch focus and image stabilization, Dual Shot, Cinema Photo; 2MP front facing camera, video-calls
Video camera: Full HD (1080p) video recording at 30fps
Connectivity: Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, standard microUSB port with MHL features (TV Out, USB host), GPS receiver with A-GPS and GLONASS, 3.5mm audio jack, NFC, Infrared port
Battery: 2600 mAh
Misc: TouchWiz UI, Impressively rich video/audio codec support, built-in accelerometer, Smart stay and Smart rotation eye-tracking, Smart pause, Smart scroll, S Health, Air Gestures