 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Voyager Air, the high-performance wireless media hub for your connected life. Visit corsair.com slash voyager-air to learn more. Welcome to my video of the Samsung Galaxy S4, which is sort of an unboxing and more sort of an overview after me spending a week and change with the device and sort of what I thought of it. So it's going to be featuring my cat, Galaxy, which is actually not his name at all, and he's not going to be in the video. So I'd like to start with my plain white box, which is a press box. You don't get your Galaxy S4 in a box like this, and it won't have your name on it. Mine says, Linus Sebastian on it, which happens to be my name. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Very, very cool. Okay, so Slick's operating the camera today, so feel free to direct all of your complaints about the camera work today to Slick on the forum. Okay, there's a Micro Sim Starter Kit. I got a TELUS phone, so it also gave me a bit of a chance to check out TELUS' network, because normally I'm a Bell customer. So it was not that interesting. It was fine. Didn't really have any complaints. We've got a Samsung charger, as well as a Samsung dongle. It should be noted that you'll get the best charging performance using a genuine Samsung charger, so that's something to note. And then I got, actually I added this piece of foam myself. The phone was actually not in a piece of foam. It was just in the box with all the other parts loose, but they never intended to ship it that way, so it's all good. So let's start with TouchWiz's optimizations. Most Android users probably won't care too much about, particularly things like up here where you can see either. Ha, this is great. So this is more like what TouchWiz users are going to be used to... Go back. This is more like what TouchWiz users are going to be used to seeing right here with all of your toggles. But now there's a whole thing where you can get like 20 of them, and they're all up there. You can turn on and off everything from Wi-Fi, GPS, and sound, things that you would actually use day to day, to things like their smart scrolling, smart stay, driving mode, all those kinds of things that normally you wouldn't touch too much, but of course you have the option of seeing the whole list or not seeing the whole list. Now there's third party apps to do pretty much everything, but not everyone's going to be capable of using them. My mum, for example, just went to Android, and I mean even something like installing an app is way beyond her. So honestly, if I'd had the choice, I'd have been happier to give her something like an S4 if possible, because easy mode would have made my life a little bit easier when it comes to helping her set it up. So basically, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll be applied to your home screens, all this stuff. So it turns everything into nice big old people friendly buttons that they don't have to think about too much, and you can pretty much set up for them once and then not have to touch it anymore. I mean, there's no way my mum calls more than like nine people, so I could set all those people up there for her, and all she'd have to do is swipe to the left to make a call, and swipe to the right to put on the basic apps that I actually think that she needs to use. The proximity sensor is really cool. Now Samsung's integrated a lot of technology with the S4 that goes from profoundly useful to profoundly useless. I think some of the highlights for me were S Translate, which I didn't use day to day obviously, but if I was traveling, it actually works pretty well. The only languages that I can speak and understand are really English and French, and at least that mode worked outstandingly well. The one drawback is that it does use data, so if you're traveling, unless you have a data plan there, you might find yourself not using it that much. The proximity sensor I also found was really cool, the motion sensor. So you can do things like call someone once you've got them open in your contacts just by... Here we go, so I'm going to call myself. Once you have that person up, you can just place the call by putting the phone to your ear. It actually works, but it's not exactly a new feature by any stretch of the imagination. And with things like swipe to the right to call, swipe to the left for text, it's not exactly groundbreaking in terms of how much more quickly it's going to allow you to use your phone, which I found was sort of my experience with a lot of the Samsung features that they've added. So one thing was waving to answer a call. If it was just kind of like this, or you just like pass over at once, then I could really see the usefulness of it. But the first time I tried to use it, I realized you actually have to wave over several times, and you have to move quite slowly. So for me, it'd be faster to just pick it up and go like this and answer my call. I mean, the one implementation... Oh yeah, and same thing with sort of browsing web pages and stuff like that. So when you have the internet browser open, I have like a Wikipedia page open here. So you can browse web pages like that. But ever since the advent of momentum-based scrolling in browsers, I don't really see a point in having something like that. The one area where I found this really useful is normally when you're moving applications around on your device, you would pick it up and then you'd kind of drag it somewhere. Whereas with this, you can pick it up. So you just press and hold, and then you can kind of go like this to decide which page you want to put it on. But you can see it actually sort of went backwards once when I accidentally did that. For the most part, it was pretty intuitive and I found that was the most useful thing about the motion sensor in front of the camera. Slick brought up an interesting point to me that if you have