As rumored, teased and even confirmed Samsung did reveal their latest flagship – the Galaxy S4 at their Samsung Unpacked 2013 event yesterday. At a glance, the Samsung Galaxy S4 looks just like a bigger Galaxy S3, but internally the Galaxy S4 is something brand new.
Hardware wise the Galaxy S4 is no doubt the highest spec’d phone on the market. It’s powered by an Octacore (yup 8 cores) Exynos 5 processor running at 1.6GHz or a Qualcomm S4 Quad processor, the one you’ll get depends on the region you buy the phone in. Although Android isn’t optimized for 8 cores yet, having the extra cores will sure come in useful when the next version of Android comes out.
The huge 5-inch display on the Galaxy S4 is a Super AMOLED panel running at 1920×1080, unfortunately the screen has a Pentile pixel arrangement but with the high pixel density you shouldn’t notice it often. The pixel density for the display comes in around at 441 ppi and is protected by Corning Gorilla Class 3.
On the memory side, the Galaxy S4 runs on 2GB of RAM which is standard with flagships nowadays. The smartphone will be available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB flavors and the memory will be expandable by microSD cards.
On the camera size the front is a 2MP sensor while the one in the back in a 13MP shooter. Major software features for the camera include Dual Shot, Simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization and HDR. Both front and back cameras are able to record video in Full 1080p HD at 30fps.
The Galaxy S4 will launch with Android 4.2.2 with Samsung’s Nature UX on top. Samsung has been working hard on adding extra features to it’s phone and this time they’ve come up with a ton. S Translator translates texts and emails from other languages, Air Gestures changes or scrolls pages by swiping your hand in the air, Air View gives you an S Pen like functionality by allowing you see information by hovering your finger over emails or calender entries. There are also other albeit more gimmicky features like Smart Pause and Smart Scroll which pause videos and scroll pages by sensing eye movements respectively.
The Galaxy S4 will be available in the US Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, US Cellular, and Cricket and Deutsche Telecom, EE, H3G, Orange, Telenor, Telia Sonera, Telefonica, and Vodafone in Europe. The Samsung Galaxy S4 hits stores on April 26th and will be available in Black and White.