NEW YORK – Samsung’s unveiling of the Galaxy S4 smartphone at Radio City Music Hall in New York Thursday night is more evolutionary than revolutionary with some smart thought-out features.
It will undoubtedly sway other brand Android users and is the best feature rich phone to hit the market.
After about 30 minutes hands on with the S,4 I can share my first impressions.
It has a larger 4.99 inch screen and is thinner at 7.9 mm and lighter at 130 grams in a surprisingly similarly sized S3 new polycarbonate shell.
Its generous rounded corners and fine craftsmanship with the right amount of rounded edges makes it easy to hold despite its large screen.
Where it stands out is in software features, doing everyday things more ways with a smartphone, including monitoring your health vitals.
My favourites are the ability to shoot a video in dual camera mode on its 13-megapixel front camera combining, at will, a smaller window video of you on the main screen.
The eraser feature – which cleanly wipes someone who inadvertently walks in front of your photo – is cool.
The zero-lag camera shutter can shoot 100 frames per second, capturing fleeting moments in drama mode.
Clearly the S Translator, instantly translating nine foreign spoken languages in voice and text, will be a great travel companion.
Story Album feature creates a story album from photos and a hard copy book album can be ordered for $20-$30.
Samsung will sell a boxed Home Sync cloud for home which will store media and give you access online from anywhere. In essence, a personal cloud.
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S Voice Drive seemed to be the most responsive for a Samsung phone but still does not live up to iPhone Siri for AI cleverness but does a good job getting around hands-free.
The screen even works when wearing gloves and it turns pages when tilted or leaned.
Group Play lets you share music and photos with up to eight other S4 phones.
Air Gesture lets you just wave across screen for some functions and the Smart Stay pauses a movie if you look away.
S health cam monitor body readings using the new temperature and humidity meters. Additional arm band-type accessories will be available for the S4.
Air Wave magically allied functions by waving your hand across the screen.
A special View Cover Screen lets you answer the phone while it covers the screen.
Is it a game changer? No. It’s a phone that can do more stuff.
Like the iPhone5, featuring more stuff is not cutting innovation. Its smart use of technology – much of it software-based – will surely show up in competitors phones.
The S4 will keep Samsung as the Number 1 smartphone maker. Samsung shipped 63.7 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012, up 76 per cent year over year according to IDC. In contrast, Apple was up 29 per cent after shipping 47.8 million smartphones in the same quarter.
This doesn’t mean Apple is in big trouble. It’s in a down “wow” cycle, against unrelenting competition from Samsung.
The combined innovation of all Android, Windows and BlackBerry phones runs circles around the iPhone, whose spartan flexibility and customization have spurred competitors even further.
Still, the iPhone 5 and older iPhone4s are hot sellers. It might surprise you that cellcos rarely get a first-time iPhone customer back for help, compared to Android buyers confused with the complexity of choices on their new phone. That costs cellcos money. In fact cellcos go out of their way to make sure customers know what they want and why, to simply avoid customer dissatisfaction.
The S4 ia a techie’s phone with features to suit many needs.
This brings to question: has Samsung outgrown its Android OS? It sells a lot of phones because of smart looks, “more” features and a huge marketing budget. But under its Samsung brand-Google layered features (that make all Android brands different from each other) lies an aging operating system that Google purchased in 2004 from Andy Rubin and brought him onboard to lead the Android group under Google.
A recent move by Google hints there may be changes ahead for Android. Just days ago, Andy Rubin was politely taken off the team and replaced by nine-year veteran Sundar Pichai, the senior vice president for Chrome and Apps. There may be a blending of Android and Google Chrome on the way, similar to Windows 8 and Phone 8 as well as Apple’s OS and iOS.
As the now de facto iPhone competitor, Samsung is also poised to expand in the global enterprise community. It is aggressively marketing a BlackBerry-BES like offering called SAFE, aimed at beefing up security for Android phones at work. It is layered and can work with other market offerings to allow employees to “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) to work, a growing enterprise trend.
Dual work/home modes under the Samsung KNOX brand, similar to BlackBerry 10 Balance, will soon be available to upgraded S3 and Note2 models in addition to the new S4. This would allow employees one phone with two completely separate modes for work and home.
Samsung’s aggressive mobile business division has an uphill challenge as most BYOD devices in Canada to replace aging BlackBerry phones are iPhones. Even if Android phones join the BYOD trend, Samsung will be in direct competition with BlackBerry Enterprise services which already handle secure business use of Android phones as well.
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