junk on your hands and you don't want to touch your phone, then things like the fact that the capacitive touchscreen can be operated even if you're not quite touching it, which I personally found to be more of an annoyance than anything else, and I did turn it off pretty much immediately. Because just trying to scroll around on a web page, it was like zooming in on things and telling me stuff about it. And it was like, oh no, that's not actually what I wanted. But if you're just trying to answer your phone while your nails dry, personally, I paint my nails all the time, then yeah, I can see the usefulness of that, but it wasn't something that comes up for me a lot. So there you go. The screen is widely regarded to be much better than previous Pentile displays, such as on the Galaxy S3. So while the matrix isn't necessarily one to one to one of every pixel color, it is close enough that you don't have that same blurriness in the text, and I personally didn't observe it at all. And comparing side by side with the HTC One, I don't notice that anything other than the fact that the vibrance is like eye-blindingly vibrant, which is, a lot of people like that, I didn't notice any problems with it compared to LCD. The lock screen's been changed as well. For example, you can do this. Which is obviously useful, but that's not actually sort of the improvement. So you can swipe to the right to get to some frequently used applications and whatnot, and you can swipe to the left to get widgets, for example, which I personally thought was really cool. It should be noted you like so many Android things, like I mentioned at the very beginning of this video, a lot of the improvements Samsung's making can be done with third-party apps, but not necessarily everyone wants to do that. So let's get into the ergonomics and build quality, which is something that everyone's talking about with this phone, because the most notable thing about it is that it's not really that different from the S3. I do find it more comfortable to hold than the S3, particularly the more square shape of the side. It was, is less, it digs into me a little bit less. Also, the rounded corners compared to the HTC One, which has more sharp corners that I found dug into my palm a bit more, I did find that more comfortable. However, the overall rigidness of the chassis, which I've seen argued both ways as a feature and as a drawback, so you can see I can bend that phone, does a couple of things. So number one is it makes it feel more like, more like an older phone, when especially if you come from iPhone, which I did, I was an iPhone 4 user for a long time, or you come from something like an HTC One, which feels like just, oh, feels really, really good. So the S4 has that kind of going against it, but I've also heard people say, well, come on, it's the only phone right now with Gorilla Glass 3, which adds ruggedness and adds durability. It's got a plastic chassis, which means it'll absorb shock more easily when it's dropped. So that's another prevailing theory as well. And it enables Samsung to do their whole... Dun, dun, dun, dun, come on. At least it's harder to get off than the old one. There you go. You have to like really be dedicated to getting the back panel off if you want to. And you can remove the back panel, replace the battery, which I don't see most people doing, especially with those little portable battery banks. I mean, I carry one, it's like you carry one, right? Yeah, I mean, especially with those around, that's a great way to beef up... He says he carries two. To charge up your devices. I mean, that works really well. Micro SD, I didn't end up using, but because I don't have one handy, but it would have been nice. It should be noted that the stock Android or the not stock Android operating system on this phone takes up 6 to 8 gigs of storage. And if you have a 16 gig phone, it's not a lot of storage left for things like movies and music. And movies, particularly, you are going to want to watch on the 5 inch screen on this guy because they look awesome. There's your SIM slot right there, which doesn't come out or go in, unless you remove the battery, which is kind of smart, because I don't want you changing that around. And other than that, the only other thing left on the back is the camera, which is 13 megapixels. And it's one of those things where, you know, you go find side by side images on the interwebs because they're all over the place. But in a nutshell, the S4 is able to take way more sharp images than the HTC One, which guys, if you recall, has a 4 megapixel camera only, but they're ultra pixels. They're big pixels. It can take way more sharp pictures in broad daylight than the HTC One, but the HTC One blows it out of the water in terms of low light performance. So it's all about what's more important to you. On the side, you've got your volume rocker, which I found way better than the HTC One, not nearly as good as my older iPhone 4, because of how hard it is to find it and correctly press it when it's in your pocket. That's when I'm usually operating the volume rocker of my phone, when it, you know, when I wouldn't be able to look at it and go like this. So being able to tell, tactily, where it is and which way I'm pressing it is really nice. HTC One really suffers in this way. You've got your headphone microphone port on the top, as well as IR emitter. Very, very cool. Their S-watch, or whatever it is they call it. I didn't end up using it because I have a TV, but I have no TV subscription, no Netflix subscription, no Hulu subscription, no YouTube subscriptions now that YouTube's paid. I have nothing, so I'm not much of a media consumption guy. I've watched two movies since my baby was born. The Hobbit, which was great, except for the dwarves that were singing for some reason. I have no idea what was going on with that. And yeah, Slick's giving me a facepalm right now. You