samsung galaxy s4 review

introduction

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the most hotly anticipated smartphone ever from the Korean brand, and with a glut of top end features, it’s the most powerful and desirable device Samsung has created yet.

One of the most impressive things about the phone is the fact the size hasn’t changed from its predecessor – the Galaxy S4 comes in at 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9mm (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 inches), meaning there’s no extra heft to try to work with in your palm.

However, despite this fact, the screen on the S4 has been increased once more, to a whopping 5-inch display with Full HD resolution. This means the same amount of pixels you’d have seen on a TV that cost well over £1,000 four years ago is now riding around in your pocket.

Let’s not pretend that Samsung is a pioneer in this area though: like a great many features of the Galaxy S4, the phone borrows a lot from the other top smartphones of the moment. Both the Sony Xperia Z and the HTC Onehave screens that rock the same resolution, but neither of them have the jaw-dropping clout of the Super AMOLED HD screen on offer here.

On top of that, there’s a much faster processor packed under the hood, ample storage space for media thanks to an expandable memory card slot, and the likes of 4G, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and pretty much any other connection you care to mention on board.

Samsung has tried to supplement this with a tranche of software upgrades too, meaning a more powerful camera, a better way to communicate with your friends and consume media, and interestingly a big push into health through dedicated apps too.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 costs the same as the HTC One, give or take a pound or two, on contract. This will still put it around £35 per month, which isn’t too bad for such a high design.

But before we dissect all the possibilities the phone has to offer, let’s look at the design. As we mentioned, it’s impressive in its form factor, thanks to the sub-8mm thickness, and at 130g it manages to still be light without shaving off so much heft that you feel like you’ve got a flimsy piece of plastic.

That’s probably the biggest compliment we can pay the Samsung Galaxy S4 – where its predecessor felt a little bit cheap in the hand, the S4 manages to bring a much more solid build and better construction to boot.

So while the “faux metal” band makes a comeback on this model, it looks a lot more premium. And there’s very little flex in the chassis when you hold it tightly, which was another problem with the Galaxy S3 at times. It can get dented very easily though, and be careful not to crack your screen if you do so – we’ve heard of a few instances where this has happened to S4 users, although that can be said of many other polycabonate smartphones.

That doesn’t mean that the phone is completely remodelled from the S3 – it’s very similar in appearance, so much so that a number of people asking to see it during our review thought we were palming them off with our old S3. The polycarbonate chassis remains, but that brings with it the faithful battery cover, which conceals a removable battery and microSD slot.

We’re not so fussed about the battery being able to drop out of the phone – so few people carry around a spare battery, and nowadays portable charging blocks are becoming so cheap and light that they make much more sense too.

We’d almost prefer something like the Sony Xperia Z, which has a refined and packaged chassis but doesn’t need a removable battery: it makes use of a slot instead for the memory card. This integrated nature would make for a slightly more premium feel to the phone.

However, it’s a small gripe with the S4, as while the cover feels flimsy, it’s better than it was on the S2 and the S3, and they both sold like hot cakes.

In the hand, the Samsung Galaxy S4 feels much better than any other Samsung phone we’ve held (apart from the gargantuan smartphones the brand used to make – the i8910 Omnia HD might have been built like a brick, but it felt wonderful to hold). The screen’s spread towards the sides of the phone means a much narrower bezel, and the effect is certainly impressive.

It might look very similar to the S3, but when you take the Samsung Galaxy S4 up close, you really start to appreciate the nuances.

We’d say it feels a lot more like the LG Optimus G range now – when we first picked it up, we were struck with how similar it felt in terms of sturdiness and the polycarbonate construction to the LG Optimus G Pro.

That’s no criticism, as the device was well built too, but it has a similar rounded feel. This is intriguing given the history of the two companies, and shows more of a leaning towards the plastic shell from the Asian brands in general.

Buttonry has barely changed from before – the power button has been shifted slightly on the right-hand side, and is now much easier to hit. Samsung has clearly taken some lessons from the Galaxy Note 2, which has a really well positioned power/lock button.

The volume key is less easy to hit, and could be lower down in our eyes, but the travel on both of these buttons is satisfying, and you’ll always know when you’ve hit them.

The plastic used on the home key has been upgraded too, with a more solid feel under the thumb when you press down to get back to the main home screen. The two buttons flanking it give you access to menus or take you back from whence you came, and while both are easily hidden, they light up nicely with an even glow when called into action.

There are loads of sensors on the front of the phone above the screen, including cameras to track your eyes, a 2MP camera for HD video calling and a proximity sensor for knowing where the phone is in relation to your ear. On the white review unit we had, their presence looks rather ugly either side of the generous earpiece, but on the darker models this is less of an issue.

