As if it could be any other way, the just-announced Samsung Galaxy S 4 is Samsung’s, and perhaps even Android’s, best phone yet. In fact, it very well may be the best smartphone on the market, period. 
 
 We’ve been through months of speculation, hype, rumors, and leaks, but the truth is out, and the Galaxy S 4 still has much more up its sleeve than the leaks suggested. More than any other Galaxy before it, the Galaxy S 4 is proof that the company can build a central brand the way Apple has with the iPhone. Both the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S series have been selling in the millions, and the Galaxy S 4 looks like it will hold up that trend. 
 
 Even with loads of new software, like an enhanced camera application, hover-style gesture features, and a slew of baked-in apps and services from Samsung, the Galaxy S 4 still brings the heat in the hardware/spec department. Here are the specifics: 
 
 
 
 The Galaxy S 4 clearly has a small ring of competition in the spec department. The only phones that are on this level are the Xperia Z (1080p 5-inch display, 13mp camera, quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro CPU) and the HTC One (4.7-inch 1080p display, 1.7GHz Snapdragon 600 quad-core CPU, and an “Ultrapixel” camera) and LG’s Optimus G Pro (1080p 5.5-inch display, quad-core Snapdragon 600, 13-megapixel camera). 
 
 Of course, they each have their own pros and cons, but the Galaxy S 4 seems to be the most compact, lightest, and fastest among them. Samsung hasn’t been clear about the exact brand of the processor for the U.S. version, but it did say that it was a quad-core Snapdragon CPU clocked at 1.9GHz, which we believe may be the Snapdragon 600. 
 
 However, “processors vary by region,” says Samsung, and the Asian and European version will sport the long-awaited Samsung Exynos 5 Octa eight-core processor. 
 
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 The Galaxy S 4 design manages to both fit in with the Galaxy S family and stand on its own as a unique breed. For one, Samsung packed a bigger display (5-inches diagonal) into a package that’s actually smaller than before. The GS4 is the same width, slightly shorter, and .7mm thinner than its predecessor. 
 
 As such, the bezels on the Galaxy S 4 are slightly thinner on all four sides, which means it’s all screen, all the time. And what a screen it is. The Galaxy S 4 display is 5 inches of unadulterated Super AMOLED 1080p brilliance. Surrounding it, the Galaxy S 4 takes a hybrid shape, something between the straight lines of the Galaxy Note and Galaxy S II with the curved tops, bottoms, and corners of the Galaxy S III. The elongated home button is unmistakably GSIII-style. 
 
 The Galaxy S 4 also sticks with familiar materials, and unfortunately that still means a whole lot of plastic. Both the front panel and back panel (which is removable) are made of brushed plastic, but with a textured pattern of tiny circles laid over it. It gives the phone an industrial, textured look, but in reality all you feel is smooth plastic. 
 
 Around the edge, you’ll notice a new embellishment to the S series: a metallic bar that runs along the edge of the device. Though it looks a lot like metal, it’s actually polycarbonate and meant to protect the sensitive corners of the device. 
 
 It would be nice to see some more premium materials in this generation of the Galaxy S, but the plastic and polycarbonate construction let Samsung fit many components into a very compact, light package, according to Director of Product Planning Drew Blackard. 
 
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 The Galaxy S 4 uses a new 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, bumped up from the 8-megapixel shooter on the Galaxy S III. It’s still centrally placed on the upper back half of the device, complete with LED flash, autofocus, and 1080p video recording. On the front, the Galaxy S 4 sports a 2-megapixel camera. 
 
 The higher megapixel sensor is nice, and will surely make a slight difference, but where the Galaxy S 4 camera really evolves from past generations is in the software. 
 
 For one thing, the camera app now uses the same UI as the Galaxy Camera, with a brushed silver finish to the buttons and much simpler navigation. Clicking the mode button along the bottom will bring up a simple scroll wheel full of various modes. When one is highlighted, the menu gives the name as well as a description. More sophisticated users can also see these mode options in a grid view for quick changes. 
 
