Jun 14, 2013 10:40 PM
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The Galaxy S4 has been in the market for a while now. The review that follows will be in detail about the features. Technical specifications can be searched and viewed in the World Wide Web.
Let me begin from the moment the S4 box was in my hand. The box is pretty cool. It looks as if it is made entirely from wood, but essentially it is made from recycled paper. The box contains your phone, a battery, and a charger, a pair of headphones, a pair of extra headphone buds and some manuals. The phone is very light at first mainly because there is no battery in it at first. You will feel as if you have 5 pages in your hands. One more thing is that the phone supports only a micro-SIM. The phone is available in mainly two colours viz. White Frost and Black Mist.
There are two variants of the S4, one has a Quad Core Processor and another has an Octa Core Processor. I bought the latter one. After you put in the battery and power it up you will be greeted with 5 inches of pure bliss. The screen is full HD (1080 x 1920 pixels). This makes watching videos and playing games a dream on this phone. The screen is ultra sensitive. You will feel as if you were thinking to click on this and voila it got clicked.
Now let us talk about some of the features which are there. This is a next generation phone. It has features which we see only in movies like James bond, Mission Impossible and those kinds of flicks. Let me walk through the features one by one.
NFC – This feature helps two phones with NFC feature to seamlessly share files by just bringing the bodies of two devices closer.
The Screen – As I have already mentioned this is a full HD screen with ultra touch sensitivity. I would advise people to keep the brightness on Auto mode as this will help the device to conserve the battery. If you run your hand across the screen, an instant screenshot will be taken and saved. so if you want to keep pictures of your important data displayed on the screen, all you have to do is swipe your hand perpendicularly on the screen and a screenshot will be taken.
LED Indicator – There is an LED indicator present on the top right hand corner of the screen. The RED LED lights up when the battery is critically low or when the phone is being charged. The BLUE LED lights up when you have missed calls, messages or any other notifications active on your phone. Another awesome feature which this phone has is that if you have any missed calls or messages, then whenever you pick up the phone it will vibrate as if to alert you.
Sound – The sound on this device is soothing. The speaker does not distort the music even when it is playing music in full volume. The stock headphones provided are also pretty good. Though I personally use BOSE headphones and would advise everyone to buy a pair of them as they are ergonomically designed and your ears wont pain even if you are listening to music for 24 hours a day.
Blocking Mode – This is a new feature on the Galaxy. This mode can help you disable incoming calls, notifications, alarms and timers, and all of this can be set for aparticular time viz. 9:00 A.M. – 10:00 A.M. And there is also an exception for contacts. So, emergency contacts can reach u anytime.
Safety Assistance – This is a particularly important feature while crime is on the rise. Just press and hold the Vol Up and Vol Dn keys for 3 seconds and an emergency message will be sent to selected contacts. You can also configure this to take snaps. The front and back camera will take snaps immediately and send them to your emergency contact.
Power Saving Mode – I recommend all users to turn on this mode whenever they receive the phone. This mode helps to reduce battery usage by limiting the maximum performance of the CPU, using low power level for the screen and turning off haptic feedback.
Motions and Gestures – This is a next gen feature introduced in the galaxy . The “Air Gesture” helps to flip through pages of a book or a webpage. So you will just have to wave your hand and voila you will be taken to either the next page or the previous page depending on your gesture. The “Motion” feature helps you to make a call directly by putting your phone to your ear with the details of the recipient on screen. The “Palm Motion” helps to capture a snapshot of your screen by swiping your hand from left to right or vice versa. It also helps to pause/mute media when you cover the screen with your hand.
Smart Screen – “Smart Stay” feature helps to keep the screen on at all times when you are directly looking at the screen. When “Smart Pause” is enabled, a video will pause if you are looking away from the screen while viewing it. “Smart Scroll” helps to scroll Web Pages/pages automatically when the device is tilted or if your head is moving up and down to read.
Air View – This is one of the amazing features that have been introduced. Even if you do not touch the screen, but bring your fingers closer to the screen, the screen detects it and displays a preview of the item that your finger is pointing to. This feature also helps to magnify words on a webpage. This is a state of the art feature that amazed me when I first saw it.
Voice Control – This is nothing new. You can receive calls and play/pause/next song/ previous song on your music player via voice.
Camera – Galaxy S4 boasts of a 13 MP camera. There are a variety of modes, namely:
Auto – Automatically adjusts the exposure to optimize the color and brightness of picture.
Night – Take brighter, clearer pictures in low light without flash.
Sports – Take pictures of fast moving objects
Panorama – take pictures in either a horizontal or vertical direction to create a linear panaroma
Eraser – Save the best picture after erasing moving objects from 5 consecutive pictures.
HDR – Creates a soft, rich colour by merging pictures taken at various exposures
Animated photo – Create a picture containing selected moving objects by animating certain parts of the picture
Drama – Takes multiple exposure pictures of a moving subject and merges them into one dramatic picture
Sound and Shot – Enriches pictures by adding a few seconds of background sound
Video – The video quality is pretty good and crisp in nature.
Now let us see some of the cons that are present in this device. Though Samsung has tried to minimize the cons but still it has some drawbacks.
The device gets hot while charging and using the camera. The battery lasts for only a day if Data Network mode is kept on. The charger wire provided is very short. This wire also doubles up as a USB cable.
Basically it’s an awesome phone with loads of features in it. And these come at a price. It will burn a hole in your pocket worth 40K, though you can lower the intensity of the pinch with a variety of EMI options available.