The other notable addition to the design of the Galaxy S4 is the infra red blaster on the top of the phone. This enables you to control your TV, satellite box, DVD player, amp and even air conditioner. Again, this isn’t a new feature, but it works well in practice, and despite being small is powerful enough indeed.

Other than that, there’s not a lot more to say about the design of the phone, as it’s just a little underwhelming. We know it’s unfair to lambast a brand for not overhauling the design every year, but in the One X and the One, HTC has proven that it is possible to offer up a new design each time around and still keep things attractive.

Looking so similar to the Galaxy S3, you can’t help but feel Samsung has gone a little too Apple and created something more in keeping with the Samsung Galaxy S3S – a minor update to a great phone to keep those coming out of contract happy that they have a premium phone to upgrade to.

We do implore you to get the phone in your hand before making a judgement though – while it’s not got the best design on the market when it comes to materials, it’s a big step forward compared to the Galaxy S3 and allows for a grippy and easy-to-hold phone, with a whopping screen inside.

To just dismiss it for being plastic would be doing the S4 a disservice as it has so much more going for it than that, but it’s worth remembering that to a lot of people, the way a phone looks is as important as how much RAM it’s got on board and how fast the CPU is – if not more so.

interface

The interface on the Samsung Galaxy S4 isn’t an officially new release of TouchWiz, the Korean brand’s name for its Android overlay, but it does bring a whole host of new features to the Galaxy range, working best on the S4.

It’s built on top of Android Jelly Bean 4.2, which means there are several significant upgrades from the previous version, found on most of the other top-end Galaxy devices and, crucially, ahead of the likes of the HTC Oneand the Sony Xperia Z.

One gets the feeling Samsung has delayed Android 4.2 for the Galaxy S3simply so it can offer differentiation with the new model – things like split menus mean you feel like you’re greeted with a different phone, despite both the S3 and S4 doing roughly the same thing.

So, for instance, in the drag down notification bar, you’re now greeted with two icons in the top right-hand corner; one takes you to the internal settings from anywhere in the phone, and the other gives you quick shortcuts to turn elements within the S4 off and on.

This is an idea Google pushed with the new iteration of Android, and works well. However, it’s a little redundant here, as the phone already has these in a long line in the notification bar. You can also edit these quick toggles too, so it means that you’ll rarely push the other button to get the full list.

Android 4.2 promises further smoothness upgrades too, and while this works on the likes of the Nexus 4, we’re not sure what it’s really added with the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Considering that this phone is running the quad-core Qualcomm 600 chip, clocked at 1.9GHz and combined with 2GB of RAM, we would have expected this phone to run faster than anything we’d ever seen before.

While that is true for the most part, it’s only a touch more than we’ve seen on the Galaxy S3. Apps will open and close faster, but elements like the time taken to open the multi-taking menu (triggered by holding down the home key from anywhere in the phone) still take a beat to activate.

It makes us hanker for the octa-core processor that other parts of the world are getting – the reason being that 4G can’t apparently be added to that chip very easily, so we have to make do with a quad core option. It’s not as simple as saying that other version is twice as fast, as it’s essentially two quad core chips doing different tasks when needed, but there’s no doubt that the other version is faster.

In case you’re wondering, there are two versions of the Galaxy S4: one with the Exynos 5 octa-core, and this one (model number GT-1905) that has the Qualcomm Snapdragon quad core. This version is clocked at 1.9GHz, which means it runs faster in general – however, the octa core has two sets of four cores, with one for day to day stuff and the other for heavy lifting, such as photo processing and such.

While we’re miffed we don’t have the option of this other version (it’s smashed the benchmarks in many tests) there are questions about whether the battery will hold up as well as the device flicks between the two quad core processors inside – it could improve efficiency or deplete it, depending on the implementation, so perhaps bigger isn’t always better.

The general Android / TouchWiz interface is still the same as ever: this means that you can throw as many widgets and apps all over the seven home screens that you like.

It’s still a great way of doing things, and since Android Jelly Bean has been used you can now flick items out of the way just by dragging them onto the screen and holding them in the place you want.

What is interesting is that Samsung still hasn’t added the functionality to drag and drop app icons on top of one another to create a folder. We’re pretty sure Apple is trying to patent such an idea, but given rivals have managed to use this method (such as HTC with the One) we’d have expected Samsung to do the same.

It’s not a big deal, but having to drag an app to the top of the screen, create a folder, name it, then drag other apps in is a bit of a hassle.

One area that has been changed massively from S3 to S4 is the lock screen. Firstly, there’s a new way to mess around with this UI: where once you could only touch the screen and watch the water ripple around, now you can choose to have your finger trigger a little light that hovers under your finger.

Combined with the S4′s improved screen technology that’s been super-boosted, in terms of sensitivity, to enable you to use gloves with it, you can now hold your finger a centimetre or so above the display and watch the light flicker along under your digit. It’s not a big thing, but one that we found ourselves constantly playing with like tiny children.