 Along with some of the same modes we’ve seen on both the Galaxy Camera and newer Galaxy smartphones like Beauty Shot, Samsung has added way more modes into the mix. One is called Eraser, and it lets you remove unwanted people from a shot. Samsung says it comes in handy for shots that have been photo-bombed, or tourist shots at busy places. The camera senses any motion that goes through the frame and lets you choose to remove it, as if that person had never walked through your shot of the Eiffel Tower. 
 
 The Galaxy S 4 also has a dual-shot mode, which is just a button press away from the main camera interface. This lets you use both the front-facing camera and the rear-facing camera at the same time, for both recording and still captures. There are various filters, such as Oval Blur, Postage Stamp, Cubism, and Split, which give you different options for the theme of your dual-shot creation. You can resize the pop-up picture, and move it around the screen using simple drag and drop tools. It’s pretty amazing. 
 
 Some other modes include Drama Shot, which lets you take a succession of photos of some action (like someone skiing down a mountain) and turn them into a composite of the entire sequence, and Sound and Shot, which lets you record up to 9 seconds of audio to pair along with a picture. 
 
 Samsung even jumped on the GIF train with the likes of Cinemagraph and Vine to create a gif-making mode, called Cinema Shot. It lets you take a short recording, and then determine which parts of the shot stay still and which parts remain animated. In fact, it’s almost exactly like Cinemagraph. 
 
 But Samsung took one step past capture and even built an app called Story Album which lets you create photo albums of special events or trips through templates, and use TripAdvisor to add extra location data to your story. You can even print your album through a partnership with Blurb’s print distribution network. 
 
 There’s a lot going on here, so try to keep up. We had recently heard that the GS4’s “wow” factor would be all in the software, and that’s exactly right. Most of TouchWiz is the same, though it seems to get lighter and lighter as the phones get faster. The one very noticeable edition was a set of extra toggle buttons available in the pull-down notifications menu. 
 
 Other than those particulars, let’s start with the gesture-based head-tracking stuff. 
 
 The most useful new feature of the Galaxy S 4 is Air View. It lets you hover over something on the screen to get an extended pop-up view of what’s inside. For example, if you hover over an email in your inbox, Air View will bring up the first few sentences of that email’s contents. If you hover over an album within the photo gallery, you’ll see nine thumbnails of the contents of that gallery. In fact, if you hover over an image while inside the folder, that particular thumbnail will expand to give you a better view of the particular picture. It’s all very reminiscent of what can be done with recent entries in the Galaxy Note line, except without requiring users to keep track of an S-Pen. 
 
 Air View is embedded in the email client, photo gallery, calendar, and a Galaxy S 4-edition of Flipboard, which lets you view and select headlines by hovering over a single tile. 
 
 Samsung also added an Air Gesture feature, which lets you control the phone without having to hold it — I could see this being used while driving. You can swipe left and right to switch between web pages, songs, photos in the gallery, etc. and swipe up and down to scroll. You can even accept calls by waving at the phone. 
 
 Rumors suggested that Samsung had developed some sort of magic-scroll eye-tracking technology, when in reality the Galaxy S 4 can actually only track your head, very much like the Galaxy S III’s Smart stay feature. The front-facing camera can detect that your head is facing the phone directly, which stops the display from dimming. 
 
 In the Galaxy S 4, that technology evolves to automatically pause videos when you turn away from the phone with Smart Pause. As far as scrolling is concerned, if you’re on a page that requires reading or scrolling, the Galaxy S 4 will let you tip the phone forward or backward to scroll (as long as the ff-camera senses that you’re paying attention). 
 
 Samsung said that using tilt-gestures as well as “head-tracking” technology to streamline browsing a page was “the most intuitive and natural to the end-consumer.” 
 
 As far as NFC is concerned, the GS4 includes S Beam and TecTile integration, but Samsung also lets you pair with up to eight other NFC-devices to run a feature called GroupPlay, which lets you play the same song across eight different devices… to create a party on the go. 
 
 Samsung also included an IR blaster on the Galaxy S 4 so that you can use it as a remote for just about any modern television. Called WatchON, it also includes rich information proved by an electronic programming guide. 
 
