Our first impressions of the S4 left us a little cold, but we've now spent a full week getting to know it better. It's definitely one of the best phones you can buy. It's just shame it couldn't stay out of USB flash drives wholesale own way.
Samsung's next great hope of a superphone. It's got a 5-inch 1080p Super AMOLED screen, a superfast quad-core 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 processor, 2GB RAM, LTE, NFC, and a 13MP camera. It also has a beefy 2600mAh battery, and an IR blaster for controlling your home entertainment system. It comes running Android 4.2.2 with Samsung's heavy TouchWiz skin on top of it. It should be available on every major U.S. wireless carrier in the next few weeks.
If you're familiar with the Galaxy S III, the S4 will look strikingly familiar. It retains the same rounded-rectangle look, with metal edges and a slippery, finger-print-trapping plastic back that looks like it belongs on a far more downmarket phone. It's at least functional, though; the back is removable, so you can swap out the battery or expand your storage capabilities with a micro SD card. A lot of people prefer that added utility over the more solid-feeling, and more beautiful unibody design of, say, the HTC One.
One place Samsung does manage to score design points is growing the screen from 4.8 inches on the Galaxy S III to a full 5.0 inches on the S4, while still making the phone thinner, narrower, and easier to grip. The side bezels are shrunk down to nearly nothing, and the screen takes up almost the entire front of the device. Speaking of the screen, it is easily the nicest Samsung has ever made. The colors (especially blues and greens) really pop, and the 441 pixels per inch ensure that text is super-clear. It's also bright enough to be clearly readable on a bright, sunny day, and the Super AMOLED screen makes the blacks like staring into the abyss.
While Nexus phones are moving away from physical buttons for navigation, Samsung has opted to include three of them here. The S4 has capacitive buttons for Menu and Back, and a physical, clickable button for Home. It's wasted space. But worse, the capacitive buttons don't light up until you actually touch them, so if you forget which side is Menu and which is Back you might end up closing out of something unintentionally. Annoying!
As we noted in our original hands-on, the S4 comes packed full of "features." There's Air View, which allows you to hover your finger over the screen to see some information without actually clicking. There's Air Gestures, which allows you to wave your hand over the phone to change between tabs or photos. There's Smart Scroll, with which you tilt your device to scroll, instead of using your finger. There's Smart Pause, which will pause a video when you look away from the screen. And there's Group Play, which lets you play a handful of selected video games with friends on the same Wi-Fi network, or use several S4 phones as Sonos-like speakers.
The most important thing you need to know about these features is that you will never use any of them. Ever. Never ever. The end.
Why not? Oh, lots of reasons. Air View only works with Samsung's customized apps—not Gmail, not Chrome—and even then it doesn't work very well. Air Gestures are less accurate and less convenient than just touching the screen. Smart Scroll is totally unreliable, and Smart Pause is totally useless. The only, only justification for any of these features is that you can wave your hand over the phone to answer a call while driving, or, again, maybe if you're addicted to buffalo wings and have an aversion to moist towelettes.
The good news is that you can turn off and/or totally ignore most of these extraneous "features," and when you do, there's a very good phone underneath. It's generally very fast, and HD games like Temple Run: Oz, Inertia HD, and Naught all ran smoothly. The pre-installed sliding keyboard is better than most manufacturer keyboards (looking at you, HTC), with plenty of space between keys and a dedicated number row, but auto-correct has a lot of issues, and we still prefer the keyboard on stock Jelly Bean or SwiftKey 4. The unit we tested was on T-Mobile's HSPA+ 42 network (no T-Mobile LTE in NYC, yet, though this phone will work with it when it rolls out); data speeds were good, and it connected reliably.
There will be a cadre of S4 accessories available (TV adapters and such) at some point, but the only one available at launch is the S View Flip Cover. It's a good-looking cover that adds almost no thickness to your phone by completely replacing the back. The phone can sense when the cover is closed, and it will only light up one little (plastic) window on the front, which should save you a little battery power (when an AMOLED pixel is black it doesn't use any power). You can swipe to accept or dismiss calls even when the cover is closed.
Battery performance on the S4 is among the best we've seen from smartphones this year, though it's still not anywhere near as everlasting as the RAZR MAXX HD. It's important to note, though, that our testing took place on T-Mobile's HSPA+ network, and not the more power-hungry LTE of Verizon and AT&T. With that advantage, it slightly edged out the HTC One by an hour or so on average (which itself does pretty iPhone headset).
The S4 did, though, make it to the end of the night without additional charging fairly often, thanks to both the larger battery (2600mAh vs. 2300mAh on the One) and the more economical AMOLED screen, though the processor's higher clock speed taxed it somewhat.
Speaking of which: that screen really is leaps and bounds better than the one on last year's S III. It's very sharp, pretty, and easy to read. The camera app is laid out very nicely, and the included OCR (optical character recognition) software, which can translate written words on the fly, are both examples of app actually done right. Overall, the S4 is definitely a sizable upgrade over the S III. But it's still got its issues.
沒有留言:
張貼留言