The lock screen, thanks to the Android 4.2 update, now enables you to have widgets on there before you open the phone, enabling music control, remotes to display and messages to preview.

While there are some useful implementations of these (the music player is really handy to have, and can be resized by dragging the track list up and down) others, like favourite apps, really don’t help as much. You can still thankfully have all the lockscreen shortcuts, which means you can interact in the same way as before. To open the phone into a widget you just tap it then swipe below. We initially wanted to criticise the phone for this, but after a few days it really becomes second nature.

There are a number of issues we found with the interface though: for instance, Page Buddy being removed, which is available in the Galaxy S3 and Note 2. This function would display a new home screen when certain actions are initiated, such as connecting a pair of headphones or roaming in another country.

You can’t get this on the Galaxy S4, and its omission is terrible, as it was one of our favourite features of the S3. You can get recommended apps when you plug in headphones in the notification window; however, these are ludicrous in their inability to be relevant.

Plugging in headphones and being recommended to check Facebook, Chrome or Email? Doesn’t make sense to us at all.

Another issue is the volume bar – for some reason, using this causes terrible lag on the phone, with it taking a long time to appear on the screen when pressed, and at times not responding to input – then deciding a few seconds later to blast right up to full volume.

It’s clearly a software issue, and one that Samsung will sort out in the near future, but it’s definitely an issue.

We would say the blocky nature of the UI really isn’t attractive. It basically adds a load of features into a previously simple experience, which may or may not please some people. Thankfully, all this is switched off by default – and you can even have your own message saying hello every time you open the phone.

It’s clear that Samsung has toed the Google line in using Android 4.2 on the Galaxy S4, as this lock screen functionality is straight from the search giant’s design board (with a few Samsung design ideals placed on top).

It’s also present in the menu system, which, rather than one long list of all your options, is divided into four screens: Connectivity, My Device, Accounts, and More. It’s a neat way of packaging things all up, but it can be hard to hit the categories on the top given the size of the screen.

The interface on the Samsung Galaxy S4, to the uninitiated or the Galaxy S2 user looking for their next upgrade, is great. It has loads of innovative ideas and works blazingly fast. We can see why some people find TouchWiz a little cartoony and convoluted at times, but in our eyes this is a great combination of power and simplicity in a smartphone.

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy S4 camera is a big upgrade over other sensors it has put into phones, and with a 13MP sensor you can see why. It is capable of taking some stunning photos and comes with a decent auto mode, which enables you to get really great shots no matter what the framing.

This means you can be taking a picture of a landscape one minute, then trying to get an extreme close up of a daffodil the next, and the Galaxy S4 camera will handle both with aplomb. There are also a number of clever modes available on the handset that take their UI cues from the Samsung Galaxy Camera, meaning that a quick tap of the ‘Mode’ button below the on screen shutter will give you a scrollable wheel of options to choose from.

These options include Drama Shot, Eraser mode and Beauty Shot, as well as cueing up the likes of HDR mode to improve the quality and light levels of your snaps. For the most part they have a good role to play in your photography, and we’re glad Samsung hasn’t over-burdened the user with too many modes.

There are some issues with this method however, and we’re not sure how you’d solve them: Eraser mode enables you to take five pictures and if someone walks into the shot the phone will recognise the intruder and ask if you want to remove it.

This is a brilliant idea in theory, but the fact you have to enable it as a setting before taking the shot means that unless you leave the camera in this mode all the time, you’ll only get the full benefit when you know you’re likely to get people walking behind.

The other problem we have is the settings side of the user interface. We applaud Samsung for going with simplicity first – and by that we mean that users aren’t presented with a settings menu as long as their arm when trying to take a quick picture of a cat or child doing something funny.

However, as you’ll see in a moment, the Galaxy S4 camera does struggle in some conditions, and as such the only way to mitigate these problems is to do things like increase the exposure or enable night mode. If you want to do this then you’ll have to acquaint yourself with the settings menu in the top left-hand corner of the camera app, which has a number of icons to toggle on and off.

That said, what is on offer does really work. Night mode is a good way of increasing the brightness of your photos when things are getting a little dark – although you’ll have to make sure that you’re able to hold the camera steady if you don’t want blur. We’ve tried a number of smartphones with this mode though, and the Galaxy S4 was one of the better ones, plus being able to enable it automatically is brilliant.

Other tricks, like being able to take a Drama Shot, are pretty close to the innovation spawned from other manufacturers. In this case, the functionality is almost identical to that seen on the Nokia Lumia 920, although we’re glad to see it again as it does enable you to make some pretty funny GIFs.

