movable kitchen sink

hello everyone. so welcome to our final galaxy s4 review. we've spent the last couple of weeks working with the galaxy s4, trying it out, we've actually had two galaxy s4s here in the office. we've been installing various updates and roms and attempting to kind of find out whether the galaxy s4 really is going to be a disaster of a product or whether samsung have been able to fix a lot of the

launch issues over time. and what i'm really pleased to announce is they fixed the issues. so while our previous reviews were very much based on what we had in front of us at the time, what samsung have released to market. now they've got their act together and patched things up we're going to take a look at the galaxy s4 again, we're going to take a look at every aspect of the s4 from it's hardware to software to its feature set and we're going to render a final verdict.

so without too much further ado grab myself a cup of tea and let's crack on. so with one of the first things that we'll notice with the galaxy s4 is that it is a very thin device coming in at about 0.3mm thinner than the galaxy s3, the galaxy s4 is a very slim phone its weight also has reduced just a fraction but

it allows for an in the hand feel which in my opinion is second to none. i recently got hold of an htc one and in my opinion the galaxy s4 does provide a better in the hand feel. it's more comfortable to use for long periods of time for starters. on the side we have our power button and what's interesting is this has been recessed quite a bit, it no longer sticks out as much as it did on the galaxy s3 and occasionally it feels a little harder to hit

it's a little softer, although the actual power button itself has been made longer and i think that does actually help quite a bit. it's also been repositioned slightly so it's more within striking distance of your fingers. on the other side we have our volume rockers, again these have been elongated slightly from previous devices and again are galaxy s4 recessed more than they were previously, they don't stick out as much, they're more flush. on the front we have samsung's obligatory home button

which will always take you home as well as two soft keys which are capacitive in nature, one is your menu and one is a back button. on the top here we have our earpiece speaker as well as a front facing camera and two sensors, one of them being an optical sensor one of them being an infra red sensor i believe and the idea there is

the device can actually sense when it's next to your ear. on the bottom we have a micro usb and noise cancelling microphone and there's also another noise cancelling microphone somewhere else the top there as well and that's also where the 3.5mm headphone jack is and also the infra red blaster as well. in all, the hardware package that samsung have put together here the 1.9ghz qualcomm 600 snapdragon processor

2 gig of very fast ram a gorgeous 5in 1080p screen it's a great powerful package there's absolutely no doubt that this is the fastest smartphone currently on general release. where the galaxy s4 kind of pulls ahead ofmost of its competition is this beautiful beautiful screen i'm just going to turn the brightness up full for you now so you can get a real sense and as you can see it really pops.

when i've been watching movies, playing games reading text everything on the galaxy s4 just screams popping out of the screen at you. certainly on these high brightness levels although it's worth noting that the battery really takes a hit when you take it off automatic. it's very nice to see this slider available on the automatic which allows you to adjust the automatic top level of brightness so again you can pop that all the way down if youwant

you'll find that it's a very easy to use device as long as you don't have a lot of direct sunlightobviously. certainly for night time reading that's absolutely perfect and just having that option there does make a big difference and saves on the battery. the hardware aside the only other major changes that they've made is on the camera which is now a 13megapixel shooter it's low light performance is still substandard in my opinion

it's not as good as the htc one by a longshot in fact. but the size of the images, the 13 megapixel images come out at something over 3,000 pixels are absolutely stunning when they have excellent light and this camera beats every other point and shoot camera i've seen with ease, really with ease. we'll come on to that in a little bit. so with the hardware package with the qualcomm snapdragon 600 2 gig of ram, 13 megapixel shooter

and a gorgeous 1080p 5in screen the hardware package here really is good value for money it's along the cutting edge and that cannot be doubted at all. with some of the issues we saw with the hardware during its initial launch for instance the excessive amount of heat being generated the headphone jack fault and some of the other weird glitches that occurred during manufacturing those issues do seem to have been ironed out by either software fixes or through improvements in the manufacturing process.

we've received a later build of the galaxy s4 and we notice some of the imperfections were less obvious than they were on this day one launch model. that's not to say that you shouldn't check your galaxy s4 carefully, one thing we've noticed coming up time and time again is this silver band around the front here if you look down where your power button is you can see a slight moulding

occurring where it's actually gone on. if i just angle that slightly you'll see it a bit more easily. just watch out for that, i've noticed it popping up on quite a lot of galaxy s4s and it does seem to be the way this band is placed on to the device, it's just not quite meeting properly but like i say, as the galaxy s4 was rolled off the production line this problem does seem to be getting better and better as it were. so hopefully within a couple of months or weeks or so and that will have been alleviated

completely from the manufacturing line. so let's move on to the software which is probably around 60-70% of the galaxy s4 functionality you get from your smartphone. you might have cutting edge hardware but without software that takes advantage of it really all you've got is a really cutting edge brick. so, samsung have always been pretty good with their software on their devices. certainly from a feature complete point of view

you could describe this galaxy s4 as everything and the kitchen sink. running android 4.2.2, the latest and greatest coming from google it provides a very fluid operating system with a lot of really cute features some of them more useful than others but what samsung have done is kind of customised things to their way of doing things so we run on the galaxy s4 the touchless operating system or touchwhizz should i say.

and really that is a skin for the standard android which updates your icons makes things look a little bit pretty and just nice widgets etcetera and generally gives a more professional edge to android than you would probably get with stock or with some of the other uis that manufacturers have released. my opinion is that while samsung have some issues with their design language and can occasionally be a bit confusing in the way that they've laid things out their implementation of android their software layer touchwizz going over the top

is the best in the industry. having used the htc one, having used the sony experia z or whichever one is the latest one i can easily tell you that the samsung beats everyone with a spade a very very large spade in fact. so let's take a look at what samsung are offering us. so for starters when you first get your galaxy s4 you'll notice there's quite a lot of widgets and some icons

already set up. so, this is your standard home screen. they've included your almost now obligatory weather widget it's going to be a nice day today! you have the google quick search option which will also put you into google now with tap you can then do a voice search. you get your icons which are a standard affair an email icon which is a kind of generic email for pulling in things like pop3 and so on,

your galaxy s4 camera access to samsung's apps store and google play store. you also gain some widgets which are related to the samsung's specific apps really that they've created for the galaxy s4 this includes story album the walking mate tool, samsung hub which is kind of like a hub really for all of your media content plus anything that samsung would like to sell you so books, video, games, music

all of it's there galaxy s4. and that's quite a large chunky widget to be fair if you look at the size of that one there. just grab that. you can see it's quite a big widget. you then have have access to your notes some more applications, ignore that one it's just one i stored earlier it includes a chat application called chaton, group play feature which allows you to tie-up multiple samsung devices together and share content quickly and easily between them.

