Samsung Galaxy S4 vs LG Optimus G Pro
There are several stages in a product development cycle. The research & development and manufacturing stage doesn’t necessarily generate any revenue. Subsequently the product is introduced to the market and starts its growth. At this time, it will have increasing returns and according to the Boston Consultancy Group matrix, this stage is known as Star. The product is called as a cash cow when it comes to maturity with the highest amount of sales. At this stage, the manufacturer needs to take the most of it before the sales decline. Finally the declining stage of a product is known as ‘problem child’ and tends to cause tension for the manufacturer. They will support it to an extent and kill the product line subsequently. A good manufacturer tries to shorten the transition from Star to Cash Cow as much as possible and puts much effort to elongate the time where the product stays as a cash cow. Subsequently the manufacturer will weigh the benefits and terminate the product. Looking at the release of Samsung Galaxy S4, one thing we noticed is that Samsung is taking every effort possible to shorten the transition from star to cash cow. This may well be because S4 has to beat the sales record kept by S3; it might even be to compete with other products, or its sole purpose might be generating cash for the manufacturer. In any case, when we see a manufacturer taking that much effort, we certainly know it’s either a great product or a total failure. In our case, we’d like to think Samsung Galaxy S4 is a successful piece of engineering and as such, we are going to compare it against LG Optimus G Pro which is also a great piece of engineering with such attention to detail. Once you are done with our take on both, you can decide what is best for yourself.
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.
LG Optimus G Pro Review
LG Optimus G Pro is the successor of LG Optimus G which was released last year. If you are keen about the smartphone market, you might know that Google Nexus 4 had a striking resemblance to LG Optimus G and still have a great demand. With what we have seen so far about the LG Optimus G Pro, we are positive that this is going to create a tight competition in the phablet arena. This handset is based on Qualcomm’s new chipset Snapdragon 600. It was announced recently along with the Snapdragon 800 version which is the best chipset offered by Qualcomm as of yet. The new chipset is said to be considerably faster and enables you to clock the CPU at higher rates. As such, LG Optimus G Pro is powered by 1.7GHz Krait Quad Core processor on top of Qualcomm APQ 8064T Snapdragon 600 chipset along with Adreno 320 GPU and 2GB of RAM. Android OS v4.1.2 commands the beast for now, but it will soon get an upgrade for v4.2 Jelly Bean. The internal storage is at 32GB with the ability to expand it using microSD card up to 64GB.
LG has included 5.5 inches True HD IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display panel featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 401 ppi. As you can clearly imagine, the display panel is gorgeous and reproduces vibrant and realistic colors. LG has decided to mold the device with plastic unlike the high end devices nowadays which comes with classier materials, but this doesn’t mean the built quality is degraded. It’s just not as classier as having a brushed metal back plate. However, this is compensated by the ruggedness introduced through the plastic material. Like any high-end smartphone nowadays, LG Optimus G Pro offers 4G LTE connectivity as well as 3G HSDPA connectivity. Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n is included for continuous connectivity while it also features the ability to create a Wi-Fi hotspot to share your super-fast internet connection. The inbuilt DLNA capability ensures that you can wirelessly stream rich media content to DLNA enabled big screens for playback. The internal speakers are enhanced for Dolby Mobile Sounds, as well.
LG has decided to give a boost to the optics and included 13MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second. It also has LED flash and LED video light when capturing movies. The 2.1 front facing camera can be used for video conferencing, and it also enables you to capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 fps. The camera application includes a few tweaks from LG which attracted us. First off, LG has tried to emulate Google’s Photo Sphere feature and also the camera app offers a mode where you can capture from both rear and front cameras. This is a clever use of beasty computational power available in this awesome smartphone. Another tweak added to the OS by LG was the QSlide which enables you to multitask in the same window. The QSlide enables apps can be overlaid on top of one another, and their opacity can be changed using the slider available which gives you access to a couple of apps simultaneously. LG Optimus Pro G is also fortified in terms of battery having 3140mAh battery. This would provide plenty of juice to be drained by the power hungry CPU and display panel throughout the day.
A Brief Comparison Between Samsung Galaxy S4 and LG Optimus G Pro
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is powered by Samsung Exynos Octa processor which is an 8 core processor with 2GB of RAM while LG Optimus G Pro is powered by 1.7GHz Krait Quad Core processor on top of Qualcomm APQ 8064T Snapdragon 600 chipset with Adreno 320 GPU.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 runs on Android OS v4.2.2 Jelly Bean while LG Optimus G Pro 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 LG Optimus G Pro has 5.5 inches True HD IPS LCD capacitive touchscreen display featuring a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at a pixel density of 401 ppi.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 13MP camera that can capture 1080p HD videos @ 30 frames per second with awesome new features while LG Optimus Pro G also has 13MP rear camera and 2.1MP front camera that can capture 1080p HD videos at 30 frames per second.
• Samsung Galaxy S4 is smaller, slimmer and lighter (136.65 x 69.85 / 7.9mm / 130g) than LG Optimus Pro G (150.2 x 76.1 mm / 9.4mm / 160g).
• Samsung Galaxy S4 has 2600mAh battery while LG Optimus G Pro has 3140mAh battery.
Conclusion
We are in an era where Quad Core processors are becoming the norm of smartphones and 1080p display panels are a commodity. I actually feel outdated using my 1080p LED display panel as my external monitor when a smartphone features the same resolution. That set aside, these two smartphones are more or less at the same level. Samsung Galaxy S4 is definitely faster than LG Optimus G Pro theoretically because of the powerful ARM A15 Quad Core processor it features as opposed to the ARM A7 Krait Quad Core featured on Optimus G Pro. However this difference is not likely to materialize immediately because the app developers are still trying to develop apps that take full use of dual core processors. Knowing that, Samsung has deployed some proprietary apps that make sure the beast is fully unleashed time to time when you use those features. In fact, beside the hardware tweaks, what differentiates Samsung Galaxy S4 from LG Optimus G Pro is the heavy modification to the UI Samsung has done. These are pretty cool inclusion extending the usability to an entirely new perspective. Both devices don’t feature the classy materials seen in other similar high end devices although this wouldn’t necessarily obstruct anyone from buying them. Our advice is to wait till the prices are released for both devices and have a look and decide what suits you best.