The other new ideas, such as being able to take a picture using the front and back camera simultaneosly, are niche at best. Samsung made a big deal about this new function at the launch of the Galaxy S4, but in reality we can’t ever see a scenario where you want your face to be in the picture too. We do like that you can have loads of frames for your face though, so there are scenarios to use it – it’s just not a USP of the phone.

But enough about what it can do; how good is the Samsung Galaxy S4 camera in day to day use? In honesty,brilliant in many ways. We mentioned that it’s possible to take some stunning shots, but then we’d expect it from a 13MP camera with Samsung’s burgeoning photography heritage.

When stacked against the HTC One, the S4 is a superior device in one way, but less useful in another. For one, the focal length is much poorer, meaning you have to stand further away from the subject to get the same shot you would on the One.

In theory this sounds great, but as you can see from our comparison shots, the HTC is much better at pulling out the object of the photograph. Then again, the Galaxy S4 has a more balance composition, meaning the chance to get a brilliant photo is stronger. It doesn’t over expose for the sake of it, so while photos might look better on the One’s phone screen, the jaw dropping effect of the S4 is higher.

In low light, the HTC One with its UltraPixel technology is streets ahead of the S4, unless you place the latter into Night Mode after which it’s more even. However, the One manages low light shots almost instantly, while the S4 needs a lot of processing.

In short, as you’ll see below, the Galaxy S4 is a good phone to take a load of pictures on – one of the best if you’re taking your time to get it right.

If you’re looking for a more even picture with the ability to zoom in on certain parts of the shot, it’s a decent option, but for point and shoot ability we would recommend the HTC One (or even giving the Sony Xperia Z a run out).

Click here to see the full-res image

Smart Stay, Smart Scroll, Air View, Air Gestures

Smart Stay

Smart Stay isn’t a new feature for the Galaxy S4, but it’s a better implementation than we saw on the Galaxy S3 last year. Back then the result was a little patchy, and also contributed to some dodgy auto-brightness levels.

In case you don’t know, Smart Stay is another of Samsung’s eye-tracking technologies, one that can tell when you’re looking at the screen and won’t dim or put it into sleep mode as a result.

This time around it’s nearly flawless at checking out when your eyes are looking at the screen, although when it does get it wrong and things begin to dim there’s no way to save it (despite us blinking and flashing our eyes at the display in the vain hope the S4 might recognise the effort.

Of course, you could just tap the screen with your finger – but come on, this isn’t 2011.

Smart Scroll

For all the brilliance of Smart Stay, the world’s eyes are on Smart Scroll (sorry). This technology was designed to also monitor your eyes, but when it notes you’re looking at the phone the Galaxy S4 will enable you to tilt the handset back and forth to move the text or email you’re trying to read up and down the screen.

Well, this is what Samsung said at the Galaxy S4 launch, but it turns out that there’s another, more cool, trick at work here: you can hold the phone steady and tilt your head up and down to achieve the same thing.

You have to make a pretty strong movement with your head to make this function work, but when it does it’s pretty cool indeed and one of the ‘down the pub’ moments that will make people sit up and take notice.

However, and this is a big one: because the feature isn’t perfect, we can’t say it’s a useful way to navigate around the screen. It’s cool that you can choose to either make the screen scroll using your head or tilting the screen, and then you can select the speed of the scrolling too.

You can also decide whether to have the annoying eye icon pop up on the screen to alert you that the Smart Scroll function is working. So while it doesn’t really work every time and sometimes messes up, it’s cool to have – although we still have the issue of using your finger being a more useful way of scrolling around a screen.

With something like Smart Scroll it has to be flawless to be considered a useful part of life, and would have mitigated the issues we found with the actual need for it. But as it’s slightly buggy and dependent on a number of factors (such as lighting conditions) we just found that after a few days it got turned off – and we fear that’s the way it would stay for most for the next two years.

Air View

One of the new features of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is Air View – well, it’s not new per se as we’ve seen it on the Galaxy Note 2 already. But where that device needed the S Pen to work, the S4 only needs a finger, which you hover over certain items to see inside without opening.

Samsung has imbued a number of applications with this functionality, but in truth only a few really need it. For instance, being able to see which speed dials are assigned to which number is really useful, as otherwise you’d just have to press and find out.

Less useful are things like video scrolling, where you can flick through the video using the timeline bar without having to disturb the main action. While this is a useful feature, there’s not a lot of point to having to hover the finger over the screen to achieve it when you can just slide your finger on the screen, which is a much easier way of doing things.

What’s nice is that in the Setting menu you can choose what Air View is used for, so that means you can turn it on for emails and messages, but off for video previews and magnifying the web.

The only problem is that you’ll have to get used to holding your finger further from the screen, as the screen is a sensitive little monkey. You’ll be scrolling through an email and suddenly you’ll see items flashing up all over the place, meaning you’ll want to turn off the function. We’d say it’s worth putting in the effort to get better with it, but we’d rather Samsung got even more granular here to let us turn off Air View in email, where it’s easier to trigger and less useful, but keep it in calendar, where it’s a blooming godsend.