the watchon app which is an infra red remotecontrol drop box which you get 50 gig of free storage 48gig plus the two gig you would get free anyway for every samsung galaxy s4 owner. if you don't have a dropbox account, hit that, sign up for dropbox or log into your dropbox account and there you will get yourself 50gig of free storage hooray! s travel which is a travel recommendation system - it's all right and flipboard which is a third party app for reading the latest news, very very cool. so that's kind of the home screen area

if you pinch you can then gain access to all of your home screen areas quickly and easily and you can also add an extra one if you'd like to. you can add one there and it becomes blank. a long press on the screen i can then add an app or a widget go into widgets let's pick that sound up which is one of samsung's toys

and that widget is now available. a very very quick and easy way of adding widgets and if you want to get rid of a widget, long press drag it up to the top or you can flick it apparently the flicks aren't working do that again, drag it there and just drop it onto remove. so samsung have certainly packed out the galaxy s4 with an awful lot of software features but that does have a few downsides. these are all of the apps that are preinstalled as it were there were a couple that i popped on myself

my galaxy s4 earlier. so if we actually take a look at what we get to work with with the galaxy s4 bearing in mind that samsung have installed an awful lot of stuff for us to begin with unfortunately you can see that we have 16gig of available storage but quite a chunk of it is already being used up by the inbuilt applications which is a real shame. one thing that has been interesting to note is that as samsung have updated the software on the galaxy s4

they have provided ways for us to limit the amount of storage space on the internal storage that we're using the galaxy s4 can take a micro sd card as well allowing you to side load applications using apps to sd feature which will allow you to very easily oops, let's just go into here move the content of a game or an application and move it to your external sd card.

i haven't got an sd card in here at the moment but effectively if you hit that it will copy most of the game data across the sd card and save you a bit of space. it doesn't unfortunately work with a lot of the inbuilt applications but it is still nice to have that feature there. many of the applications that are installed on the galaxy s4 are google standard tools like google plus, the messenger, gmail and so on although samsung have also created a number of their own applications.

things like s health, the optical reader and s translate. we'll take a look at those now. hello everyone. so today we're taking a look at s health on the galaxy s4. this is one of the new applications samsung have put together. the idea is it helps you to lead a healthier lifestyle try saying that three times fast! so it will monitor your calorie intake, the calories you've burned and a host of other bits and pieces

and it uses the various sensors that samsung have built into the s4 to achieve this. so this is the health board and this gives you a round-up of your current situation so the number of calories you've burned your weight and your calorie intake and then also a series of statistics as well so you can monitor over time how you've been doing now it uses the holo style interface so you have a slideout on the side which is just available there from the chevrons and the walking mate

exactly as it sounds it monitors the number of steps you've taken. it sets you a goal based on the type of activity you want to do so in this case light activity and it monitors those steps. it will then tell you how far you've walked and how many calories you've burned. fantastic. and it will then break these down by days so you can see how many i did yesterday - must try harder! come into the exercise mate it will set you a goal for burning a particular number of calories within a particular set of time.

and how long you spent doing that. the food tracker allows you to track your incoming food so how much food you've consumed and quite cool, you can even take a photograph if you like or add additional food information so you can track over time which food you've been eating, how many calories and the application will update and adjust itselfbased on that information. one of the coolest things and something i already am using around the office is the comfort level and what this does

it uses the barometer and temperature sensors inside the device to basically tell you how humid it is, how hot it is. now you can set your comfort levels so i've set my comfort levels between 20c and 26c and humidity between 30 and 70. if at any time these drift outside of those levels into uncomfortable areas it will let you know which is just fantastic if you want to obviously keep yourself comfortable. galaxy s4

you know, being in a very humid country or being in a cold country like we are in britain knowing that it's a bit too cold and it's going to affect your performance particularly if you're going to be doing some running or anything like that, can be very useful. you also have the health diary which monitors your weight. now with this particular feature there's two ways you can work with it. you can either have the app updated by you updating the app so you pop in each day what you weigh or once a week,

or you can use some of the new samsung connecting devices by third parties which talk directly to the s health app so you would simply weigh yourself once a day or whenever and that information would be beamed directly to the samsung galaxy s4 and these various metrics will update for you and because it's able to update these elements it will adjust things like the health board for you, your walking mate and so you can see

that you are progressing and it provides a kind of more i suppose, holistic, is that the right word? view of your health. a very very clever idea. if this was just a health app that you had to bung in all the data yourself manually maybe not quite so useful and more time consuming but when you build this in to a connected health approach so things like s band things like weighing scales

suddenly the samsung galaxy s4 becomes a much more intelligent device and this becomes a very very powerful way to train, work out and keep yourself healthy. i think for a large cross-section of people who are into health and fitness the s health app is going to be a big win. hello everyone. so we're taking a look at one of samsung's cooler apps that they've released with this particular generation of samsung phones. the galaxy s4 they've got a system called optical reader and the idea behind optical reader is towork with printed text

in a slightly different way now it allows you to basically query a word that you can see written down and then pull up a dictionary for it as you can see and it will pull up things like examples of what the word means, how it's pronounced and if you want to you can even do translations so if i wanted to i could translate this text from one language to another so at the moment it's saying english to us

sorry, english us to english uk a bit of a strange one i know so instead let's translate it to french. so let's find a word, let's have the word never and see if we can get that word. there we go and you can see it's translated the word never to jamais. now i can't actually speak french so i'll take its word for it but as an amazing piece of kit

the ability to kind of focus on a word like this and have it translated for people who travel this is just incredibly powerful stuff. it will also read qr codes so it can pull data and things like that in that manner and also if you want to you can use it to actually take a capture mode picture like that and what it will then do is ocr all of the text and turn it into words, things that we can actually work with so if we now go like this,

select the text that you want to be detected and you can see there that it's had a reasonableattempt at converting that into text that we can read. and obviously edit if we want to send or share to somebody. now with any kind of ocr it all depends on how good a picture you manage to take, how fuzzy it is obviously trying to do it a bit like this is sometimes difficult the background-color that the text is sat on, the colour of the text, the size of the text

the font of the text there's an awful lot of things here that can go wrong and cause it to obviously make mistakes like blu tack and it's put a slash in there instead but by and large when we were testing this outside in good light and with reasonably large text we found the translation to be really spot on, better than we expected anyway and certainly as good as you would get from a

professional ocr system. all ocr is fallible as it were and will make mistakes and this one does a very good job. when you combine it with the translation aspect samsung have got a bit of a winner here it's a very very clever and neatly built piece of software. as an application it works well translating text from one language to another when you're out and about or in a foreign country. wow! galaxy s4

it's kind of breaking down those barriers that we used to have where you go to a foreign country and you kind of feel a little bit like an outsider. you can't read the signs you kind of wander around looking like a tourist. now you can have a bit more confidence that you are reading the signs correctly and that's a bar not something else you want to go into absolutely fantastic and what a great little feature to have on a smartphone of all things. brilliant. so that's optical reader.

hi everyone. we're taking a look at samsung's s translator on the galaxy s4. now when they announced this at the launch event i was quite intrigued it sounded like a really good idea. how well it would work in practice though, that remained to be seen. so let's give it a try. what we're going to do we're going to try and dictate a small phrase in english and then we're going to have it translated into french.

we absolutely love the galaxy s4 and this translation feature is kind of awesome. as you can see, the main problem i've found time and time again is it doesn't always pick up the correct english words so if you're obviously trying to read it in english then get a translation back you might not be getting the most accurate version possible. let's give it another try. we love the galaxy s4 and this translation app is cool.

speaking slower pronouncing your words properly does help. if you're a northerner like me and you tend to shorten a lot of words, you're in trouble! but you can see there it's given us our dictation as it were, the voice to text translation has happened quite accurately on this occasion now we can take this french and we can speak it back. now one of the things you get whenever you translate something is an option as it were to download a high quality tts voice for that language.

