Samsung Galaxy s4 is not the best smartphone out there.

Thank you Con, let us debate....FIRST THING's FIRST, SO, "WHAT IS GALAXY S4?" Samsung's next great hope of a superphone. It's got a 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED screen, a superfast quad-core 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 processor, 2GB RAM, LTE, NFC, and a 13MP camera. It also has a beefy 2600mAh battery, and an IR blaster for controlling your home entertainment system. It comes running Android 4.2.2 with Samsung's heavy TouchWiz skin on top of it. With the Galaxy S III, the S4 will look strikingly familiar. It retains the same rounded-rectangle look, with metal edges and a slippery, finger-print-trapping plastic back that looks like it belongs on a far more downmarket phone. http://img.gawkerassets.com...; data-chomp-id="18ljnw6qvt22ijpg" /> USING ITThe touch screen has got an improvement but is nowhere near the smooth touch of Canvas4 HD. (a) The S4 has much software to work with and has air gestures too. Nice.PLUS POINTSThe long battery life as one! It beats other smartphones on that by a decent time. The big screen scoresThe flash camera is superb.CONs 1) The software always gets on the way... Big surprise to nobody: the software is not up to snuff. Let's ignore for a moment that all of the "innovative" banner "features" mentioned above are at best useless and at worst annoying. The rest of the UI ain't much better. For example, there's a "feature" that gives you access to a little drawer of favorite apps on the left side of your screen, called the "Multi window." Just tap the little tab, and the drawer slides up. The problem? That tab does not go away. Even when you're watching a video. http://img.gawkerassets.com...; data-chomp-id="18ljk3fwmgq4pjpg" /> Or there's the Watch ON app, which is a combination of a program guide and a universal remote. Aside from the fact that it's hard to navigate, it gets your TV's inputs all mixed up, despite the fact that I was testing it with a Samsung TV. Or it let me control my Roku player, but it forgot to include a home button, so you can't switch out of HBO Go and into another application. The phone is full of little face-palm moments like this. But the software's worst offense? It makes the phone slow. Well, not slow, exactly, but much slower than it should be. The Galaxy S4 has a 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 processor. The HTC One has the exact same processor, but it's only clocked to 1.7GHz. So the S4 should be faster, right? Wrong. Despite that fact that the S4 benchmarks better, the HTC One leaves the S4 in the dust in every practical way possible. The One boots up three times faster, navigates the UI quicker, scrolls smoother, opens apps speedier, and most importantly, takes photos with no shutter lag, whereas the Galaxy S4 generally takes about a second to fire off a shot.2) The features are rather annoying than cool. There are many things like Air view and etc etc... Sensors which pause video when you move your head... But the point is that one will never use any of them. Ever. Never ever. The end. Why not? Oh, lots of reasons. Air View only works with Samsung's customized apps—not Gmail, not Chrome—and even then it doesn't work very well. Air Gestures are less accurate and less convenient than just touching the screen. Smart Scroll is totally unreliable, and Smart Pause is totally useless. S4 is a phone full of Bugs. One will actually require 5 years practice to master the art of scrolling a web page down with air gesture... Then there are these three buttons which actually had to make S4 cool and easy but makes it annoying. While Nexus phones are moving away from physical buttons for navigation, Samsung has opted to include three of them here. The S4 has capacitive buttons for Menu and Back, and a physical, clickable button for Home. It's wasted space. But worse, the capacitive buttons don't light up until you actually press them, so if you forget which side is Menu and which is Back you might end up closing out of something unintentionally. Annoying! The final touch: on top of the device is a super tiny IR blaster for controlling your TV. You'd never even notice it if you weren't looking for it, and you won't look for it. Believe me, there are so many features that are actually annoying rather than cool in this phone. 3) The camera is useless for low light shooting. Low light shooting is cool and done for making the pictures look awesome while in some cases it is done to save the precious last battery moments from being used up by the flash. So, why do I say these things? Because, The S4 is is a blatant bluff for low light shooting. http://img.gawkerassets.com...; data-chomp-id="18ljnkkgba8nfjpg" />See? It is like day and night. HTC one being the left and our S4 on the right. And not only the HTC one but many phones excel here... http://img.gawkerassets.com...; data-chomp-id="18ljum1y7qzoujpg" />4) No party sound here. Sound on the S4 is another problem. It still has just one tiny, tin-can-sounding speaker on the bottom back of the phone. It's quiet enough that I often missed a call or text even when I was just one room away. This problem is exacerbated if you put the phone down screen up (as one usually does), especially on something soft like a couch. Here, again, the HTC One blows the S4 out of the water, with its dual, stereo, front-facing speakers which are both very clear and loud enough to give you a heart attack in the morning if you set your alarm too loud. And why only the HTC? Try other phones and we see the difference clear and sound.5) What's in the looks?Much. If one doesn't like the white colour then it is a problem of looks on this phone too. Its a scratch magnet and we have to clean it regularly because of the dust. The Lumia or Xperia or HTC one or should I go on? All these look royal or cool... In conclusion, The S4 is far from a bad phone. And one can't help but think that if Samsung would have poured all of its innovation into maximizing the practical user experience—instead of highly ignorable gimmicks—it might have taken the crown.