That said, it’s still probably one of the best innovations used on the Galaxy S4, and we’re glad it’s been added in.

Air gestures

Where Air View was useful, here we come to one of the things we thought was the least practical things on the phone in our hands on preview: Air gestures. It’s designed to let you simply wipe your hand over the front of the phone without touching it and means you can skip tracks, move between photos and answer calls without touching the phone.

We’ll say that the latter functionality is good, but only when you’re in a hands free situation, such as the car. There you don’t want to be having to root around for the ‘Call accept’ function when you’re supposed to have two hands on the wheel, where a simple wipe to answer is really cool.

We’ve got nothing against the option of doing things this way, and it’s not a lot more accurate with the new software update. This means that there’s no more (well, nearly) missed gestures, and it won’t activate when we don’t want it to, which is another real bugbear we found at the start.

Other uses, such as moving between tabs in the internet browser and moving app icons around, are cool and could be useful in very niche situations… but it’s still not really better than just touching the screen and doing it without worry.

There are some more instances where it’s really, really useful – you can wipe over the screen and flick through PDF pages, scroll through web pages a large jump at a time or flip between tabs.

It’s a clever system, but like we said, it’s not useful enough – it’s cool to do, but takes a little more effort than it should to be a natural flowing part of your phone use.

Like so many new features on the Galaxy S4, a little annoyance means you’ll turn them off, and it’s unlikely you’ll ever turn them on again, which makes us feel bad for all those engineers that were asked to come up with all this innovation.

WatchON and S Health

WatchON

WatchON is Samsung’s attempt to make the Galaxy S4 into the remote that controls your whole home, and given the power of the infrared (IR) blaster on the top of the phone, it makes a decent fist of it for the most part.

The application comes with a number of other elements too, but let’s focus on the remote part first, as it’s still a novelty to those that haven’t got a modern tablet or tried the likes of the HTC One or LG Optimus G Pro.

You can set rooms up, enabling you to take the phone with you and still have it as a remote. When first setting the device up, you can tell WatchON how you get your channels (through the TV, set top box or cable) and it can then set up the controller to work in the correct way by asking a few channel-based questions.

It works well, and we found it was really swift at getting the right codes for our devices so we could start controlling the volume etc without having to reach for the main remote. However, it wasn’t as strong as the HTC One here, as some of our gadgets passed the set-up test, but then not all the functions worked, so we needed to reset the codes, which was annoying.

There are also fewer buttons on the Galaxy S4 interface, which was irritating when even swiping down to the lower level, which is supposed to give more complex functions, didn’t yield the options we needed. It’s a good app, just not the best out there.

One thing we did miss on the HTC One, and enjoyed on the Optimus G Pro, was the ability to have the remote control pervade in the notifications menu or on the lock screen, and it’s great that the Galaxy S4 could do both of these things easily.

It’s a good remote control, if a little unwieldy, and it’s a real upgrade to have the option on there.

The other element of the WatchON app is the ability to have programmes chosen for you, with a simple tap on the thumbnail keying in the right sequence to open the channel on your set top box and have it working simply. We noted that although the genres were all over the place (not looking for content coming up, just suggesting basketball when asking for sports etc) when you keyed in your favourite channels and shows the WatchON app was good at suggesting the right content.

It’s a step forward from the HTC One option, and we liked the open and easy to use interface from the Galaxy S4. Also, unlike the One, there’s a lot more to choose from when it comes to On Demand video, with the Video Hub getting its own zone within the app rather than feeling tacked on with the HTC offering.

We’re can’t see a time when you’d use it as such, as the really annoying thing about the Galaxy S4 is you can’t stream bought movies wirelessly – only to a TV with a wired connection and screen mirroring enabled. Come on Samsung, don’t make a big deal about such a function then not let us watch things we bought from you.

S Health

Samsung made a big deal about S Health with the launch of the Galaxy S4, and it’s clear to see the intent: it wanted to get a slice of the lucrative fitness market, and wanted to leverage the technology contained within the smartphone already.

It’s a novel idea to have it so entrenched within the phone itself, but it does have some good ideas on how to use your phone to improve one’s fitness. For instance, once you’ve entered all your weight, height and exercise details, the phone can tell you an idea weight to aim for, and how many calories per day you should ingest to achieve it.

On top of that, you get a guide to exercise levels each day, in a way that mimics the likes of Nike’s FuelBand, which uses points to tell you how to get more active.

Samsung is clearly aware of this, as it’s even got an S Band accessory to achieve the same thing if you don’t have the phone with you – although we can see a scenario that when you use the phone and S Band together you’ll be getting twice the exercise for the same activity, which renders the whole process a little moot.

