At 11pm last night through a very weird and cringe worthy presentation Samsung announced the details of their new flagship handset - the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Samsung have introduced a range of new features to the 5-inch smartphone, most notably a massively upgraded camera. The handset will feature a 13 mega pixel rear camera and a 2 mega pixel front-facing camera while the camera software gets a major upgrade with some brilliant new features.Dual recording, where both the front and rear cameras are used at the same time so that the person taking the picture can also be in the picture and the same when video calling or recording video looks like a particularly useful new feature.
The screen also gets an upgrade and is now a full 5-inches on the diagonal as well as being Full HD AMOLED with 441 PPI (Pixels Per Inch). The S4 will feature 2GB RAM along with 16GB storage - 32 and 64GB version will also be available.
To power all of this new tech Samsung have stuck in a 2,600 mAh battery although they haven't said how long it will stay charged.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec&w=560&h=315]
Hands free seems to be the way Samsung have gone with this new phone. They've introduced air gesture, smart pause and smart scroll. Air gesture allows the user to control certain aspects of the S4 without touching the screen but rather waving above it while smart pause stops video on the screen when the user looks away. Smart scroll - a much rumoured function - isn't exactly what people thought. The user can tilt their phone up or down to scroll rather than using their fingers. Although I can see a few problems with this already.
Despite all this new technology Samsung have managed to make the Galaxy S4 much thinner and lighter than the previous version and it now comes in at just 7.9mm thick (almost as thin as the iPhone 5) and weighs just 130 grams (slightly lighter than the S3).
The handset will be released at the end of April in 155 countries, on both 4G LTE and 3G networks.
There's a few things that weren't revealed though. The price is yet to be confirmed, there was no mention of the processor and no mention of battery life - something that will definitely be on people's minds.
Interestingly Samsung made absolutely no mention of Android or Google with much of the OS and built in apps being Samsung branded - something that smartphone companies have been trying to do for a while.
Overall, the Samsung Galaxy S4 stands to be a best selling handset and will most definitely be the most successful Android based handset. There's nothing revolutionary in there, it's more of an upgrade of the S3 rather than a new handset but still a great phone.
