Like most smartphone releases, details surrounding the Samsung Galaxy S4

Like most smartphone releases, details surrounding the Samsung Galaxy S4 are pouring in from every direction just before the official unveiling this evening. More information about the international (or at least the Chinese) variant of the phone have popped up, this time bringing higher quality photos, components details, and videos of the headlining features for Samsung’s next flagship Android smartphone.

There’s been no shortage of whispers surrounding the Samsung Galaxy S4 and its suspected innards, though the sheer volume of rumors breeds doubt that most of them are true. Samsung’s Galaxy line has grown popular enough that the first wave of renders and specs that “leak” are often little more than wishlists from fans eager to see their favorite manufacturer deliver the best possible product for the coming year. The Galaxy S4 is upon us nevertheless, and while it may not have a lock on being the best phone of 2013, what we know about it so far assures that it will be a highly sought after handset.

 

From previous leaks of Chinese models and a sneak peak from Samsung earlier in the week, we know that the front of the Galaxy S4 will be nearly identical to its predecessor. The Galaxy S3 is hands-down the best selling Android phone to have ever been made, so it would be silly to mess with that design if you don’t have to. Today more images and video emerged, giving expectant fans a nearly completely look at what seems to be a variant of the GS4.

There are some subtle differences to the casing, since the 4.99-inch screen is a slight increase over the 4.8-inch found in last year’s Galaxy S3. The increase in size is matched by a drastic increase in resolution, bringing the often rumored 1080p SAMOLED+ screen to replace the previous 720p screen. The added screen size and extra 500mAh found in the battery make the GS4 an imperceptible 5 grams heavier, but will also be a full millimeter thinner than the Galaxy S3.

As if the display and battery weren’t impressive by themselves, it’s being reported that the Galaxy S4 will pack a tri-core PowerVR 544MP3 GPU alongside the previously unearthed sort-of-but-not-really octo-core processor. The Exynos Octa has eight physical cores, split between four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 cores. The big.LITTLE setup here is designed to allow the more powerful cored to handle any heavy lifting that needs doing, while the less powerful cores handle low power tasks like garbage collection. This is the first Android phone to deploy this setup, and while the concept suggests that there will be significant gains in battery life there’s yet to be any significant real world testing.

Samsung won’t win the hearts and minds of the world on hardware alone, and just like last year it looks like the company is stuffing their TouchWiz flavor of Android with a ton of features that you can only find on their phones. We’ve heard plenty about the ability to use your eyes to control the phone, and now there’s a video of one such behavior in action. If you are watching a video on the Galaxy S4 and you look away from the screen, Samsung’s Smart Pause will pause the video without any commands from the user, and will begin playing again once your face is detected by the front facing camera. Like many of Samsung’s features, SmartPause is likely something that you’ll have to activate and it is unlikely to work in apps like YouTube and Netflix.

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In about an hour, Samsung is going to announce its next flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4. The Galaxy S3 released a little under one year ago, so hopefully you’ve spent enough time with the little guy to be excited for his new, younger brother.

Because the Galaxy S4 is a piece of technology, and there is an official event to announce it with a livestream, some significant specs leaked beforehand, because that’s how that works. A shot of the phone was leaked (seen below), and it looks extremely similar to the S3. The screen grew slightly in size, to 4.99 inches, from the S3′s 4.8 inches. Along with the slightly larger screen, the S4 will upgrade from 720p to 1080p.

The leak also claimed the Galaxy S4 would be just 5 grams heavier than the S3, but will be a millimeter thinner. Samsung’s new phone will also have SmartPause, a feature that pauses whatever video is playing on the phone whenever you look away from the screen. The phone will also support floating touch, a technology invented by Sony that debuted in the 2012 Xperia Sola. As the name suggests, floating touch allows you to interact with the screen while not actually touching the screen. In the Sola, though, the recognized distance is a small 20mm, so you can’t, for example, have your phone on the other side of your night table and float-touch through your playlist from your bed.

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Samsung’s Galaxy S4

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 — the company’s flagship smartphone for the 2013 — has been announced and unsurprisingly the handset bears a striking resemblance to its predecessor. If you take a closer look, however, you’ll find there’s more than a couple of differences between the Samsung Galaxy S3 $189.99 at Amazon Wireless and the new Galaxy S4.

For the purposes of this compare, we’re going to be focusing on the US variants of both Galaxy smartphones. We’ll be looking at the Verizon Wireless variant of the Galaxy S3 as well as the S4.
“This year we put a four on the box”

For most phones out there, a year’s worth of technology evolution shows itself in some not-so-subtle ways. If you look at Motorola, HTC, or LG, it’s usually not hard to point at the phones in a lineup and tell which phone is the older generation. Design evolution is just as important to most companies as hardware iteration, but you’ll find no such glaringly obvious distinctions between the Galaxy S4 and the Galaxy S3. Samsung’s design has survived a full generation, much in the same way that Apple maintains their design for “s” variants of their hardware line. Unlike Apple, there’s a lot more than a spec boost between these two phones — but more on that later.

The Galaxy S4′s physical updates are nearly imperceptible when seeing the two phones laying side by side. Samsung’s latest flagship is ever so slightly heavier and just barely taller and wider, but also manages to be a full millimeter thinner. The jump from the 720p 4.8-inch screen to the 1080p 4.99-inch screen marks a significant increase in quality as well as a slight increase in overall size. Despite having a larger battery and a bigger screen, the Galaxy S4 is still lighter than its predecessor.

There may not be much difference looking at these two phones with the screen off, but turn them on and the power under the hood is sure to show you which is the Galaxy S4.

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