While we like the sentiment behind the S Health app, and the fact it works so much better than other similar apps, there’s still a lot to wonder about in there.

You’ll be set a ‘steps per day’ goal, and these are divided into Running, Walking and Up/Down (whatever that last one is). While on the days we did take the Galaxy S4 running it did have a larger uptick in the percentage of running steps, it was far from accurate.

Even on sedentary days, the S4 was congratulating on running for a portion of it. Seems a bit unfair to all those people that were out sweating and pounding the streets, but we took the kudos.

Perhaps we’re being a little hard on this app, as it works well – just too simplistically. You can track your weight here nicely (and even more effectively if you purchase Samsung’s Bluetooth scales) enter the food you’ve eaten to keep an eye on calories, and if you’re organised enough, track all your exercise in one place.

But there’s so much more to be done; what if you had running app capabilities within S Health, so it can monitor your runs in a similar way to Nike+, Adidas MiCoach or Endomondo? Samsung is missing a trick here – plus it needs to make the pedometer more accurate.

Group Play and Samsung Hub

Another big sell from Samsung, is Group Play – and again we can’t really see the point for certain elements. Yes, we know this is getting to be a theme with the phone, but bear with us here.

One of the most popular functions Samsung was keen to talk about was the music sharing – the idea being that if you’ve got more than one Galaxy S4 kicking around (presumably not by yourself) you can set up a Group Play group by making a Wi-Fi hotspot and stream the music to all phones at once.

The clever idea is that multiple phones can connect, and each can have their own speaker setting in a surround sound setup. The downside is that you’ll never have that many Galaxy S4s in one place, and even if you did, a single small speaker at the back is hardly going to be enough to wipe out your home speaker system.

We can see this being useful going forward though, as if you have other devices with Group Play functionality – such as wireless speakers – you can easily create a virtual surround speaker system using just the Galaxy S4.

One other thing that REALLY annoyed us was the fact that Group Play on the likes of the Galaxy S3 or Note 8.0 is a completely different app, despite having the same name and icon. You can’t do anything we mentioned above with these devices – you can barely connect the two together.

It seems an oversight from Samsung to remove this function, as many people will already have bought heavily into the Samsung ecosystem.

Samsung Hub

Building neatly on from the WatchON app, we’ve got the all new Samsung Hub ready and waiting to be played with. This is a much better idea than before, where all the disparate entertainment sections were scattered around the phone.

With this attractive hub, Samsung is looking to take a real crack at iTunes by making a holistic experience, whether it’s games, music or video you’re after. The UI, as we mentioned, is really nice, with swipes enabling you to get through all the content, and a home screen that throws up all the different kind of content it thinks you might like.

It’s not got a universal appeal, as even though you’re paying a high dollarpound price for the latest blockbuster, you can’t watch move that content onto your larger screen without a HomeSync device. Connecting to a TV or streaming using AllShare won’t let you play video you’ve purchased from the Samsung Hub, which feels like a massive trick missed here, although Samsung tells us it’s due to a licensing issue.

HTC Watch can do it, and the prices are often cheaper. What gives, Samsung?

It’s not really a great place to get all your content thanks to the really high price, and it would be excellent to see a wider remit by including third party apps to supplement the lack of functionality in places.

For instance, and we’re sure there’s a licensing reason for this, how great would it be to see Netflix in the Video Hub to enable instant streaming, rather than having to pay £10 or so just to get a video in SD that you can only really watch on the phone?

Accessories

When it comes to ‘things you can put on the Samsung Galaxy S4′ the Korean brand has gone all out with some ideas.

We’ve got covers, holders, things and stuff all over the shop – and we’ve got our hands on the Flip Cover to start with.

While we were given the delightful pea green colour, there are white, black, yellow and blue options as well, to give you that touch of class when protecting your new handset.

The cover is made from a fairly strong material, and adds rather a large amount of depth to your Galaxy S4. For some reason it is thicker than the main cover plate, which means when you fold the front around it makes a much larger phone than you’d have expected.

One of the main problems some people would see is the cover closing properly – it’s unfortunate that it doesn’t have a magnet to hold it closed, but it doesn’t ever stay open when flat on its back, as the soft material will always relax.

In terms of the ‘mini mode’ of the S4 when the cover is closed, it’s a mixed bag. The small clock mode is cool, and being able to answer and end calls with the front closed is nice, but the speed with which the S4 reverts to mini mode is poor, which takes away from the effect.

In short: the Flip Cover is much better than the standard option, as the little window is genuinely useful while keeping your screen safe. But it does add heft to your ultra-slim Galaxy S4, and doesn’t always work as quickly as it should.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life

Ah, the old battery life test. One of the world’s most difficult things to rate, thanks to the sheer range of things you can do with the phone to keep it from throwing out all its juice in a heartbeat.