i've not bothered because i'm not really going to be using this translation app that much but you can see there how easily it works. and now if i wanted to, let's stop that now if i wanted to i could have the person speak it in french i don't know how to speak french and then it will speak it back in english if i wanted it to. so as a kind of combined application

it's very very cool and it does work if you're willing to give it a little bit of leeway and like i say you have to speak quite clearly fairly slowly and well pronounce your words. if you rush, if you use a lot of jargon, or anything like that then it's going to be a bit inaccurate. i would have thought it's much better at your standard phrases... please can you tell me where the toilet is? do you serve mushrooms?

and things like that, obviously not those two questions run together but you get the point. i think this is going to be a bit of a killer app for businessmen at the end of the day or businesswomen in fact, anyone who travels a lot anyone who finds themselves in countries where they don't necessarily maybe speak the language or have a pretty hard time kind of wrapping their head around that language to be able to talk to people

naturally as it were. but there are some limitations here as i say but it's very clever app and it's going to be interesting to see how this technology kind of evolves over the next year. certainly the s translator is a very good first attempt and one that i think is maybe it's not going to sell a lot of devices but it's certainly an interesting one to have on your phone. hi everyone, this is the samsung galaxy s4 watch on app. now it's basically like a tv guide but

more digitally led. the idea is you set it up with where you live so you pop in your postcode you tell it which tv service you're using, like virgin media, sky or freeview and then it will pull in tv shows and programmes that might interestyou. you also can pick from kind of stuff, that interests me, that interests me, i like technology i like news

i like sport and it will profile that for you and as you use the app and watch certain channels by pressing buttons etcetera it learns the stuff you like. now the clever thing with this system is not really the programme guide and the app, it doesn't show you the tv channel, what it allows you to do is to control your physical tv equipment or audio video equipment.

so what you do is you pop your device in front of the television and you go through the set-up routines. now to do that is fairly simple. you come in and you go to settings and you go my room and then these are the current devices i've got set up and i can add a new device and say if i want a blu ray disc player i then select my brand and it has pretty much every brand imaginable in there

so you can pick samsung. and then all you need to do is you press that button and it will send the ir code, the infra red code and it will ask you did that turn the device on oroff? if it did then you say yes, that worked, and if not you click a button and it says i'll try the next code and it tries the next code and you keep going until it finds the one that turns the device on or off. once you've got that you confirm and then you have control of your device

directly from this application so for instance if i want to turn the volume up on my television set all i need to do is come on to here and go to tv and then press the volume buttons. and my tv volume goes up, same with changing the channels, turning the power on and off, mute changing sources or if i need to i can pull up the dial pad. which will effectively allow me to key in the numbers for the tv channel. i can use my dvr or my av receiver,

and all of this is worked very very easily. i haven't found any devices yet, other than my playstation 3 that weren't included in here. hopefully the ps3 will find it's way in at some point but the really clever bit is when you then come to use the channels that it's selected for you or any channel available within the guide basically. if i go here i can see ahead of myself what channels are currently coming up. if i click on one and watch now, what it does is it sends the ir code for that channel

and it changes the channel for you. so it will type in 151. it takes a couple of seconds to do it, it's probably a teeny weeny bit slower than you keying in the number yourself but it is kinda cool just hitting the watch now button and it just doing it for you. and if i want to i can hit the record button and it will send a record signal to my tivo and say record this channel for me. all of this is done from one simple application and i must admit it does work very very well. even if the application itself is not the most beautiful looking i've ever seen.

obviously the ir section here where you've got your universal remotes etcetera it's not most beautiful layout and you can't customise it etcetera but it does work very well and really you know, what are we looking for here, beautiful or functional. this is functional and it does a very very good job if you've got the galaxy s4 this is something very very cool to try out. i mean, who doesn't have a televsion set or loads of devices that take ir these days anyway. it's another option to put your s4

into your life. quite cool. hi everyone, here we are with blitz brigade. it's a new title from gameloft that basically riffs off team fortress and team fortress 2. so the idea is that you're this group of guys and it's basically multiplayer and it's a multiplayer shooter

and it's done very very well. so the idea of the game is it can work on gyroscope or it can work on a normal control system, your left or right analogues as it were, but the idea is to kill as many people as you can on the opposing team hitting the maximum score which is usually 15 and thus winning for your team. you gain experience points, you can unlock weapons, upgrade your gear etcetera and it's very much like a team fortress game but with a bit of a cod mixed in as well,

bit of call of duty or battlefield. the graphics are absolutely fantastic, galaxy s4 really really really nicely done and on the galaxy s4 they absolutely shine. the game can be quite difficult to play especially at the same time as talking because you know, concentration is quite important but the idea is you'll have various control points that you need to capture you'll also have to defeat your opponent. the first team to hit 15 points wins and then you get an experience boost at the end for your trouble and i think i'm being shot at. all of the kind of classic team fortress style characters are here, you've got the heavy

you've got the infiltrator sniper guy you've got the soldier heavy weapons and everything like that and it just works very very nicely as you can see the frame rate all the time is just gorgeous really solid. occasionally some lag but one of the things that i found really really interesting as i was playing last night was very very little lag at any point, occasionally you'll see other characters sort of

glitching around a little bit but that's more down to their bandwidth, but you know, the experience from the client side as it were is very good. you've got the ability to zoom in as well, which does give you much more accuracy but obviously makes you a little bit more sort of vulnerable to attacks coming in which you can't quite see the same field of view. it works on so many levels this game and it's really interesting to see gameloft able to produce a title really of this quality. normally we expect quite a lot of rough edges on gameloft's titles, framerate issues,

compatibility problems the whole nineyards but here we seem to have an absolutely fantastically made game that works just beautifully. oh! shot in the back as i was shooting somebody else in the back! gutted. when you die there's a respawn timer that's about 10-15 seconds, i think it depends on the level or naturally, you can spend a gem you can spend a gem and respawn instantly

which is quite useful. now, gems cost you money you do get gems every time you level up but you only get a couple by the looks of it, as with every gameloft game this is a free to play title you will have to spend cash if you want to level up quickly you can take out like the equivalent of a monthly subscription for faster xp and obviously there's the obligatory inapp purchases you can use for buying weaponry and upgrades etcetera. you can see there we've completed the game or completed that level and

get a big experience boost and then if i want to i can invite all of these people to be my friend in the game. interestingly there was no kind of forced log in option here it simply asks you what your name is and then you can jump straight into a game which was really nice as opposed to having to register or remember what your log in details are or anything like that. it's been made quite fast and fluid to just jump straight in brigade blitz, i think this is going to be a title that a lot of people are going to be playing for quite a while.

the whole first person shooter action, the team fortress styling to it, is just brilliantly done. as you can see in the armoury, you have all of your weaponry and you actually have to repair galaxy s4 your gear over time as well so you need your cash credits you earn from completing levels and kills are used to basically repair your equipment and then you can spend gems to upgrade if you'd like but overall i would say brigade blitz is something of a hit and

gameloft have done an absolutely cracking title on this game, free to play and as you you're going to see the graphics are absolutely stunning. the gameplay is just as good as it always was and things are just as manic. there you go, there's the starting flag guy's just been run over, so the idea is i have to complete these races, by either destroying my opponents' cars by crashing into them or actually completing the right number of laps and making all of the checkpoints. the game is fairly free roaming in the way it approaches things, whoa, i'm being shunted,

because there's multiple differentways that you can complete the various course and checkpoints as well as lots of pitfalls and other problems that you're going to have to deal with. the whole point of the game is just over the top absolutely over the top and so you gain bonus points for how you crash into other people how you kill pedestrians etcetera. for instance doing a flip and then crashing into a load of pedestrians will earn you some bonus points.

