Samsung Galaxy S4 vs HTC One
Samsung was able to create a huge anticipation over their next in line signature device Samsung Galaxy S4. In fact, we have to give credit Samsung Marketing Division for creating such hype and not to mention the ardent Samsung fans who kept the rumor mill running. But that was yesterday and today is a new day; we have Samsung Galaxy S4 at our hands today thanks to Samsung who finally revealed it yesterday. We have to mention that their event in Time Square for gigantic but received mixed reception. Some were so bold to claim it to be useless marketing stunt with relatively low information gain, some were impressed by the sheer amount of effort Samsung has given to the event. In fact, it featured some Broadway actors and scenes demonstrating the use cases of Samsung Galaxy S4 which was innovative and certainly a great way to showcase what this device can do. We were actually impressed about the event but have to agree that it didn’t assimilate as much information as us geeks would require gauging a smartphone. But fear not; we have managed to secure a complete review on Samsung Galaxy S4 and thought of comparing it with one of its obvious competitors. HTC One was our point of attraction few weeks back and we claimed that it was one of the best devices in the market. It still is, and now Samsung Galaxy S4 falls under the same category. So here we go comparing them against each other.
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.
Introducing Galaxy S4
HTC One Review
HTC One is the successor for HTC’s flagship product last year HTC One X. Actually the name sounds like the predecessor of HTC One X, but nonetheless, it is the successor. We have to commend HTC on this awesome handset for it is one of a kind. HTC has paid so much attention to the detailing of the smartphone so that it looks premium and elegant as ever. It has a unibody polycarbonate design with a machined aluminum shell. In fact, Aluminum is etched in order to create channels where the polycarbonate is inset using zero gap molding. We hear that is takes 200 minutes to machine one of these stunning and elegant shells, and it certainly shows. The Aluminum used by HTC is harder than what is found on the iPhone 5, as well. HTC revealed Silver and White versions of the handset, but with the different anodized aluminum colors and variety of polycarbonate hues, the color variations can be virtually limitless. The front of the HTC One resembles a bit to Blackberry Z10 with the two aluminum bands and two horizontal lines of stereo speakers at the top and the bottom. The brushed aluminum finish and the square design with the curved edges have some resemblance to iPhone, as well. Another interesting thing we noticed was the layout of the capacitive buttons at the bottom. There are only two capacitive buttons available for Home and Back which are laid out on either sides of an imprint of HTC logo. That is about the physical elegance and the built quality of HTC One; let us move on to talk about the beast inside the beautiful outer shell.
HTC One is powered by 1.7GHz Krait Quad Core processor on top of Qualcomm’s new APQ 8064 T Snapdragon 300 chipset along with Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB of RAM. It runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean with a planned upgrade to v4.2 Jelly Bean. As you can clearly see, HTC has packed a beast inside the beautiful shell of the One. It will serve all of your needs without any concern for performance with the super-fast processor. The internal storage is either at 32GB or 64GB without the ability to expand the storage using microSD card. The display panel is also purely awesome having a 4.7 inches Super LCD 3 capacitive touchscreen display panel featuring a gorgeous resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 469 ppi. HTC has used Corning Gorilla glass 2 to fortify their display panel. The UI is the usual HTC Sense 5 which has some additional tweaks. The first thing we noticed is the home screen which has what HTC calls a ‘BlinkFeed’. What this does is to bring out tech news and related content to the home screen and arrange them in tiles. This actually resembles the live tiles of Windows Phone 8 and critics have been fast to allege HTC about that. We of course have no offense towards that. The new TV app is also a great addition to HTC One, and it has a dedicated button at the home screen. HTC has included a Get Started wizard that lets you set up your smartphone from the web on your desktop. This is a really nice addition since you are required to fill up a lot of details, link up a lot of accounts etc in order to get your smartphone up and running like your previous one. We also liked the all new HTC Sync manager which features a wealth of new stuff.
HTC has also taken a bold stance in terms of optics because they have only included a 4MP camera. But this 4MP camera is bound to be way better than most of the smartphone cameras in the market. The basis behind this exclamation is the UltraPixel camera HTC has included in One. It has a large sensor that is capable of getting more light in. To be precise, the UltraPixel camera has 1/3 inch BSI sensor of 2µm pixels enabling it to absorb 330 percent more light that the regular 1.1µm pixels sensor that is used by any normal smartphone. It also has OIS (Optical Image Stabilization) and a fast 28mm f/2.0 autofocus lens which translates in to a layman as a smartphone camera that is capable of taking extremely low light shots. HTC has also introduced some pretty neat features like Zoe which is to capture a 3 second 30 frames per second video along with the snaps you are taking that can be used as animated thumbnails in your photo gallery. It can also capture 1080p HDR videos at 30 frames per second and offers a pre- and post-shutter recording that mimics functionality similar to Nokia’s Smart Shoot or Samsung’s Best Face. The front camera is 2.1MP and enables you to take wide angle views with f/2.0 wide angle lens and can also capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second.
Any new high end smartphone nowadays comes with 4G LTE connectivity and HTC One is no different. It also has 3G HSDPA connectivity and has Wi-Fi 802.11 a/ac/b/g/n for continuous connectivity. You can also set up a Wi-Fi hotspot to share your internet connection and stream rich media content using DLNA. NFC is available on selected handsets as well which would depend on the carrier. HTC One has 2300mAh non-removable battery that would power up the smartphone to last a typical day.
Introducing HTC One
A Brief Comparison Between Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is powered by Samsung Exynos Octa processor which is an 8 core processor with 2GB of RAM while HTC One is powered by 1.7GHz Quad Core Krait processor on top of Qualcomm APQ 8064T Snapdragon 600 chipset along with Adreno 320 GPU.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 runs on Android OS v4.2.2 Jelly Bean while HTC One runs on Android OS v4.1.2 Jelly Bean.
• 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 HTC One has 4.7 inches Super LCD 3 capacitive touchscreen display panel featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 469 ppi.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 13MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with awesome new features while HTC One has 4MP UltraPixel camera with very good low light performance that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is almost of the same size as HTC One, but slimmer and lighter (136.65 x 69.85 / 7.9mm / 130g) than HTC One (137.4 x 68.2 mm / 9.3 mm / 143g).
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 2600mAh battery while HTC One has 2300mAh battery.
Conclusion
There are various things to look at when you try to conclude reviews on two high end devices. In fact, it is the most difficult part given both these devices is signature products of two rival companies. Each hold a high esteem and very specific goals; Samsung Galaxy S4 has to match the sales record of Galaxy S III and be able to surpass Apple’s new smartphone. On the other hand, HTC One is supposed to exponentially increase HTC’s sales. As you can see, these two are mutually exclusive and one is going to happen on this expense of the other. Hence this conclusion is equally important as an elucidation. Getting at the bare metal, Samsung Galaxy S4 is definitely faster than HTC One with the new Samsung Exynos Octa processor featuring two sets of Quad Core processors. The GPU performance is bound to be the fastest in the market as well. Both display panels are superb and reproduces vivid and vibrant images. HTC One is particularly good at audio performance and low light photography with bunch of cool additions to the camera app. On the other hand, Samsung also feature a bunch of interesting additions to the camera app that makes it a clear differentiation. We have to compliment HTC for the design of the One because it is elegant and awesome with the premium look and Samsung Galaxy S4 can’t really match that outlook. So that’s about our take on both of these devices and their pros and cons; making the decision is up to you.