If you can’t be bothered to read why, just understand that Galaxy S4 = good battery life.

For one person the Galaxy S4 is a treasured beast, only brought out into the dappled light to check emails manually once an hour for most of the day. For the next it’s an all-powerful media beast, one that will be streaming movies over a 4G connection while auto-updating every app under the sun.

Whatever you use your phone for, in our eyes it should be able to handle what the handset’s main USPs are.

But the good news is that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is able to handle all the things you can throw at it and still keep the 2600mAh battery chugging along at the end of the day. We found that in general use it was very well received, as nothing we found could hurt it.

Our usual test is performed on the commute to work, the time where we’re at our most ‘phone-use-y’. For this test, like all other phones, we streamed the audio over Bluetooth headphones (Rockaway Novero, if you’re asking).

A 10 minute cycle ride with music playing dropped things by 1%. Streaming video over 4G for 10 minutes with full brightness on the screen pulled down another 3%. Then it was more music for 30 minutes, which ate another 2%, and then downloading a 86MB game file over 4G, which munched 3%.

A little more music playing, combined with general email checking and testing out the air gestures, air view and smart scroll saw a battery drain of just over 10% for the hour we were trundling to work. That’s really impressive, as we reckon high drain capability of 10% per hour will lead to more than enough juice come the end of the day.

We never found ourselves in that situation, which is great. You can always pop in another battery, thanks to this being removable, but in truth, it wasn’t needed.

We will say that those that like gaming, movie watching and internet browsing will struggle to make the battery last on this phone, as the screen is the biggest drain. That sounds obvious, but we’re actually happy that the Galaxy S4 isn’t one of those devices that will see your battery juicing down from an overly-enthusiastic background syncing process.

Connectivity

Connectivity on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is well catered for, thanks to simply packing every kind of sensor under the sun in there. For instance, you’ve got low power Bluetooth (Bluetooth 4.0) which means you can connect to a wide range of sensors – like trainers – and have them send back up data without taking up loads of power and sucking the battery dry.

As you can imagine, S Beam and NFC are both present and correct on the Samsung Galaxy S4, with both working well in tandem to nab stuff off other phones which you’ve tapped the back of.

It uses a Wi-Fi Direct connection to make it easier to send items from A to B, and does do very speedily indeed. It might look odd, but we still believe massively in the power of NFC thanks to the plethora of speaker docks and headphones that now use it for easier Bluetooth pairing.

GPS and GLONASS are on board, as we mentioned above in the Maps section of the review, and combined offer a startlingly quick location time when firing up the mapping services. Seriously quick – we urge you to try it.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 supports all manner of Wi-Fi connections, and can hang on to the signal even when weak thanks to dual-channel bonding to preserve the data transfer.

We can’t say that we noticed much of an upgrade over other models, but then again that’s not bad thing as most of the top end smartphones will now manage to offer decent Wi-Fi connections given they’re so crucial to the running of the phone.

When downloading large files we did notice some dropouts and speed losses, but that was more to do with the server connection it seemed. A 700MB video file from Samsung’s Video Hub took a lot less time to download than a 590MB file from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

4G

We were testing the Samsung Galaxy S4 on the EE network, and if you’re new to the 4G game then we urge you to make sure you’re going to get the superfast service on your new S4, should you have got this far and decided to rush out and buy it.

From app downloads to streaming video, it was just so fast. Web pages load in a heartbeat, updates occur almost instantly and everything you could hope for is serviced by upping the speeds to 4G levels.

If you’ve got fibre optic broadband then the effect is similar – we’re loving the fact you can download things on the go at lightning speeds. The S4 is well set up too – we moved between two tube stops (overground, obviously) and managed to nab a massive 87MB of data in just a few minutes.

The data levels need to be watched though. It’s very easy to get over excited with 4G on the Galaxy S4 as so much of it is enhanced by the faster speeds – from video to music to game downloads, we found ourselves wanting to do everything superfast, and as such were heading between 500MB and 1GB of data per day.

So make sure you’ve got enough data to manage – if you want the full force of 4G, you’ll probably be wanting at least 8GB of data, if not more.

One more thing…

Oh, and a big shout out for USB on the go. It’s a massively underloved feature that enables you to connect a USB dongle to your Galaxy S4 and transfer files without having to fanny about with microSD card and taking off the back of the phone.

Yes, you need a separate cable, and yes, finding one is harder than extracting teeth from a chicken, but we still like to see it added as a feature.

Verdict

Many people will have jumped straight here to see what we think of the phone, so we’ll get the salient points out of the way first.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a phone that we really, really like. The combination of powerful innards, the market’s best screen and a clever design ethos all combine to make a really strong contender for the handset you should be buying when you wander into your local phone emporium.