you can imagine that at the time when this game was released that caused a fair few problems for daily mail readers! you know, bonus points depending on if you land on your roof crushing somebody, but as you can see the game is actually quite difficult to play while talking and i just need to reverse up here. the control system works very very well, it's very reminiscent of how the game actually played on the pc which is where i played it originally crashing into people earns you bonus points

as well as obviously your profit totals up at the top there as well which you can use for upgrading your various gear and we're just going to go into the arena now and we're going to find ourselves hey, it's my bonus, whoa! you gain additional bonus points basically forkilling as many people as you can in a short space of time. now pedestrians will actually try and get out of your way

but they're not particularly fast which is lucky for us really, we want some bonus points. overall the game plays just like it always used to the cars are quite slippy and so you're not supposed to have a massive amount of control over the vehicles, kinda adds to the driving by the seat of your pants, you never quite know if you're going to make the next turning properly or not and obviously, whenever you clip pedestrians and so on that can also send your car

spinning out of control a little bit of the galaxy s4. the gameplay, as i say is just fantastic, and unlike in most driving games, water is just considered another part of the environment for which to drive-through. there's power-ups as well, i'm about to run over one here that will give me a time bonus and and there's all sorts of crazy...whoa! let's try and flip our way out of there, maybe not and there's all sorts of little bonuses that you can pick up as you're driving along things like the crazy crazy spring

power-up which basically sends your car bouncing down the road, great if you're trying to pick up trick shot kills on pedestrians or for crushing other cars if you get it just right, invulnerability, all sorts of crazy stuff. there's a huge number of levels that you can play in this game and also about 9 different cars i think as well that you can unlock and obviously they can all be upgraded as well. i don't recall there being an upgrade option in the original but maybe i missed it, it's 15 years ago since i last played this game so i may very well be

remembering incorrectly. as i say, free today only. but the game won't be getting updates in thisfree version. there is a paid for version for â£1.60 the developers will be supporting that and providing upgrades and patches and so on over time. personally, guys, for â£1.60 you've got to buy this game. yes, it's free to play today but use that as anopportunity to just demo it and see if you like the game,

if you do, if you love what this game is offering, drop a â£1.60. it's a small price to pay for such a classic title and more importantly i always end up crashing into that wall.... there's my engine. it's cooked! and it's game over for me! ok, what i want to show you now is the samsung galaxy s4 camera. now as i said at the start of this review the galaxy s4 camera is one of if not the best camera in normal lighting situations. it's 13 megapixel sensor backlight illuminated

is absolutely stonking. however, where the galaxy s4 unfortunately falls down is in its night mode. it simply isn't as good as the htc one, not even close in fact although in full light conditions if you're outside on a sunny day the galaxy s4 blows away everything but dslr cameras. i use a lot of dslr cameras if you're aware of those they are effectively professional cameras which are digital.

and the image quality from those is absolutely outstanding. so when i gave the galaxy s4 a test review i was absolutely amazed at how close these images are to dslr quality a slight lack of sharpness and a slight lack of you know incoming color, or incoming light but overall this is by far the best galaxy s4. traditional point and shoot camera that

i've ever used. however, its low light performance as always it's very lacklustre. images come out very blurry, dark and an awful lot of noise when compared to something like the htc one where the low light performance is absolutely stunning but my personal feeling is it's normal lighting performance on the htc one is actually very poor. i know some people will debate that one with me but i think the megapixels race when you're

looking for perfect lighting situations, you know, bright sunlight well exposed then i'm afraid the htc one just doesn't quite have the same level of pop and clarity that the galaxy s4 has but like i say in those all-important night shots or low light conditions the s4 just doesn't quite have that same level of awesome but that said

it does a good job, you just have to keep the camera a little bit more steady and maybe take a few more pictures to get the right one as it were with the htc one i found that you'll actually get a pretty decent shot every single time in low light conditions. now on to what samsung have actually delivered with this particular camera. as you can see it is jam packed with different software features so as the aforementioned night mode auto is the kind of standard mode that it runs in most

of the time and in this it will automatically take a look at the exposure, the colour brightness of your pictures and it will select whether it thinks it should do a single shot or burst shots and you just simply select and you press and it will take those various shots. for some reason my burst mode is off. just a second there we go. so you can take 20 shots in a burst

just by pressing and holding on the camerabutton. you also have quick access to the video button up at the top here which will allow you to very quickly start a video recording. you can see there how fast that was. with previous samsung galaxy range you tended to have to go into video mode and then start recording. now, tap and it will automatically start recording for you. and you can then pause if you want to or stop the play altogether. and you can still take a picture as well while you are recording as well.

it's a very useful feature. but the other modes that we have available is beauty face which will do some facial enhancements like smoothing out wrinkles and things like that and just generally making you look a bit better best photo will allow you to take a series of pictures and the system will decide on its own which is the best picture or you can quickly flick through and pick one you like yourself. best face again will work for looking for the best

facial expression possible no more people smirking or not quite smiling all of its available there on the the best face and it does a pretty good job actually. one of the things i found really interesting in the camera in the samsung galaxy s4 is it does actually seem to be very intelligent, it does a good job most of the time it's only been hit and miss really in lower light conditions or strange lighting situations where it gets a bit confused.

sound and shot allows you to take a photograph and then record audio that's going on at the same time kind of like an audio video postcard of sorts. so you'll have a still picture and then some audio that kind of captures the moment. drama shot allows you to take a number of drama based shots and the idea there is that as you can see in this picture you would take a series of pictures of a snowboarder and then you would stitch them together with the software and it will create this really nice one image but with multiple transitions of the person

moving through the frame. animated photo allows you to record a series of frames then select an area that you would like to freeze or animate. the background will freeze and the object that you have highlighted will then be animated within this still framed image.

it's a cool technique it's been around for a while but it's quite nice to have that built into a camera. rich tone hdr. if you've ever played with hdr on any other camera it's very very similar here, effectively it helps to smooth out the exposure and the tone of your image to make sure that the whole image is as well exposed as possible and has an even tone colouring across it. rich tone hdr will work in the vast majority of situations

and i actually find that a lot of time when i'm working in low light conditions hdr mode is actually quite useful. the eraser allows you to as it says, erase people from your photographs by taking a series of 5 consecutive photographs it will then work out anyone who's moving around in the background of the shot rather than the people who are static the person you want to take a picture of, if they're moving around in the background it

can erase them for you. in my experiments doing this on a road galaxy s4 fast cars moving past it was incredibly accurate to the point where i actually wondered whether i'd taken a picture and there wasn't anybody moving around in the background at all. i had to do a couple of shots to make sure that i hadn't messed up when i took the photograph. it's a very very powerful tool

it works very very well. panorama mode you'll have seen this one on a lot of cameras. essentially it allows you to take a 360 degree panoramic image which will then stitch together really nicely for you. it's a real shame that this panorama mode wasn't replaced with google's own photo sphere technology which is considerably better than panorama

and much more modern as well. i remember doing panoramas back in 1996 for goodness sake. personally i think we need to innovate on this one. i don't understand why samsung would have left out such a key feature of android 4.2.2 and simply replaced it with their own rather lacklustre panoramic tool. honestly samsung

the sports mode is very good for capturing fast-moving objects. i tried this on a sports cars that was driving past and it quite literally froze the wheels so the wheels were spinning around, it was going about 30mph and it was like the car had been stopped in motion it did a brilliant job up there with some of the fastest frame rates i've seen coming off dslrs really really impressive and more important, no mucking around with settings. select sports mode, start shooting and it just does the job.