know what? It wasn't that great. And then the, I also saw Skyfall, which was just horribly disappointing. I mean, a Bond movie without a Bond girl. People are like, oh no, she was the Bond girl. Yeah, for like four minutes. Pfft. I mean, yeah. To imply that James Bond only needs a girl for four minutes is, I think, not a very fair thing to say about his. Anyway, so speaking of media consumption, we have a bit of an interesting thing to talk about in this video, if you could throw that to me. This, my friends, is a book. I got it three months ago. I have not even cracked open the cover. So when audible.com reached out to us with an opportunity to do a free audiobook for our viewers thing, where if you go to audible.com slash Linus, you can get a free book. So it's basically a first month of your subscription free. Um, I was like, okay. So the one that I used my free book on was actually that one. So my plan is to, I downloaded the app on my phone, so my plan is to listen to the book while I fall asleep. And as Slick knows, normally I use Adventure Time to fall asleep. I don't actually watch the show. I just listen to it. But I've made my way completely through it. I'm done now. So I need something else. So I'm going to listen to this book instead of reading it. So guys, feel free to go to audible.com slash Linus, get a free audiobook, download the app, use it on your computer, use it in your car, do whatever it is you're going to do. You don't have to get Good to Great by Jim Collins, which might not be what you're all interested in, but you can check out not only New York Times bestsellers, but also Audible's own bestsellers. I mean, they're trusted. It's an Amazon service. So it was easy to use. You can't really go wrong. All you do is like press the thing and then it plays the book. This is Audible. All right. Well, apparently it's music now as well. But there you go, guys. Check it out. Moving right along. Other bizarre features, things like S Health to me, are one of those things where it's like we fit, where the sales pitch is use this device to be more healthy. But the reality of it is, is if you already had like the gumption and wherewithal to keep track of your life to the degree of detail that this application is going to require you to do it. They want you like taking pictures of your food and recording calories. And it's a pedometer, which is kind of cool. It has humidity and temperature sensor, which is cool. But the kinds of people who would actually be doing that are the kinds of people who are probably already doing it anyway and are probably fit and active. So I don't think that the S4 is going to be the difference between being someone who sits on the couch and eats potato chips and the difference between someone like that and someone who's like an active healthy individual. I don't think that's going to happen. But there you go. It's kind of neat. There's accessories coming that'll make it easier to use and more comprehensive. But I think finally we're going to finish up with the physical features of the phone. So on the right side, you've got the lock button, which is a way, way better position than the top left of the HTC One because nine times out of ten I go to press this, I mash the volume button. So yeah, there. Someone take a cue from that. And the lock button is exactly how the volume button should be because it's easy to feel and it has a nice tactile press to it. Speaking of buttons, Samsung hasn't done away with the three button approach to the bottom. So you've got your... They went away. Come back. So you've got your context menu. You've got much to Google's chiggering, I'm sure. You've got your context menu down here, your back button as well as your dedicated home button. There's one feature that I thought was cool, but for some reason isn't working for me right now. But if you hold the back button, you can open up their multi-window display compatible applications. This comes over from the Note 2. And it works really well because of the high resolution screen. Well, when I was using it, but now it's not seeming to work for me right now for some reason. But that's the way videos go is you want to demo something and it just kind of dies. The camera. The camera improvements are really, really cool on this phone. So there's a bunch of stuff that it does. So there's all these different modes. Honestly, if you're using it in stock mode, you might be missing out a little bit. But I found myself doing that a fair bit. Just I don't know, I'll explain why. Best face is cool. So it allows you to sub out bad faces. This is great for when you're doing a group shot. So when you have time to tinker with the phone and go, oh, I want drama mode, which will capture a bunch of different pictures and then see, you can see they have a little snowboarders. An example like that's something like a soccer ball flying something along those lines. Eraser takes random weird strangers out of the back. The other one that I thought was great, which one best photo and best face are the ones that I found most useful. However, what I to capture the moment, unless you're staging something or it's like a group picture where you're getting a bunch of people together, I really found myself launching the camera app and taking a picture quickly. Go, go, go, go, go, because you want to capture that moment. And because the shutter speed so fast, you can just go beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and you can do your own best picture and you can start through it after on your own. That's what I actually found myself doing. However, it's cool that it has all these features and I like that they're a carryover from the Galaxy camera. Samsung's talked a lot about Knox and the enhanced security that it offers. There was a great article from Justin Case on Android Police where he basically said, look, don't worry too much as basically what they're