Samsung Galaxy S4 vs BlackBerry Z10
As you know, RIM recently surfaced their new operating system along with their new signature device which is known as Blackberry Z10. This is the first device to feature full touchscreen display panel where RIM predominantly featured keyed smartphones. The Blackberry 10 operating system seems to gain popularity at its half-baked condition which is a good sign for Blackberry. The hardware components used by RIM emphasizes that they seriously need to give an update to their signature device. But let us give them a break for now for they have resurfaced after a long time and their fate will depend on Blackberry Z10. In fact, their constantly declining stock prices got a spike when Blackberry Z10 was released showing the trust the investors have placed on this device. So we thought of including Blackberry Z10 to this discussion. On the other hand, we have an equally important product for its manufacturer; Samsung Galaxy S4. Samsung Galaxy S3 was able to exceed the sales of Apple iPhone for the first time in US and marked a milestone for Samsung. The Galaxy S4 carried an inherent responsibility of keeping up to the name of the kin and we certainly hope it to do so too. So we decided to put it on the tablet for comparison.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Review
Samsung Galaxy S4 is finally revealed after the long anticipation and we are here to cover the event. Galaxy S4 looks smart and elegant as ever. The outer cover emanates Samsung’s attention to detail with their new polycarbonate material making up the cover of the device. It comes in Black and White with the usual rounded edges we are used to in Galaxy S3. It is 136.6 mm long while 69.8 mm wide with 7.9 mm thick. You can clearly see that Samsung has kept the size almost the same as Galaxy S3 to give a sense of familiarity while making it rather thin for a smartphone of this caliber. What this would imply is that you are going to have more screen to look at while having the same size as Galaxy S3. The display panel is 5 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display panel featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 441 ppi. This is actually the first Samsung smartphone to feature 1080p resolution screen although several other manufacturers beat Samsung to it. Nonetheless, this display panel is incredibly vibrant and interactive. Oh and Samsung features hover gestures in Galaxy S4; that is to say you can just hover your finger without actually touching the display panel to activate certain gestures. Another cool feature Samsung has included is the ability to perform touch gestures even with wearing gloves which would be a step forward towards usability. The Adapt Display feature in Samsung Galaxy S4 can adapt the display panel to make the display better depending on what you are looking at.
Samsung Galaxy S4 has 13MP camera that comes with bunch of awesome features. It certainly doesn’t necessarily feature a newly crafted lens; but Samsung’s new software features are sure to be a hit. Galaxy S4 has the ability to include audio in to photos you snap which can act as a live memory. As Samsung put it, it’s like adding another dimension to the visual memories captured. The camera can capture over 100 snaps within 4 second which is just awesome; and the new Drama Shot features means that you can choose multiple snaps for a single frame. It also has an eraser feature which can erase unwanted objects from your photos. Finally Samsung feature dual camera which lets you to capture the photographer as well as the subject and superimpose yourself in the snap. Samsung has also included an inbuilt translator called S Translator which can translate nine languages as of now. It can translate from text to text, speech to text and speech to speech in any way convenient for you. It can also translate written words from menu, books or magazines as well. Right now, S Translator supports French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish. It is also deeply integrated with their chat applications as well.
Samsung has also included a customized version of S Voice which can act as your personal digital assistant and Samsung has optimized this to be used when you are driving too. We are yet to test their new navigation system which is integrated with S4. They have made the transfer from your old smartphone to new Galaxy S4 very easy with the introduction of Smart Switch. The user can separate their personal and work spaces using the Knox feature enabled in Galaxy S4. The new Group Play connectivity seems like a new differentiating factor as well. There were a lot of rumors going on about Samsung Smart Pause which tracks your eyes and pauses a video when you look away and scrolls down when you look down or up which is awesome. S Health application can be used to track your health details including your diet, exercises and can connect external equipment to record data as well. They also have a new cover that is more or less similar to the iPad cover which makes the device sleep when the cover closes. As we have speculated, Samsung Galaxy S4 comes with 4G LTE connectivity as well as 3G HSDPA connectivity along with Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. Strangely enough, Samsung has decided to include a microSD card slot on top of the 16 / 32 /64 GB internal memory you already have. Now we come down to what’s under the hood; it’s not very clear about the processor although Samsung seems to ship Galaxy S4 with two versions. The Samsung Exynos 5 Octa processor is featured in Samsung Galaxy S4 which Samsung claims as the world’s first 8 core mobile processor and models in some regions will feature Quad Core processor as well. The Octa processor concept follows a recent whitepaper released by Samsung. They have taken a patent for the technology from ARM and it’s known as big.LITTLE. The whole idea is to have two sets of Quad Core processors, the lower end Quad Core processors would consist of ARM’s A7 cores clocked at 1.2GHz while the high end Quad Core processors will have ARM’s A15 cores clocked at 1.6GHz. Theoretically, this will make Samsung Galaxy S4 the fastest smartphone in the world as of now. Samsung has also included three PowerVR 544 GPU chips in Galaxy S4 making it the fastest smartphone in terms of graphics performance as well; at least theoretically. The RAM is the usual 2GB which is plenty for this beefy device. You certainly don’t have to worry about the performance with Samsung’s signature product because that is going to pack up plenty of action to keep it running for a whole year at the top of the market. The inclusion of removable battery is also a nice addition compared to all the unibody designs we’ve been seeing.