 Along with an updated camera and Story Album, the Galaxy S 4 brings a handful of brand new applications to the Galaxy S family. The first, and possibly most important, is S Translator. S Translator is available in nine languages at launch, including Chinese, English U.S., English British, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. 
 
 It is a standalone app that automatically translates information that is typed or copy/pasted into it. S Translator is also embedded in ChatOn, Messaging, and email. 
 
 The Galaxy S 4 also has an optical reader which turns analog information into digital, by reading business cards and turning them into address book contacts. S Translator is also embedded into the optical reader, which scans QR codes as well. 
 
 ChatOn, Samsung’s own-branded VoIP application, has been updated to include three-way video calls, screen share, and annotations. You can even use the new dual-camera mode to enjoy ChatOn calls. 
 
 Samsung has been making a big push in the health department with the new Galaxy S 4, and has thus preloaded the S Health app on the device. The app originally made its debut last July and seemed to focus mainly on linking up with existing health gadgets like fancy scales and blood glucose monitors. This time around, using the Galaxy S 4’s built-in pedometer, S Health tracks your activity throughout the day and knows when you’re running, walking or climbing stairs. The S Health app also lets you input your consumption activities to track caloric intake and get suggestions. 
 
 Speaking of S Health, Samsung is selling a few health-related accessories to tackle the ever-growing quantified self products like the Jawbone Up, Nike Fuelband, and FitBit. That said, Samsung has introduced the wrist-worn S Band that tracks activity, temperature and humidity. 
 
 Samsung is even going so far as to sell a heart-rate monitor which you can strap on for your daily workouts, and a body scale. All of the accessories come with Bluetooth so they can pair back to your device and be recorded by the S Health app. 
 
 And since Samsung loves making special cases for its big-name phones, the Galaxy S 4 had to go big even with its case. It’s called the S View cover, and it has a little screen on the front that reads information from the phone. That way, even though the phone is locked, you can still see the time, SMS notifications, battery status, and choose to accept or ignore incoming calls. 
 
 Samsung didn’t specify which technology they used for the cover’s display, or whether or not it needs a charge or takes battery from the S 4, but it wouldn’t surprise me to hear they took a page out of the YotaPhone playbook and are using low-power e-ink here. 
 
 Samsung didn’t clarify exact pricing, but said it would go for the same price as a “Samsung premium smartphone”. The Galaxy S III launched in the US at $199 with a 2 year contact. 
 
 In terms of availability, they didn’t give a specific release date but did say it would be on store shelves in 2013Q2, at AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cricket and U.S. Cellular. 
 
 Samsung is riding high on the success of the Galaxy S III and from what I’ve seen, the Galaxy S 4 is a worthy successor with innovative features packed into a familiar housing. It’s a bit of a shame that Samsung announced the phone without giving a price or release date, but at this point, with Samsung the global sales and innovation leader in smartphones, it can do pretty much whatever it wants. ||||| After a lot of teasing, and a lot of leaking, the Galaxy S IV is finally here. Last year's version, the S III, remains the world's most popular Android phone, having sold over 40 million units. Can the S IV live up to that kind of hype? Can Samsung make us feel like we're living in the future? 
 
 We took a deep dive into the S IV earlier today, and the verdict is in. It just may not be the one you were hoping for. 
 
 Design 
 
 The first thing you'll notice about the S IV is that it's a dead ringer for the S III. In some ways, that was a neat trick to pull off; the screen went from 4.8-inches on the S III to a full 5-inches on the S IV, but it actually feels smaller. At 5.46 inches tall, 2.75 wide, and 0.31 thick, it's slightly narrower and thinner than the S III, and just 0.08 inches taller. It's also 0.9 ounces lighter at 4.6 ounces. They accomplished this by shrinking the bezel way down. It's the same basic shape as the S III, though it's a little bit more rectangular. 
 