night mode will help to boost your images during low light conditions, as i said earlier it works but it's not as good as the htc one. now what we can also do is come into a series of settings up here as well the whole set of settings here so we've got sharing options, video recording options for video messages, capturing audio a night detection mode now this is quite useful as it will automatically adjust your low light as well as using the night mode.

so if you use auto plus night you're getting a boost if you have night plus night running you get more of a boost bearing in mind it introduces more noise. if we go into the main settings here you can select your photo size now one tip for you. notice here it says 16 x 9 4128 x 3222 that's not the resolution you want, that's only 9.6meg. come in here

set to 13 meg now watch. you see it's now added some black borders and you might think oh, that's a bit ugly and i have lost some of my picture. actually you haven't you have gained more of a horizontal resolution here. you can see there 3096 versus 2322. you're almost losing 1,000 pixels of resolution by going wide screen so my advice would be get yourself some extra crop. go by 4.3 yes you get some black borders but you're actually getting bigger images and more

horizontal resolution. you've got burst shot which you can turn on or off i would leave it on, it's a very useful feature especially if you're a google plus user and that auto awesome mode really makes good use of the burst mode features. you've got your metering there which is how it will detect your light and how it will calculate exposure timings. my personal feeling is i like to leave it on matrix so that i get a good overall weighting for the if you centre weight or spot weight

then you'll find that the very centre of the image will be overexposed or can be perfectly exposed the backgrounds will be muggy, muddy dirty and horrible i like matrix, i prefer an overall nice exposure. auto night detection can be turned on or off, depending on what type of mode you're in you can get some control over the iso and also turning on your anti-shake. and your video mode, pretty much standard stuff

set the video at the side and do you want it stabilized and in here you can set things like the volume key to be used either as a zoom or to actually take a picture galaxy s4. you've got timers, the white balance control, exposure values which is very nice to have some control over that you can see there that automatically lightens and darkens the image which is a very nice thing to have available. flash, turn that on or off, or put it on auto. the voice control which allows you take a picture simply by going 'snap!'

or say cheese or anything else you'd like to program it for. you can save the images straightforward to select where you're going to save the images to. all in all there's a lot of features here for the galaxy s4 camera and just to top it all off you also down at the bottom here have a series of filters as well very instagrammy, but if you notice all of these filters are interacting in real time which is quite a powerful feature. you can see there

i can drop a fish eye lens on there if i want. and the camera applies these in real time to the image. the galaxy s4 camera is certainly the best on the market only let down by its low light performance. for my mind, the actual number of times you take an image in low light conditions the tradeoff is probably worth it. yes, you're not going to have htc one clarity of images in low light

but what you're gaining is better images 99% of the time all-round when you're not shooting in low light. ask yourself if you're in the market and you're trying to choose between both cameras or both devices which do you spend more time shooting? if you do a lot of photographs out in the pub or at night then the htc one is going to be the one for you.

if you spend most of your time shooting during the day or if the camera is only an extra added feature for you, then the galaxy s4 absolutely wins hands down. it produces photographs that are both natural sharp and realistic more importantly. at no point do the colours feel over saturated. there's been a really really really good effort by samsung on this camera. let's take a look in the notification area because this has taken some of the

larger changes. what we now have is our notification area with the brightness control you can turn that on or off in settings and also the quick toggles across the top and while you've got more and more and more toggles, i'm not kidding you can toggle absolutely every area of the system from the various air view and gesture controls which i'll come on to in a bit smart stay and smart pause

to syncing, to wi-fi hotspots, they've crammed it all in here, and if you want to, tap that across the top and it will quickly show you all of the toggles that you have available and you can turn them all on or off. you can also go in and you can edit those as well if you like. so you can then set which order these various toggles appear which is quite useful. generally speaking everything is very android 4.2 at this point.

so your notification area can expand when you get certain messages from like gmail and so on, you can swipe them away as you would like. available also from the top here is access to the full settings area which has been completely redesigned on the galaxy s4. if you're coming from a previous galaxy device you will probably jump for joy when you see this. what they've done is taken what was a very long column a long stream of settings and they've broken it down into

settings types. so we now have one area for connections soeverything related to how your device will connect to the internet or connect to other devices like smartphones, your device itself so dealing with what features and functionality your device provides. your accounts, which obviously as suggested is all about things like your google account, facebook account, your cloud back-up etcetera, more which

is probably the least helpful destinations where they have basically hidden all of the things most people use quite often your application manager, your battery and your storage as well as security and location services. now what we'll do is go back to connections and let's go through these areas quickly. wifi is self explanatory. that allows you to set up your wifi, turn your wifi on and off, bluetooth for headsets or communicating with other bluetooth devices, your data usage which is one of the coolest things android has

which allows you to see exactly what devices are using up all of your valuable data allowance and you can set thresholds on those if you'd like to. you can see there all of the applications that have ever pulled data on line and how much they pulled. if i go into more networks i can set my flight mode on or off, i can make adjustments to my mobile network if i have my sim card in there tethering portable hotspots, this is a feature that won't be available to all users around the world

it's very much a network dependent thing i know the guys in the states suffer with this one quite a bit but effectively it allows you to turn your samsung device into a portable hot spot so you can take your laptop or another wifi device and tether it wirelessly over wifi and use a 3g sim or 4g sim in the galaxy s4 to then access the internet effectively allowing the laptop to access the internet via your mobile phone.

as i said, some manufacturers charge extra for that, some don't it all depends on your network and where you are in the world. you can also set up a virtual private network as well if you need to connect back to a business base or something like that the vpn option's there. near field communication is there as standard as is s beam which are basically two very similar technologies. the near field communication is a contact system it allows you to scan tags interact with devices that use nfc

and s beam allows you to connect two devices usually samsung devices that you would tap together very easily using the nfc, it will then set up a wifi connection between those two devices and you can share information very veryquickly much faster than you'd be able to do it over bluetooth and less negotiation and mucking around with settings and is your device discoverable. don't worry about that flick s beam on both devices, tap them together, the system will take care of the rest for you

and you just share your data between them. nearby devices is for dlna which is a way that you can have media content available on the local network and your samsung device can connect to that content and start streaming it straight to the device. really really cool. screen mirroring allows you to take the samsung galaxy s4 content

and throw it onto another device so you can take the entire output that's appearing on this device right now and display it on a television set and that can be done with screen mirroring. kies via wifi is samsung's updating back-up utility for your pc and that option is available in there as well. within my galaxy s4 we have lots and lots of options

and one of the key ones is the lock screen. it's also one of the more complicated areas. what samsung have done is adopted the android 4.2.2 lock screen widgets. now what this allows for a lock screen that is more interactive and more useful. yes you've got your standard lock screens so you can swipe to unlock, have a face unlock, face and voice, pattern pin or password or turn it off completely. what you can also do is add widgets onto your home screen and add lock screen widgets as well

things like your camera app personal message. you have unlock effect which is either a light or a ripple or none and really that's just a cute little feature on there if nothing else. would you like the help text on the home screen just to remind you how these features work and you can wake up in the lock screen aswell. you can set a wake-up command so you can say something like samsung wake up

and the lock screen will disable itself. we're going to take a quick look at these widgets now, let's have a quick look. so we'll turn the device off and go back to our lock screen and if i place my finger, you'll see where it says this life companion bit here? if i was to place my finger here it will log me in to the device. if i place my finger here and just swipe you can then see a series of widgets that i've added and this is where you can add a widget, so let's add one. and let's just quickly add one for the s planner.

