[Galaxy S 4 General] BarryH_GEG:
There are a couple of things going on that make it hard to understand how "finished" the i9500's s/w really is. The launch s/w for both the i9500 and i9505 wasn't Samsung's best work with more issues than you typically see with a new Samsung phone. For example, GSMArena retested the camera and battery life in the i9505 after it received updates and both results changed.

We got a final retail Galaxy S4 [i9505] unit and redid tests and benchmarks, made new screenshots and checked if the description of all the features is accurate. Here's what we found to have changed:

Added info and photos on the new eco-friendly box

The Smart scroll feature works better on the final unit

New benchmarks showing slightly improved performance

New audio quality test

New photo and video samples

Surprisingly, web browsing started killing the battery faster after the update – an hour and twenty minutes faster to be specific. At 7 hours and 24 minutes, the new Galaxy S4 result isn’t bad, but it’s no longer one of the best.​

Here's what big.LITTLE is supposed to deliver.

ARM big.LITTLE™ processing is an energy saving technology where the highest performance ARM CPUs are combined with the most efficient ARM CPUs in a combined processor subsystem to deliver greater performance at lower power than today's best-in-class systems. With big.LITTLE processing, software workloads are dynamically and instantly transitioned to the appropriate CPU based on performance needs. This software load balancing is so fast that it is completely seamless to the user. By selecting the optimum processor for each task, big.LITTLE can reduce energy consumption in the processor by 70% or more on light workloads and background tasks, and by 50% for moderately intense work, while still delivering the peak performance of the high performance cores.

Clearly the battery performance gains described aren't currently being achieved in Octa.

Personally, I'd like to believe that the current performance (power and battery life) of Octa will improve over time with updates. There doesn't appear to be any reason they shouldn't based on the architecture or implementation of big.LITTLE. Does anyone remember the One X launch with it being the first Teg3 smartphone? It was a train wreck of massive proportions with video driver, performance, and battery life issues. It was all corrected over time and HTC got great performance out of Teg3. The performance of Octa already exceeds S-600 on its launch s/w but battery life is lagging. Other than that you don't see the "OMG!" issues you typically see with the first deployment of a new SoC. I think there's a lot of untapped upside in Octa that we'll hopefully see over the next few months.

And big.LITTLE is the future.

April 17, 2013 - IDG News Service (New York Bureau) — More companies have signed on for ARM's Big.Little chip design technology, which mixes low-power and power-hungry cores for more efficient energy use of chips in smartphones, tablets, servers and other equipment.

Seventeen companies have so far licensed Big.Little, ARM said in a statement Wednesday. That is a jump from seven companies announced at the Mobile World Congress in February.

Big.Little is meant to preserve battery life on faster smartphones and tablets. Its design reserves high-power cores for demanding tasks like video playback, while the low-power processors take on mundane tasks like answering phone calls or playing audio. That effectively provides power-efficient use of processors and better performance per watt.

Samsung is using the Big.Little design in its Exynos 5 Octa chip, which combines four high-power ARM Cortex-A15 cores with four low-power ARM Cortex-A7 processors. The Octa 5 chip is used in some Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones. A prototype tablet displayed by ARM at MWC also demonstrated the processor, with the low-power cores largely handling background tasks.

The design will apply to ARM's upcoming 64-bit processors, in which the high-power Cortex-A57 processor design will be mixed with the low-power Cortex-A53 design. ARM has also said it is open to mixing and matching other types of processor designs.

An ARM spokesman did not provide names of the new licensees, saying the list was limited to Samsung, Fujitsu Semiconductor, MediaTek, Renesas Mobile and CSR, who were named at MWC. However, LSI has an implementation of Big.Little, and HiSilicon and Marvell are listed on the Big.Little website.

Seven companies are expected to release chips based on ARM's Big.Little processor technology this year.​

To me, the move to big.LITTLE is no different than the way people reacted when BMW started replacing V8's with bi-turbo 6's and 6's with bi-turbo 4's. The newer technologies delivered better performance more efficiently. People were resistant because they were comfortable with BMW's world-class V8's and inline 6's. Change is hard to accept.