It’s slick, it’s fast and it wipes the floor with the competition in so many ways. The 13MP camera is one of the best we’ve seen on a phone for getting thatpicture, with rich colours and texture the way forward.

We’re getting really fed up with the design criticisms thrown at any phone manufacturer that deigns to not make its flagship out of metal. Yes, it doesn’t feel as premium, but what you’re giving up in feel you’re getting back in weight, removable battery and general hardiness – the combination of Gorilla Glass 3 and a plastic shell mean this is one tough cookie.

The trend for cases is such that users aren’t even getting the full force of the design either – we don’t think that they should be necessary, but a lot of people are protecting their high investment. We spoke to a chap that went for the HTC One for design reasons, then showed us the huge case he carried it around in.

That’s not to say Samsung couldn’t do better with design on the S4 – there’s a lot more to wish for here – but it’s a much more solid version of the S3.

We liked

The Galaxy S4 seemed to be a boring iteration of the S3, and we were ready to be fully nonplussed by it. But you then realise that deep in the Samsung labs they took apart the older version and then upgraded it in nearly every way, so this really is very, very good Galaxy S3 here.

The screen is out of this world. Even at a lower PPI the 5-inch display dominates the competition. We love how Samsung has evened out the colour by default, so the usual ‘OHMYGERD, the colours are too over the top!!!1!’ argument is mostly moot.

It’s clear, bright and vivid, and there’s very little it isn’t great for.

The camera upgrade is impressive too – we liked the top end features and the sheer snapping power enabled for some simply divine pictures. The whole user interface was improved as well, which was a nice touch forward, although it still over-complicates things.

TouchWiz is an Android skin (Android 4.2, don’t forget) that rewards you for playing with it – and in today’s over-sanitised smartphone world, being able to discover features is a real treat to a lot of users.

Battery life is strong, 4G is a real step forward in speed and the addition of a microSD card slot is what we’re looking for in a phone still. Hear that, HTC and Google?

We disliked

While the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a much better phone than the S3 and most of the competition, there are still some niggles that we can see being problematic.

For a phone that’s so quick to run through nearly every task we were a little upset to see how long it takes to load a gallery up. This problem is compounded with a microSD card, and the more stuff on there, the more the phone has to parse.

It got to the point where we were embarrassed to show off the photos we had taken as it just took too long to get them up.

We were initially worried about the 9GB of internal space – Samsung tells us that the Galaxy S4 needs to eat up over 6GB of your 16GB allocation (on the base model) for a more ‘feature rich’ OS – but a software update has freed some more of that for use, which helps a lot.

One of the worst messages you can get on an Android phone is telling you there’s no space for new apps, as many will simply not know what to do. Thankfully, that message is less likely to happen now, even if you’re someone who downloads loads and loads of games.

But the biggest problem we have is with the supposed ‘innovation’ Samsung has brought to proceedings. Air View, Air Gestures, Smart Scroll – these are all cool in their own way, but all are flawed or overly complex, marring the overall simplicity of the device.

Compare that to the HTC One or stock Android on the Google Nexus 4 and you feel that Samsung is coming up with ideas for the sake of something new. We really do laud the sentiment, and you can just turn it all off – but then you’ve basically got a faster Galaxy S3 with a better screen and camera.

Final verdict

Make no mistake – the Samsung Galaxy S4 is far, far more than a Galaxy S3 ‘S’ – Samsung may be copying Apple according to some people, but it’s not as brazen as the Cupertino brand in flogging the exact same design with a slightly uprated processor and calling it a new phone.

The Galaxy S4 is a great, great device in its own right, re-inventing what it means to own a brilliant smartphone in a number of ways. The gestures are cool, the touch-less experience amazing at times – in short, it’s a wonderful phone you want to pull out of your pocket again and again and again.

The design issue is overblown, but pertinent. Yes, it’s plastic, and yes, compared to the competition you wouldn’t choose to spend £500 on it for the chassis. But it’s a very solid device that belies that exterior and shouldn’t be discounted for it, although it still feels like the cheapest of all the top end phones on the market – we’re slightly amazed that Samsung hasn’t gone a few steps further with the design after the S3′s criticism.

TouchWiz is getting a little complex now, though. The simplicity of HTC Sense shines through, and the HTC One is a superior device in many ways because the innovation is based on things users want. Where Samsung brought the ability to wave to move photos, the HTC One made the speaker better.

Where the S4 lets you scroll with your head, the One lets you take photos in low light. The latter feature is slightly offset by the S4′s auto Night Mode, but you get the picture.

But screw all the ‘which phone is better than the other’ notion for now (we’ll get to that in our best mobile phones piece) the Galaxy S4 is a stunning smartphone that won’t let you down for a variety of tasks. There’s no doubt Samsung will have to make a big step forward to keep users interested with the Galaxy S5, but for now we love the S4 and would be proud to have it in our pocket.