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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 weeken 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 line of Sebastian on it which
happens to be my name 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 um okay there's a micro SIM
starter kit I got a tus phone so it also gave me a bit of a chance to check out
ts's Network cuz normally I'm a Bell customer so it was not that interesting
it was fine didn't really have any complaints uh 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 uh so it's all good so
let's start with touch wiz's optimizations most Android users
probably won't care too much about particularly things like up here where
you can see either 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
daytoday to things like their smart scrolling Smart Stay um 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 mom 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 up up so basically okay yeah yeah yeah will 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 mom calls more than like nine people so I could set all
those people up there for her and all she 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 thinks that she needs to use uh 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 um 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 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 one one thing was uh waving to answer a call
if it was just kind of like this or you just like pass over it 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 you have to move quite slowly so
for me it' be faster to just pick it up and go like this and answer my call um I
mean the the one implementation oh yeah and same thing with uh 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 you can browse web pages
like that but I ever since the Advent of
momentum based scrolling in browsers um
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 um
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 touchcreen 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 to trying to scroll around on a web page it was
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 uh 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 HTC1 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 um 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 um also the the
rounded Corners compared to the HTC1 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 um does a couple of things so number one is it makes it feel
more like um 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 HTC1 which feels like just oh
feels really really good um 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 air hole let's see if I can 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 slick you carry one right yeah I mean especially with those
around that's a great way to beef up he says he carries two um to to charge up
your devices I mean that works really well uh micro SD I didn't end up using
but because I don't have one handy but I would 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-in screen on this guy
because they look awesome uh 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 cuz they
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 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 HTC1 which guys if you recall has a 4 megapixel
camera only but they're Ultra pixels they're big pixels can take way more
sharp pictures in broad daylight than the HTC1 but the HTC1 blows it out of
the water in terms of um low light performance so it's all about what's
more important to you on the side You'
got your volume rocker which I found way better than the HTC1 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 tacti
where it is and which way I'm pressing it is really nice HTC1 really suffers in
this way you've got your headphone microphone port on the top as well as ah
I emitter very very cool uh their 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 Lick's
giving me a face palm right now you know what it wasn't that great and then the
uh 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 I mean yeah to imply that James
Bond only needs a girl for four minutes is I think uh 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 3 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 Audi book for our viewers thing where if you
go to audible.com 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 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
best sellers 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 you place the book this is
audible all right well apparently it's music now as well but there you go guys
check it out uh moving right along other
bizarre features things like Sealth 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 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 uh there's accessories coming that'll make it easier to use and
more comprehensive but uh 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 HTC1
because nine times out of 10 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 a way with the three button
approach to the bottom so you've got your they went away come back uh so
you've got your context menu you've got much too Google's trigger in 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 application this comes over from the note to and it works really
well because of the high resolution screen well when I was using it but now
it's uh 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 um 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 and 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 something like a soccer ball flying
something along those lines eraser takes random weird strangers out of the back
um the other one that I thought was great which one best 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 uh you
want to capture that moment and because the shutter speeds so fast you can just
go be you can do your own best picture and you can sort 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 KNX and the enhanced security that it offers
there was a great article from just in case on Android police where he
basically said look don't worry too much because 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 okay 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 uh Palm motion I didn't end
up really using uh there's a couple 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 has a little window so you can see notifications speaking of
notifications smart alert which basically will uh 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 okay 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 I'm 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
so there's that uh what else stuff like voice control has always felt kind of
goofy to me I use it much um 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 uh 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
share is still here I don't think I've ever seen anyone use it um 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 um turning every
phone into a speaker and like you know oh this is a center channel this is a
left and right channel um 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 uh ice cream sandwich cuz 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 um at the end of the day if
you're looking for a conclusion um I will be sticking with my HTC1 it's all
about the trade-off do you want the more advanced features it's a faster
processor 1.9 versus 1.7 GHz um do you
want the high megapixel camera or the ultra pixel camera do you want things
like the gestures and the temperat and humidity Monitor and S Health and all
these features that Samsung puts in to differentiate their phones um or do you
want something that really has that that
feel like it's a serious business device I mean this is the first I've said this
before in my ey switch to Android where I did 30 days with the HTC1 um coming
from iOS to Windows Phone 8 now to
Android um 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 quality um also
it was a huge step backwards for me going to a rearm mounted speaker again
from the boom sound really boom sound uh but the front
mounted speakers on the HTC1 um you know going back to cupping
my hand behind the phone just really felt like like like going a generation
back in terms of the device so I'll take the ergonomic quibbles that I have with
the HTC1 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 on is great it's not that great um
iPhone 4 has better sound quality through the headphones than the Galaxy
S4 or the HTC1 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
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