and you can see there i now have my s planner available on my lock screen. my lock screen is still down here, there's my lock but i've now got more information. now if i swipe over onto the right side a left swipe as it were, that brings me into a series of icons which i can customize and these are quick launch icons effectively. so if i want to i can get rid of a few of these and add some other ones in instead.

and this is a really quick and easy way of being able to add new icons giving quick access from your launch screen without having to go into the main device itself. now there are security implications of doing this. there are certain devices i would certainly say you want to keep off this particular area of the lock screen, anything that might run you up data charges and anything where you are concerned about your privacy.

do not put them on this lock screen. simple as that. but the idea of being able to have more customization on your lock screen add a little bit of personality to it gain more information quickly at a glance is fantastic and the way that samsung have actually designed this

is nice, especially with this really cool message available on the front end. so with this particular feature you can change the message that appears on your lock screen. it's just nice for a little bit of extra customization gives you a little bit of wow factor as it were. and we can also go in and change

the font on that and you can also change the colour of it as well let's have a nice fetching green shall we? and you can also turn the clock on or off if you want to as well and it just works nicely and like i say it adds that extra little bit of flash to it that you know, let's face it a lot of these devices are going to be sold and anything that allows you to personalise it just a little bit more to make it just a little

bit more unique is always well worth it and welcome. so let's go back into settings shall we? so we've taken a look at the lockscreen, there's quite a lot of options in here, you have the shortcuts as well which are available along the bottom. same advice as with the suppose you'd call it the icon area as it were on the widget screen, you want to keep these icons only that you're comfortable with. if there's any of these which are considered privacy of the data or running up

charges don't have them on your lock screen, it's as simple as that. moving on to the display area you can change quite a lot of options for the display including the wallpaper the notification panel and whether you want multi window options. multi window is kinda cool we'll come back onto that in a moment. but galaxy s4 screen mode this is where you can set

how your display is going to handle certain types of content. now adapt display is how it's set as default and that's quite useful it will automatically analyse your content and it will decide what it needs to tweak on the screen boosting your colours or contrast turn the brightness down etcetera and it will do that automatically for you to try and create the best experience possible but as you can see if we look at this image here as we move between these various options it's then just lightly changing some of these functions

so you can see here that the colour is being boosted in this red area as we move around. the image is becoming lighter and darker and so on and really the adapt technology is probably the best way to use the device. it will stop you from using too much battery because you are pushing too much colour etcetera when you don't really need to in that particular situation. your brightness control

self explanatory you've got the automatic brightness option there which has a number of different stages of auto brightness which are very useful plus and minus five off the centre line. auto screen rotation which will allow you to automatically have the screen rotate around for you depending on orientation. this can also work with the smart stay utility as well so it will know whether you're looking at the screen or not. screen timeout

sets how long you would like the device to stay on for. one really interesting thing to note from my time with the htc one htc have done something strange where it goes from basically 15, 30, one minute, two minutes and 10 minutes on the timer there's no 5 minute timer so your choice is either two minutes orten minutes for the timeout. luckily samsung have put a 5 minute timer on theirs which is probably quite preferable for most people

i don't understand why you would jump from 2 minutes to 10 minutes on the htc one. but samsung have made sure that they give you the option of nice step changes. daydream is a feature i've not really spent much time with because it conflicts a little bit with some of my other technologies like my dock. but essentially it allows you to have images scrolling past your screen while it's charging. big deal!

it's really just a cute little feature i don't think very many people will actually use it. it kind of turns your smartphone into one of thoseanimated picture frames. i'm not so enthusiastic about that. font styles, kind of useful. really this is more for just giving your device a little bit more of personality you can get more fonts online. i would say be very careful with this. it's very easy to use a font that you think is going to look absolutely awesome and it makes the display pretty much unreadable.

so do be careful with that font option like i say very very easy to mess your display up to the point where you can't really read the text well galaxy s4 in all situations. in my opinion the fonts they've provided as default do a good all round job. now this is a new option here, increased legibility. this is coming through on a number of the updated roms i believe, we've seen them coming through from samsung and it does actually boost readability of the text. can you see here

things are a little bit cartoony at this point with the text? i've just turned that feature off so what i'm going to do i'm just going to pop it back on and you'll see the difference it actually makes. the fonts become a little less rounded in myopinion they have certain amount of more aliasing to them that just gives it more pop. my first thought when i turned this feature on a couple of days ago was my eyes, my eyes, my eyes are going funny but actually i think previously

the fonts weren't as easy to read. now, once you get used to the changeover if you've obviously come from a device prior to having this feature available it takes maybe half an hour to get used to it because it does seem to change the definition of fonts and the legibility of texts increased quite dramatically but it does have a slight moment of eek! my eyes! it's quite a strange thing. let me know in the comments if you notice that same issue

because it did throw me a little bit to begin with. so that's pretty much the display area taken care of. you do also have your touch key light duration there which are these options down here the battery display percentage, you can set that as a percentage if you want. terrifies me because then i can actually see my percentage of battery going down in real time. i'd much rather be led into a false sense of security with a little green blob.

you can edit the after screen capture so if you've captured a screen shot of something running on the device you can go straight into edit mode. high touch sensitivity which is very much for glove wearing not have to actually touch the screen to interact with it. quite useful. led indicators these are the led notifications up at the top here.

you've got a very limited amounts of options you can change on that one. if you're interested in that particular functionality and gaining more control there are some really cool applications out there that can give you control of that. sound has an awful lot of options. we'll try not to spend too much time in here but really it's about your volume, the vibration intensity you're going to take when you get a call and setting things like your ring tone, your vibration, notifications, all of that. one thing that i know annoys me so much and a lot of samsung users is that god-awful touch sound

which they insist on having turned on by default. you can turn it off in there but that is basically every time you touch the screen it goes bloop bloop, bloop, bloop! after about an hour you really want to throw the device out of the window if it bloops one more time so there you can turn that off. haptic feedback is enabled

bearing in mind that it does drain battery but it's very useful to have that kind of tactile feel from the screen when you tap. and adapt sound which i suppose you could call it samsung's answer to beeps audio it does an all right job but what it basically does it performs like an audio test on you like you can get at the hospital to check your hearing and it will play a series of high and low frequency beep sounds and it asks you can you hear them or not

and you say yes or no. now, what it will then do is it tunes the output of the audio to audio you can hear and it will discard anything you can't hear. supposedly that provides better audio quality although in my tests i can't really tell the difference. it's not as pronounced a change as you would get from beeps audio and sometimes i actually felt that it made my audio worse by kind of

compressing the mid range just a little bit too much for my liking. it's a great idea i don't really think it works in practice. home screen. this is where if you're a user who is new to samsung and new to android you can switch your device into easy mode which creates very big buttons limits the number of features and functionality really this is designed for people who are first time android users or who are first time smartphone users completely. or for older users, or for people who may have a handicap where the interface is too small and fiddly.