doing is they're locking it down for the people who aren't adept enough to get past it. But for those power users, we're still going to be OK. We can still load custom kernels that don't do those security checks. So you can choose whether you have the customizability or whether you have the locked down more secure device. It remains to be seen how dedicated Samsung really is to keeping things custom and how dedicated they are to making it well more locked down. Let's get into a couple more of the motions and gestures. Palm motion, I didn't end up really using. There's a couple of cool things here, though, so you can mute and pause playing sounds when the screen is on by turning it over. Personally, this bothers me a little bit because I hate putting my screen down on anything. But if I had a case for the phone, then we'd be having a different conversation about it. They have a case available that's actually pretty cool as a little window so you can see notifications. Speaking of notifications, smart alert, which basically will buzz when you pick up your phone. If there's something new, there you go. I don't know if you guys heard that, but then it doesn't turn the screen on, which is like, OK, that's great, Samsung. You told me there's something new. You didn't tell me what it was. So now I have to press the button anyway, which means it's probably easier for me. Like habit wise, I already just press the button immediately and look at my phone all the time anyway. So there's that. What else? Stuff like voice control has always felt kind of goofy to me. I didn't use it much. If I used my phone when I was driving more, then that might be something that I would use. And I did find that the voice recognition for text voice to text was outstanding. Better than anything I've really used in the past, although again, I have always kind of found it goofy. And I haven't really gone out of my way to use it that much. But it was something that was actually usable, unlike other stuff that, yeah, I've seen in the past. All shares still here. I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it. Their group play was really neat when I was at the Samsung demo and there were like five people sitting around a table with S4s, you know, playing poker, turning every phone into a speaker and like, you know, well, this is a center channel. This is left and right channel. I've never found myself in a room with more than maybe two Galaxy users at the same time, particularly of the same model. And the way that Samsung segments their software across different devices has always really bothered me because from my perspective, I would think from their perspective, it would be better for them to have this technology be supported across all their devices so that it's like the Samsung experience as opposed to going, well, no, the Galaxy S4 will have 4.2 and the Galaxy S3 will have 4.1 and they will be different because of that. I mean, there's no reason they can't roll it out to the S3. And yeah, I'm still bitter about my wife's Galaxy S Vibrant, which was the first Galaxy that never even got ice cream sandwich because Samsung said, oh, well, there's not enough RAM and yet third-party app developers could do it. So I don't know. I mean, using software as a way to differentiate platform to platform, I was only slightly bitter about my iPhone 4 not getting Siri because everything else has been rolled out all the way up to iOS 6. So yeah, even Apple for three-year-old plus devices is still rolling out all the software. So it'd be great to see Samsung try to follow suit. But I understand that Android is a little bit of a different beast in that way. Group play on the other hand for things like sharing music to wireless portable speakers when compatible stuff shows up is going to be really, really cool. I think that's pretty much everything that I wanted to talk about. Yeah, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. At the end of the day, if you're looking for a conclusion, I will be sticking with my HTC One. It's all about the trade-off. Do you want the more advanced features? It's a faster processor, 1.9 versus 1.7 gigahertz. Do you want the high megapixel camera or the ultra pixel camera? Do you want things like the gestures and the temperature and humidity monitor and S-Health and all these features that Samsung puts in to differentiate their phones? Or do you want something that really has that feel like it's a serious business device? I mean, this is the first. I've said this before in my iSwitch to Android where I did 30 days with the HTC One coming from iOS to Windows Phone 8, now to Android. I've said this already, but this is the first Android phone that I've really touched that feels like an Apple phone in terms of the quality. Also, it was a huge step backwards for me going to a rear-mounted speaker again from the BoomSound. Just really BoomSound. But the front-mounted speakers on the HTC One, going back to cupping my hand behind the phone just really felt like going a generation back in terms of the device. So I'll take the ergonomic quibbles that I have with the HTC One. It's not perfect. I hate the location of the lock screen and I really don't like the way the volume rocker works for the overall higher build quality. Although it should be noted that Beats Audio isn't something that... A lot of people have asked me if the Beats Audio one is great. It's not that great. iPhone 4 has better sound quality through the headphones than the Galaxy S4 or the HTC One from my experience for that matter. So I think that pretty much wraps it up. Thank you for checking out my unboxing. And really, it was more of an overview of my thoughts of the Galaxy S4. Let me know if you guys enjoyed the video by clicking that like button. And don't forget to subscribe as always unless you're already subscribed. In which case, I don't know, subscribe again... Or something. Bones.