Slashdot Mirror
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."
Maybe they should have said biggest revolution since 3D TV.
I have an S3 now and I'm planning on keeping it until it dies. Unless I can get a phone that has two days constant usage on a single battery charge, or uninterpretable signal. I don't see the point in spending $600 every year on a new phone for incremental changes. I probably would still be using my HTC HD2 if it hadn't died on me.
I'm surprised by how many people expected it to be so much better than the S3. When does a phone ever completely change in less than a year?
More importantly, who buys a phone in less than a year after their last? This isn't for people with an S3, it's for everyone else. Like me. I can't think of any line of phones where I would want to have each iteration. But I'll get this, and then I'll happily skip the S5, whatever it happens to be. The S3 isn't outdated now, and the S4 won't be outdated for a couple of years when the S6 comes along.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
What I don't understand is the IR port.
Don't like what's on TV in the bar? Change it!
What's the point in a wireless device with an uninterpretable signal?
You're making an assumption which may not be valid. First of all, the primary driver of screen battery life is brightness, not resolution. Second, if you're not doing something graphics intensive on your phone, the battery will get you through the day anyway. So your concern is mostly applicable when doing things like playing games and watching movies. Now, if you're watching a 1080p movie on a smaller resolution screen, the phone's graphics processor has to downconvert the image. So the question becomes, which is more of a drain on battery life - downconverting a 1080p movie to a 960px screen, or playing a 1080p movie on a full HD screen? This I don't know the answer to, but I suspect that it's a close call.
smafti
I have apple's latest version of iOS (on my ipad,) and it already feels dated.
- Application icons get thrown about haphazardly upon install requiring manual sorting, even for an app you don't even use very much (whereas android stores them alphabetically so they are easy to find - even if you rarely use the app.)
- Changing any common setting requires switching apps followed by menu navigation, whereas on android it's just a swipe and tap without any navigation necessary (e.g. turning wifi on/off, muting, orientation lock.)
- Can't set application launch defaults, such as setting a default email client other than the stock one. (good lord...WHY? every other OS has done this since the 80's...)
- Although apple finally made notifications stop interrupting what you're doing by borrowing the notification bar system from android, the notifications it provides aren't ever good enough to tell you what you need to know without opening them.
- I'm not a heavy widget user, but I like having a brief display of my agenda visible on my smartphone desktop, as well as an RSS ticker on my tablet desktop. Apple offers no such capability without running an app. Every other OS, including (shudder) windows phone has managed to do this, but not apple.
The whole point of a smartphone is having access to information you need quickly, and iOS hasn't offered many improvements in that department in years. The ones that it has added (e.g. passive notifications) it ripped from android, and it didn't really do a good job of it.
It's kind of hard to give the "innovative" title to a company who hasn't really done anything other than incremental hardware updates. While android is also stuck in increment land at the moment, at least it increments both hardware AND software. Also android doesn't call each generation "the best iphone yet" or "the new ipad".
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
You're going to love that you can pop in a brand-new battery. The more the phone does, the more it will use up the power, the more recharge cycles, and the faster your battery wears out (note that battery running times become unacceptable long before the battery is actually gone).
Are you serious? A chief of marketing named Schiller?
People used to ask why desktops would need multiple processors. Most software now takes advantage of multithreading capability, and trying to use a single core process is downright painful.
It may not need to multitask many phone calls at once, but it most certainly may need to multitask a whole bunch of apps at once, especially on a phone that can do things like instantly translate written or spoken text, record and composite two video sources at once and audio in real time, receive notifications such as texts, keep track of calendars, locations, temperatures (?), heart rates (!), etc. while you go about whatever it is you're doing, running a pretty sophisticated operating system with a pretty sophisticated user interface, and oh yeah, take and process telephone calls. And don't forget that it might have to do some of these tasks twice, given that the phone can be configured to be running an entirely separate virtual OS for your work stuff.
Never ask why any electronics device would need more resources, whether it's CPU cores, memory, storage capacity, network bandwidth, or anything else. It's a sure recipe for looking back in five years and say, "Wow, I sure was dumb back then. I never dreamed that devices today would be able to [insert amazing capability due directly to advancement in hardware specifications]!"
441ppi is AWESOME, by the way! The "retina" display is only 326ppi! Your eyes will not be able to see individual pixels on that screen... it'll look as good or even better than print.
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
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.
Actually I find 5 inches to be about perfect. It'll fit my pocket okay and I can actually hold it.
That's what she said.
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.
There was a girl I liked back in college who I took out a few times, but it turned out she was ineffable.
After that, I tried to stick to only the effable ones.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
Note to mods:
"My baseless claim contradicts your baseless claim" != "informative".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
Get Verizon, they charge me a lot for wireless.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.