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 Samsung sold a ton of S IIIs, so to a certain extent it makes sense that they'd take an ain't broke, don't fix it approach. But to be brutally honest, in 2013 the design feels stale, dated, and boring. The S III's plastic back made it look and feel cheap; the effect is amplified on the S IV given how sleek and anodized the competition has gotten. There's just no innovation on this front, to the point that it's hard to take the S IV seriously next to a gorgeous piece of hardware like the HTC One. 
 
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 Hardware 
 
 At least the 5-inch "Full HD Super AMOLED" is very good-looking. It's a full 1080p, which gives it 441 pixels per inch (PPI). Indeed, it looked very sharp, and you can't discern individual pixels. Colors—especially greens and blues—were vibrant, although that's largely because AMOLED screens skew a little blue compared to phones with other display technologies. The blacks were nice and deep, though, and the screen was bright enough that you should be fine even when the sun is blazing. 
 
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 We know that the S IV will be packing a flagship-standard 2GB of RAM and a hefty 2600mAh battery, which is certainly welcome news. It will come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB options, with a micro SD card slot allowing for expanded storage. Naturally it will also have Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4, and NFC. The rear camera is 13MP and the front—which is also capable of 720p video chatting—has a 2MP sensor. It'll also have LTE (duh) with p to 100/50Mbps, which is quick. We still don't know what processor's running the show; Samsung would only say is that guts will be different from region to region (and possibly network to network). We'll have to wait until closer to launch for those details. 
 
 One of the few surprises here is that the S IV has an IR blaster, meaning that—like the HTC One—you can use your phone as a remote control for you home entertainment system. We love this feature, since remotes always seem to go missing right when you need them. 
 
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 Software 
 
 As with the S III, Samsung really tries to differentiate itself here with software. The S IV running the current version of Android (4.2.2, Jelly Bean), but you wouldn't necessarily know that because of the heavy TouchWiz UI, where more is more seems to be the philosophy. Some of the new features are definitely innovative, but they're just as often impractical. Let's go through some of the marquee additions: 
 
 Smart Scroll: So, all those rumors about the S IV tracking your eyes and auto-scrolling? Turns out that was something Samsung was experimenting with, but ended up not using (this time, anyway). Instead, the phone knows when you're looking at it, and then lets you tilt it up or down to scroll. Sounds neat! But unfortunately doesn't work very well. The S IV that we played with seemed to have trouble setting the base angle, so it would scroll up or down even when you didn't want to. When it worked it was fine, but more often than not it was a frustrating mess. 
 
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 Smart Pause: Conversely, Smart Pause works quite well! This new feature automatically pauses a video you're playing when you look away. It works, but it's hard to think of too many cases in which you'd actually want to use it. 
 
 S Health: Holy crap, Samsung put a health tracker in its phone! Which is actually a great idea. S Health is an app that will track your steps, stairs climbed, and the ambient temperature and humidity, plus track your food intake and estimate calories consumed/burned. You can even track sleep with an optional accessory (see below). Fitbit and co. should be nervous, although I'm curious to see what kind of ding this puts on your battery life. 
 
 Air View / Air Gesture: Samsung did some borrowing from the Galaxy Note II, where you can hover with the S Pen (stylus) over the screen and it will preview information. Except with the S IV there's no pen; you just use your finger. You can hover over galleries to see previews of their contents, email headers to get the first few lines, or text in the browser to magnify something. Likewise, gestures let you switch between tabs in the browser or skip tracks by passing your hand left or right above the screen, scroll by passing it up or down over the screen, or answer calls by waving at it. Cool that you can do that, but ultimately, it was pretty useless. It's the same things you'd do in Android with simple swiping, just... a few centimeters above the phone. The only way I can see this being great is if you find yourself constantly eating buffalo wings and hate moist towelettes. More importantly, these features—particularly Air View—didn't work very well. Sometimes it would accidentally select something, and sometimes it didn't sense your finger at all. Other times it would register a slight hand movement and switch tabs when you didn't want it to. They were more annoying than helpful, ultimately. 
 
