Samsung Galaxy S4

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is being touted as a groundbreaking smartphone, but we were surprised by how similar it looks to the S3. It's the same height (136.6mm), and only a millimetre narrower (69.8mm) and 0.7mm thinner (7.9mm). However, it has a larger SuperAMOLED 5in screen that's Full HD, so text looks sharp and colours are vibrant. But it's a minor leap from the 720 x 1280-pixel screen of the S3, and the difference is barely noticeable. Unfortunately, Samsung has retained the S3's plastic casing, which makes the S4 feel cheap and fragile. and to accommodate the larger screen, there's a smaller bezel on either side. This makes the S4 awkward to hold and it's easy to accidentally touch the screen's edges and unintentionally open menus. The camera has jumped from 8MP to 13MP with more advanced photo-editing tools, and the battery has also been improved. That said, we didn't have enough time with the S4 to fully test its battery life, but with the ramped-up screen, we'd be surprised
if a charge lasted a full day. The S4 has also added some interesting new features. For example, you don't need to touch the screen to swipe through pages; you can wave your hand across it, or tilt the phone to scroll. Its eye-gesture controls register when you get to the bottom of a page and should scroll automatically, although we struggled to get this to work well. Videos stop playing when you look away from the screen, but we found this annoying because it meant we couldn't play videos in the background. When these features worked, they were useful, but they take a lot of getting used to. We also felt a bit silly when waving at the phone. If the S4 was cheaper, we might recommend upgrading, because the hardware improvements are good, as are the (albeit gimmicky) new features. However. at £629 for the handset, or around £41 per month on contract, we don't think it's good value for money, and it certainly isn't enough to tempt us to upgrade from the excellent S3.