i actually think it's a really great idea that samsung have done this. i wish more of the manufacturers would decide for themselves, well hang on a second you can't have a one size fits all for a smartphone, it doesn't work like that! people need to customise it and you need to have these two modes really available if you want to sell your device to galaxy s4 the whole of the market. because for a lot of people they pick up a smartphone certainly older users and they look at it and just go huh? what

where how? there's too much going on and apple has that problem as well in my opinion and so having this ability to drop the device into an easier to use mode is welcome and it's improved again just from a structure point of view has improved from previous versions.

it looks a little bit prettier, it works a bit easier. your call settings area as you might imagine, it's all about handling how calls will be handled so including your ringtones onscreen messages and notifications. you reject messages which is quite useful. if you get a call coming in and you're busy

you can just flick up and hit a button and it will send a text back from these predefined ones, you can create new ones if you want as well or delete them. you can set up call alerts, your various accessories so that if a call comes in it will trigger an accessory perfect for those in car kits. ring tones and keypad tones should the device increase the volume if it detects it's in your pocket? do you want the noise cancelling turned on? your video calls, what should happen if a call fails.

how are you going to handle voicemail everything is in here and also there's internet calling as well which i believe is a sipp option so you can use sipp if you want to if you are part of a network or if you like to save money on your calls. you have a blocking mode which allows you to as it might suggest block, so you can disable absolutely everything coming in to the device, any incoming calls, notifications turn it all off. you can set a timer when it will block

so for instance after work. block all of that and you can also say who your allowed contacts are as well so if you only want calls to come in from 4 or 5 people you can set that up everyone else will get blocked. a really useful feature which i will just turn off. driving mode. not something that i use because i don't drive but will allow you to pop the device into driving mode and it will handle things like your notifications for you

and stop you getting distracted while you're driving safety assistant is a really clever idea. it allows you to set up a series of emergency messages and pictures and that information can then be quickly relayed to parties in an emergency you can also set up emergency contacts in there as well so should you be discovered unconscious someone can

take a look and see who they need to call to help you. hopefully they won't just steal your shiny new galaxy s4, they'll render some assistance. your power saving mode is one of the most useful features ever on android and it allows you to drop the galaxy s4 into lower power usage. effectively it will scale back the cpu, drops the screen brightness, it turns off haptic feedback. that will just buy you a little bit of extra timeon the battery very very useful. accessories and accessibility pretty standard stuff galaxy s4.

accessories are anything you might want to plug in to the s4 or connect it with. accessibility helps provide ease of use for the galaxy s4 for certain features. language and input is where you can change yourkeyboard language and so on. motions and gestures probably one of the more feature packed areas of the galaxy s4. this allows you to interact with the galaxy s4 without having in some cases to touch you can use an air gesture for instance waving your hand over the device you can use motion like flicks to

move around the interface or you can use palm controls like that as well. and all of those are available in there. they're quite difficult in some cases to actually show as a demonstration something you're going to have to have a play with it yourself. they work well surprisingly well although they are a drain on the battery

so that's something worth mentioning. smart screen is well, it's a smart screen. effectively what it does it uses your various sensors across the top here of which the galaxy s4 has bags of different sensors and it will allow you to do things like keeping the display on while you are looking at the device. a simple thing you might think and it works really really well. rather than having to worry about your screen time outs and setting them, as long as you are still looking at the screen the device will know you are looking at the screen and not turn itself off. brilliant!

smart pause, likewise a really cool feature. works with youtube as with onboard videos as well or a video player. if you're watching a video and you look away from the screen because you're distracted the video will stop playing when you look back to the screen it will carry on playing again. smart scroll is a very very useful feature but unfortunately only works for the inbuilt android browser, it doesn't work with the chrome browser and it doesn't work with any of the other add-on browsers like next browser or opera. a real pity

but what it does allow you to do is to look down a page of text in the android browser and as you look down the browser will scroll for you. really useful quite cool to actually to use but so limited by the fact it only works on the android browser and honestly samsung need to make these things api level so developers can just hook into it. it's so stupid

having a feature like that that only works with the inbuilt browser. in my opinion, it might be the fastest browser on mobile, but it's not the most feature complete. and i prefer chrome so there you go. now air view and voice control these are useful features but again they are battery drains.

now the idea with air view is if you happen to be looking at a video or pictures in the gallery you can hover your finger over the element, you don't have to touch the element and it will show you more information, so it might enlarge the picture or start playing the video through. likewise if you're watching a video you can use the hover of the air view to

see what's coming up ahead in the video and then simply tap to move to that point. it's kind of like a preview mode effectively. like i say, these do use quite a bit of power so they're not always worth keeping turned on all the time. but they work and they work well, they're nice features the galaxy s4 has over and above a lot of the other manufacturers. voice control though, i'm afraid this is no siri and in fact i really dislike s voice a lot

having used it now for a couple of years it sucks and really samsung need to get rid of it google now technology, the google now app is substantially better. it does a better job, it's more accurate it's more in tune i would say with what i'm doing because it's actually working off real data held in google's cloud about my life

however the s voice option is good it kind of works but for my mind it just feels like a poor man's siri and a poor man's google now. and it's really just a case that samsung should move on from this particular option now. embrace google now. dump s voice it just isn't worth the time and hassle and it isn't

very accurate in my opinion. ok, so this is the accounts area. so in here we can add an account and there's lots of different accounts available. as you add new applications they'll also appear in this account area as well. you've got samsung's account, chat on app, dropbox generic email the google, galaxy s4 ldap support, microsoft exchange support, generic servers and sync with facebook. tap on any of those and you can add the accounts.

you also have cloud back-up and this is part of samsung's system and it will automatically allow you to back up things like contacts, calendars, memo, your internet backups your logs, your mms, your sms, and so on. it works pretty well. whether you actually need that over and above using your google account i'm not so sure, i think the google account probably does the job nicely yes it's not going to grab your sms messages but

it doesn't worry me particularly. you also have back-up and reset options as well. so in here you can completely wipe all the data on the device or you can back up the device as well from there. you come into more, access to our location services. so we can turn location awareness on or off or also set how it's going to use what elements it's going to use for location. turn your gps off if you want to save battery. in security this is really where things like the samsung security system kicks in as it were you now have encryption available, you can encrypt the entire device you can

encrypt the external sd card you can set remote control options you can allow unknown sources or set up device administrators or make passwords visible you can also install from device storage from there as well or set up your ca trusted credentials that's really more coming into play for business owners although there are some useful features in there for instance the device encryption for sd cards is very welcome. how many times have we heard of people's mobile phones being stolen and all their photos

being uploaded to the web. happens quite often unfortunately. at least with encryption there the sd card would be protected well worth using. the application manager handles all of your installed applications and any apps that are currently sat on the device that are pre-installed. it allows you to uninstall those apps

freeze them, do anything you like. if i want to get rid of chrome now come in and i can simply uninstall it. i can also disable the app if i want to, force the stop effectively if i disable it i freeze it and it will reduce its memory usage completely. in here i also have the option with some applications now to move them to sd. very very useful will save on that internal storage space. also along the bottom here it shows you how much space you have used up and how much space you have available quite useful.