Samsung introducing Galaxy S4
Blackberry Z10 Review
BlackBerry Z10 is a smartphone that would determine whether we will see any more BB devices in the market or not. Having that in mind, we should commend on Z10 for its elegant looks that closely resembles the square-type outlook of Apple iPhone 5. This is not to say that Z10 is stylistically vibrant; in fact, it rather has a gloomy take on that with the monochrome exterior, but it is also elegantly built that may catch the eyes of the executives as usual. A remarkable difference compared to iPhone 5 is the horizontal bands that span at the top and bottom. It comes with 4.2 inch capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 355ppi. Z10 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 chipset with Adreno 225 GPU and 2GB of RAM. The operating system at play is RIM Blackberry 10 OS which comes brand-new to this device. As we stressed before; the future of BBs depend on Z10 and BB 10 OS, as well. It is more or less like any smartphone OS we see nowadays with a couple of tricks in its sleeve. However, we are visibly worried about the prehistoric applications available in their app store which creates a huge void in modern customers mind. In fact, some of the applications suggested by the OS were rather stale and not monitored because they were actually apps created for the Playbook and looks disoriented in Z10. RIM promises that they’ll be upgrading the app store in the near future with a lot more applications with sounds like a solace.
BlackBerry Z10 features 4G LTE connectivity as well as 3G HSDPA connectivity which is a great step to reach more audience. The web browsing seems super-fast as well tripping the balance towards buying a Z10. It also features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. The internal storage is at 16GB with the ability to expand storage using microSD card up to 32GB. We commend RIM for including a micro HDMI port in BB Z10 for better connectivity. BB Z10 has 8 MP cameras with LED flash that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with continuous autofocus and image stabilization. The secondary camera is 2 MP and can capture 720p videos @ 30 fps. There are some interesting additions in the camera interface for BB 10. The interface, of course, needs some polishing up, but you can take a time shift photo of a group and select individual faces within that short span depending on your preferences. BB Z10 also has a Map application, but that is mediocre, to say the least. RIM will need to do a lot of convincing to make people use that map application over Google Maps or even the newly released Apple Maps. However, compared to Blackberry 7 (which is apparently the predecessor of BB 10), BB 10 is really good and gesture based. It allows you to have either concurrently running application emulating the multi-tasking, also featuring Blackberry hub. BB Hub is like a list of every communication line you have which might be alarmingly crowded but can easily be filtered, as well. BB Z10 has a removable battery of 1800mAh that is estimated to last for 8 hours, which is average.
Introducing BlackBerry Z10
A Brief Comparison Between Samsung Galaxy S4 and Blackberry Z10
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is powered by Samsung Exynos Octa processor which is an 8 core processor with 2GB of RAM while Blackberry Z10 is powered by 1.5GHz Krait Dual Core processor on top of Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 runs on Android OS v4.2 Jelly Bean while Blackberry Z10 runs on Blackberry 10 OS.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 5 inches Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display panel featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 441 ppi while Blackberry Z10 has 4.2 inches capacitive touchscreen featuring a resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels at a pixel density of 355ppi.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 13MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with awesome new features while Blackberry Z10 has 8MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is bigger, but slimmer and lighter (136.65 x 69.85 / 7.9mm / 130g) than Blackberry Z10 (130 x 65.6 mm / 9 mm / 137.5g).
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 2600mAh battery while Blackberry Z10 has 1800mAh battery.
Conclusion
The conclusion is rather easy in this case. We can clearly declare that Samsung Galaxy S4 is better than Blackberry Z10 in almost every aspect. Sorry RIM fans, Galaxy S4 supersede Blackberry Z10 with the help of Android OS. The problem with the Blackberry Z10 is partly in the hardware they used, but also partly in the half-baked Blackberry 10 operating system. I mean, we saw a serious lack of applications for the Blackberry 10 OS which is bound to turn off a lot of customers. In fact, it is unlikely that Blackberry store will have an app density like that of even the Windows App Store any time soon. So if you decide to go with Blackberry Z10, you may do well to keep this in your mind. Elaborating what’s better in Samsung Galaxy S4 doesn’t seem like a requirement because a simple look at the specs can convince you about that. But for the major part, you’d spot the two sets of Quad Core processors in Galaxy S4 against Dual Core Krait in Z10 and the 1080p display panel against the 720p display panel. There are many subtle differences that are elaborated in the respective reviews. As such, we leave you hanging for the decision because we simply can’t bias you to make the decision in this context.