Samsung Galaxy S4, As Good As It Gets? #samsung @samsungmobileus #review #s4

Everyone wants to know what the deal is with the Samsung Galaxy S4.

“Is it worth a switch from Apple?”

“Is it worth and upgrade from the S3?”

There has been a lot of press and events surrounding this device, not to mention the Apple v. Samsung trials over the past year.

The honest truth is: The S4 is a great phone with a good amount of features you will use daily and a host of others that you probably won’t ever use. That’s the S4 dilemma.

The three features that have risen to the top through daily use are the amazing screen, the camera and the built in IR which gives you the ability to control any television.

The screen is a Super AMOLED capacitive screen with Gorilla Glass (for those of you with broken phone screens). Pictures look amazing. so does video playback. In other words, it’s pretty to look at.

For the camera options, off the bat you are starting with a 13mp rear camera, with LED flash, and a 2mp front facing camera. To make it even better you have multiple 13 shooting modes to choose from. The favorite being the Best Photo feature that takes 8 quick photos in succession and leaves you to decide which is the best. There are others that include the ability to take a photo and include a snippet of sound, one that allows you to erase a photo bomber and another that allows you to take a photo and animate one section of it. All great features, and in a month of use I have only used 2 of the 13 modes.

Other “neat tricks” of the S4 include the use of the optical reader function to translate words on-the-fly via the viewfinder, the Smart Stay feature which allows video playback to stop when your eyes move away from the screen and the hover feature that allows you to swipe your screen and choose options without touching your device.

All are great options and I haven’t used any of them.

In other words, the S4 is a great phone with great features that you will only use 60% of.

I suppose having too many options is not such a bad thing.

Features:

• Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7
• 13 MP, 4128 x 3096 pixels, autofocus, LED flash
• Dual Shot, Simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization, HDR
• LTE Ability
• Li-Ion 2600 mAh battery, Stand-by  (2G) up to 370 hours, Talk Time (2G) up to 17 hours, Music Play up to 62 hours
• Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, temperature, humidity, gesture sensors
• HTML5 Browser