the battery. one of the most useful areas of android is being able to see what's destroying your battery. and there's google maps as always really hammering my battery. actually using up more than my screen but allows you to go in and just see what is using all my battery and you can go in there and if you want to you can force stop so just stop that from using up any more power. the storage area it's kind of showing you what was in theapplication area but broken-down into types

so i can see how much space is used by an application by my pictures by my audio downloads and so on and how much i have available. if i have an sd card in there it will tell me the amount the space amount as well. i can go in and i can adjust things like my date and time set that to automatic if you want and formats and then finally you have about device and this really is just telling you

what your device is about so what your spec is, what software you are running or firmware updates you're running and also gives you your software update option as well hitting that it will check for software updates and it will download and install asnecessary. now one thing i'm just going to show you quickly is if you need to get into the developer mode on this device it's actually pretty easy. find your build number here and just keep tapping. and that will turn it on and browser back and your developer options are available there. now inside developer options is a few useful things that people might need for

instance some applications that use rootrequire usb debugging to operate properly. you would turn that on in developer. another useful thing galaxy s4 is coming down to this window scaling option here. it's been well known for a long time that if you just tweak these by dropping them by about half to 0.5 you'll actually speed up the responsiveness of the vast majority of android devices. you need a fast device for this to work. effectively what it is doing it

changes how long it takes for things to animate moving between application and windows if you have a very fast device you don't need as long a transition to cover over the loading effect that's occurring so a fast device like an s3 or a note 2, htc one or the s4 drop it onto 0.5 or turn it off completely and what you'll find is things are just a little bit snappier and you know

if all you've got to do is one quick little tweak like that just to make things a tiny bit faster when it's moving around. brilliant. just a very quick thing to get rid of the other bit of interface lag. now, this brings me on to an interesting point interface lag with the galaxy s4 was a massive problem when this device first launched. you'd see all sorts of funny little stutters when moving around. you come into the app tray, flick, and suddenly it goes stutter

and then picks back up speed again. and it was like this was one of the fastest devices ever made, it shouldn't have any stutter this thing should be practically pre empting you touching the screen and already moving to where it needs to be. that's an exaggeration but there shouldn't be stutter it should be so fluid. now what we discovered over time as samsung released firmware updates they fixed a lot of these problems. the stutter now happens,

very very very rarely certainly doesn't happen when i've been playingany games and a lot of the time whenever i've noticed stutter now it does seem to be if there is a background task hitting the memory the internal storage at the same time. or if i'm downloading something and then install just needs to quickly run and you'll get just a slight bit of stutter from it. that's pretty normal it's something we've seen on so many android devices over time. what was inexcusable was if you were going into the app tray or something and flicking along and the whole interface went into a stuttered redraw

it was weird and it wasn't really acceptable. as i say, if you now have a galaxy s4 and you have this new update or if you're buying a galaxy s4 over the next couple of months or so the problem has been eliminated. do not worry if you hear and read reviews from the first couple of weeks about how the device was stuttering discount those it is no longer relevant the stutters have been fixed as far as i'm concerned anyway. like i say, bit of stutter when you're installing an app. that is to be expected every android device does that.

but what isn't expected is any stutter within these interfaces. it should be very very smooth and fluid. there was a small pause there that first time while it first loaded that panel you expect that, what we don't expect is now that we're in here flicking backwards and forwards to suddenly get a bit of stutter going on as you can see it's absolutely fine and fluid.

everything exactly as it should be. overall the galaxy s4 has turned out to be a great device certainly i was really annoyed with samsung with how rushed the device was and how unpolished and unfinished the software was over the first sort of month or so this device was on the market. it gave a very bad impression of the galaxy s4 now those issues have been fixed, now the software has been updated things have become much faster and they've actually added some extra features as well.

the galaxy s4 is easily the device to buy. certainly in this form factor in your candy bar, if you're not looking at fablets you would be foolish to gloss over the galaxy s4 or pass it over for something like the htc one or the sony xperia z. or xperia x, whichever one it is. i get confused they need a better naming convention on the sony side of things.

but put it this way if you're thinking of buying a samsung device, if you're thinking of buying a new smartphone you need to take a look at the galaxy s4. do compare it to the htc one, do compare it to whatever that sony thing is they released earlier this year and i think you'll come away and you'll choose the galaxy s4. not saying that as a fan boy, i've got a htc one ready and waiting to be reviewed in the next couple of days. having looked at both of them having compared

them and having considered where the software is at now where these software updates have taken us with the galaxy s4 and again on the htc one, the s4 wins hands down. the only area where i would say you're probably goingto want to go hmm, umm and aah a little bit is when it comes down to the camera. if you're looking at the camera and you are going to be shooting a lot in low light

then the htc one may very well be the device to go for. but if you're looking for an all round package if you're not going to be shooting that much in low light, if you you want the large screen that pops at 1080p and has that beautiful vibrancy to it in my opinion the s4 wins. we'll see what the note 3 offers certainly my hope is that the note 3 galaxy s4 eclipses the s4 as the note 2 eclipsed the s3 but right now there is a king smartphone

now the software has been fixed the s4 wins. it actually is a better device than the note 2 right now purely based on the 1080p screen 13 megapixel camera and the overall feel of the package which at no point left me feeling i miss that .5 screen resolution on the note 2 and i missed the stylus.

at no point have i had any of that. this device will replace my note 2 very nicely since we got this new update. i've been really impressed with it. for my mind the galaxy s4 it's now the king device and it's going to be very very hard to beat. there has been some rough edges for the s4 it hasn't had the smoothest ride to market but samsung have certainly pulled their finger out and fixed everything that was a grumble on the galaxy s4 that i had. there's still a few rough edges here or there but i know some people are struggling with.

the screen blurring issue or the screen smudging issue should i say which seems to occur mostly within this area here it's anytime you have black as a background with white in the foreground and you move quickly people see this purple smear, i've not been able to recreate it on any of the s4s i've used. i've got two of them physically and i've played around with quite a few in different shops

and not been able to recreate it. maybe my eyesight is failing at the age of 32, i'm not too sure but that was not an issue for me. so, to wrap up finally the galaxy s4 is one of the most expensive devices on the market it certainly offers the most feature complete package both hardware and software of any device out there, it's only let down by it's low light performance of the camera. the software and hardware issues that

i was suffering from initially when the device was first released have been fixed with software, all in all there is nothing stopping you from buying the galaxy s4 with confidence right now. it's a cracking device and samsung have certainly managed to get the software fixed up and really polish things up over the last couple of weeks since the device was launched. absolutely no reason not to go ahead now and purchase a galaxy s4 and do it with confidence

be happy about it and be safe in the knowledge that the s4 has its head and shoulders just slightly above the competition right now. we'll see what software updates for some of the other devices yield but certainly i think it's very very difficult to say that the galaxy s4 isn't the best device on themarket today.

Author : indra

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