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Samsung Unveils the Galaxy S4
adeelarshad82 writes "It's been leaked, teased, accused of being a copy of its predecessor, and celebrated as the likely champion of the mobile ecosystem for 2013. Samsung has finally unveiled the next in their line of globally available smartphones, the Galaxy S4. The phone carries a 5-inch Super AMOLED display with 1080p resolution at 441ppi, weighs only 130 grams and is no more than 7.9mm thick. On the inside, the Exynos based Octo-Core processor clocked at 1.6 GHz and the Snapdragon based Quad-Core 1.9GHz processor power this machine. Galaxy S4 is also packing 2GB of RAM and a 2600mAh battery, and its microSD slot is accessible though the removable rear panel. The S4 will include several new features, such as Air Gesture, Smart Pause, and Smart Scroll. Samsung's vice president of portfolio planning said many of the software improvements in the Samsung Galaxy S4 could make their way into existing Samsung Galaxy S3 phones."
Jelly Bean was released in November, making it 4 months old, 5 months by the time the SIV is generally available. Jelly Bean will be obsoleted by Key Lime Pie at Google's I/O developer conference in May so you get a whole month to enjoy being on the current version of Android, that might be some kind of record. After which you get to wait another 4-5 months for Samsung to get the OS up and approved by US carriers.
No, because your eyes suck at seeing blue. Your eyes have very poor resolution in blue, moderately better resolution in red, and sharpest resolution in green. The whole point of a pentile display is not to waste subpixels on blue and red that your eyes can't even see. So you put in more green subpixels than red or green.
Put another way, even though the Lumina has 996 subpixels per inch, 67% of them are much higher resolution than your eyes can resolve, while 33% (green) are lower resolution than your eyes can resolve. So you're actually wasting a lot of subpixels. With a pentile RGBG display, the ratio of subpixels better matches your eye's resolving ability. 50% of the pixels are devoted to green, 25% for red, 25% for blue. So pentile can produce a sharper looking picture than RGB while using fewer subpixels. Pentile only looks bad if you unrealistically put your eye right up to the screen or take a magnified photo.
And before anyone starts rebutting that they can see the difference, no you can't. This trick is not new nor did it start with Android pentile displays. It's been used in NTSC TV broadcasts, color film formulation, and JPEG and MPEG compression. All of those store and display red and blue at a lower resolution than green. That you never noticed this before is proof that it works. It's just new to computer displays because until recently we didn't have spare computing power to waste on converting RGB data for a single pixel into a RGBG subpixel array millions of times in real time.
Not on Android. There was no way to turn on WiFi with a single click until Android 4.2.2, and even in Android 4.2.2 is it a press and hold, not a tap.
I'm running 2.3.7 and I just hit the WiFi button on one of the widgets.
With a five inch screen it's a small tablet! I wouldn't mind having one, but I'd still need a phone, my pocket isn't that big.
In terms of size - the S4 is actually smaller and lighter than the S3 - even though the S3 only has a 4.8" screen.
S3: 136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm, 133 g
S4: 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm, 130 g
The screen runs closer to the edges, and the buttons at the bottom are slimmer. All in all, some pretty neat engineering.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
That's... not how it works. The "penta" part refers to a prototype arrangement that isn't actually in use in any phones (see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PenTile).
These phones are using the RGBG pattern, which has the greens 1-to-1 with the pixel map, which means each pixel is either a green-with-red or a green-with-blue. So the parent here did do the math correctly.