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 Other Stuff: S Translator is a built in translation service that works as a standalone app (which does voice to voice translation), but also integrates into email, messaging, and Samsung's ChatON service (though not Gmail or Google Talk). Group Play allows up to 8 devices to directly connect via NFC for sharing photos and music, which, whatever, but the cool thing is it lets you game together. At launch it will work with Asphalt 7 and Gun Bros 2. Pretty cool idea. Adapt Display will change the color of your screen if it senses you're reading a lot of text on white, making it more of a sepia tone, which is easier on the eyes. 
 
 Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren't things you'll ever use. Which is really the S IV's biggest problem. 
 
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 Camera 
 
 Samsung really revamped the camera app—which is to say it stole the interface from its own Galaxy Camera. That's not a bad thing. The on-screen mode dial is a really convenient way of selecting the mode you want. It has some really cool built-in features like Cinema photo, which is basically a cinemagraph mode. The UI for it was very nice. There's also Drama Shot, which takes a burst of pictures, and then combines them into one image, showing the subject at various points of his/her trajectory. It would be great for friends who do a lot of cartwheels. 
 
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 There is also dual camera shooting, which uses both the back and front cameras at the same time, getting your face all up in the action. You can have your head in a hard rectangle, or a gaussian circle, or a heart, or you can do a split screen. Again, it feels more like Samsung is showing off what it can do, rather than giving you something you actually need. 
 
 Accessories 
 
 There are some rather nice accessories for the S IV. Most appealing is a flip cover that has a little window cut out of it, which can light up by itself to show you incoming callers, text messages, and the time of day, so you don't have to open it to get that info. Pretty slick. 
 
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 There are also a bevy of accessories that complement the S Health app. There's a wristband you can wear independently of the phone (in case you prefer running with out it), which will track your steps and monitor the quality of your sleep. It will then sync wirelessly with the app. There's also a connected scale and heart rate monitor. Again, this isn't good news for smaller fitness tracking companies. 
 
 Overall Impressions 
 
 There has been a ton of hype and build-up to this device, and ultimately, it left us feeling cold. The S IV feels uninspired. There are small spec bumps from the previous generation and there's a ton of software which will largely sit unused. There's just no wow-factor here. 
 
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 I had the HTC One with me during my hands on time, and the difference is like night and day. For starters, the One is noticeably faster in every context. When flicking between screens, opening apps, and taking photos there was clear lag on the Galaxy S IV, whereas everything was almost instantaneous on the One. To be fair, this wasn't the final production version of the S IV, and who knows which processor was in the model I had. There's a chance it'll be faster at launch. 
 
 But even purely from a design perspective, the One absolutely crushes the S IV. When you pick up the One, you feel like you're holding something amazing, both in the build and the screen. When you pick up the S IV, you feel like you're holding an S III with a few extra bells and whistles. 
 
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 We'll reserve final judgment until our full review. But already the S IV feels like a missed opportunity for Samsung, a company that had an inarguable lead over the rest of the Android pack and a chance to close the door. Instead, it's invited HTC, LG, and others right on in to take a run at the crown. 
 
 The Galaxy S IV will be available sometime in Q2 of this year on Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Cricket.
– Samsung is kicking up its competition with Apple with its new Galaxy S4 smartphone, which has a larger, sharper screen than its predecessor, the best-selling S3. Samsung revealed the phone today at an event at New York's Radio City Music Hall. The Galaxy S4, which crams a 5-inch screen into body slightly smaller than the S3's, will go on sale globally between April and June. In the US, it will be sold by all four national carriers—Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint Nextel, and T-Mobile USA—as well as by smaller ones US Cellular and Cricket. Samsung didn't say what the phone will cost, but it can be expected to start at $200 with a two-year contract in the US. In the last two years, Samsung has emerged as Apple's main competitor in the high-end smartphone market. At the same time, it has sold enough inexpensive low-end phones to edge out Nokia as the world's largest maker of phones. Early reviews are mixed. It "feels uninspired," writes Brent Rose at Gizmodo. "There are small spec bumps from the previous generation and there's a ton of software which will largely sit unused. There's just no wow-factor here." But at TechCrunch, Jordan Crook writes that "it very well may be the best smartphone on the market, period."