![]() The lone speaker on the Galaxy S4 resides on its backside, in that wonderfully unconsidered spot where audio is both muffled by your hand and blasting directly away from your ears. You really can't lose, and that's pretty great. Both are incredibly high-res, bright, and crystal clear the One is slightly more accurate, but I still periodically forget my nitpicking and get lost in the GS4's vibrant colors. I tried to pick my favorite between the One's display and the GS4's, and wound up going back and forth a dozen times before giving up. I turned automatic brightness off very quickly. The glass is rigid and responsive to touch, and works even if you have gloves on - which I shouldn’t have needed to test in April in New York City, and yet here we are.įor some reason, Samsung has always had trouble with screen brightness settings - the GS4 can never seem to decide how bright its screen should be, changing suddenly and drastically often and without warning. And with a ridiculous 441-pixels-per-inch, even the PenTile display matrix I usually loathe causes no problems. Those colors may not be accurate - reds and oranges absolutely explode off the screen, whether they should or not - but they certainly catch your eye. The latter is partially a bad thing: the S4 uses a Super AMOLED panel like many of Samsung's phones, and like many of Samsung’s phones it displays overly contrasted and vibrant colors. The GS4's 5-inch, 1920 x 1080 display is big, beautiful, and seriously eye-catching. The answer's simple, and luckily for Samsung it's also immediately obvious. Before even considering how Samsung can beat HTC, I wondered how such an apparently evolutionary change would convince users to upgrade from the S III, or to spring for the newer and more expensive model when the GS III is still a solid choice. Through my entire time with the GS4, I kept imagining walking through a store and trying to pick a phone. Samsung's feature list has to be awfully long to overcome that - and it is, but I'll get there. The HTC One is a powerful, feature-rich device that is also beautiful and classy, while Samsung's handset feels like an overpowered children’s toy. Samsung's proven repeatedly that people don't care about build quality, or at least will overlook it in favor of features and performance, but the landscape's different now. It's very comfortable for such a large phone, but I can't get over the gross feeling I get holding it. I’m thrilled the GS4 has a physical home button, with capacitive Back and Menu keys on either side. The port layout is smart: power button on the right, volume on the left, headphone jack up top and Micro USB on the bottom, with the SIM card, microSD slot, and battery accessible when you peel off the removable back. It's also an improvement over the S III, thanks to slightly flatter edges and shrunken bezels. It's not all bad: the GS4 is thin and light, and feels durable despite its cheap materials. The company made tradeoffs for a removable battery and a slightly thinner body, but I’m not sure those are features worth sacrificing so much for in 2013. It's a shame, too, because Samsung didn’t have to do it this way. ![]() That's going to be a huge problem for Samsung, because the GS4 and One are likely to be next to each other on store shelves, and at least on first impression there's absolutely no contest between the two. Everyone I showed the GS4 to frowned and wrinkled their nose as if it smelled bad, before rubbing their fingers on the back of the phone and then handing it back to me - that's the opposite of the standard reaction to HTC’s One, which everyone wants to ogle and hold. Even the silver band around the sides, which is obviously supposed to look like metal, is plastic. ![]() My white review unit is completely smooth and glossy, with a subtle checkered pattern that looks textured but is neither grippy nor textured anywhere on its body. ![]() It makes an awful first impression, slippery and slimy and simply unpleasant in your hand. I don't like holding this phone, and I can't overstate how much that informs the experience of using it. But copying the S III wasn’t a good idea. It looks for all the world like the Galaxy S III - despite having a bigger screen and more horsepower, at 7.9mm and 4.6 ounces it's actually imperceptibly thinner and lighter than the S III. Where Apple and HTC have both made beautiful, well-made, high-quality phones, the GS4 has Samsung back in the land of cheap, plasticky handsets. The GS4's primary competitors are the iPhone 5 and the HTC One, and from a pure design perspective that should make Samsung very, very nervous.
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