A week ago from today I walked into the local At&t store and bought myself a frost white Galaxy S4, I bought it completely on an impulse with the hopes that it would maybe turn me back onto Samsung fan after being spoiled by Sony phones particularly the Sony Xperia Z.
I get home and take it out of the box, imagine the S3 box but made to look like a piece of wood. Yes I said a piece of wood, maybe it’s Samsung and At&ts way of being “green”. After taking it out of the box I turn it on, while its starting up I take a look in the box. Looking inside I see it has youre typical usb cable, decent looking set of white earbuds with your standard earpieces and your everyday powerblock. Instantly I realize my S3 came with the same exact stuff, not saying im surprised as its your typical phone extras. And just like the S3, Note series the phone feels cheap, everytime I’ve taken the battery cover off I feel like all the little tabs are going to snap. In all honestly I’ve never felt a Samsung phone feel as amazing as the captivate, hopefully one day Samsung realizes all there new phones feel like a dollar store kids toy.
I notice the phones up, its past the typical second or 2 where it has zero signal. As I unlock the screen it brings me to the Google sign in page for all the google services. I skip all that except the wifi portion and sign into my network.
First thing I do after all that is mess around with touch wiz, for those that don’t know its Samsungs native launcher. To me its the same as its always been, sluggish and full of things I’ll never use. Right then I install my beloved Nova launcher and change all the settings to what I use on any phone I install it on and like that the phone feels smooth and well better.
After setting up Nova I decide to look at all the At&t and Samsung bloat ware thats pre installed, first one I try out is “watch on”. Its the app that turns your phone in a remote control for your tv and cable box, upon opening the app it asks for your zip code so I can pull up the cable/dish providers in you’re area. I select comcast and then it asks if its a dvr box which I pick yes, I then notice the LED indicator blinks blue and the screen says “press power button, if box turns off this is the correct code. If not hit next”. So I press the power button on the screen and it turns my box off, next it asks the tvs manufacturer and I select Samsung and it goes through the same process as setting it up for my dvr. After getting both setup I give them a try, automatically noticing that for both it seems as though I have to be pointed directly at both and not far away and I’m not to impressed but then again its a phone first and remote. After messing around with it some more I turn on the air scrolling and to be honest in a week its worked exactly ZERO times, HUGE upset but after digging around online it seems others have had the issue and just got them swapped out for a new one. The “hoover” feature is cool, basically in certian apps like the photo album you can hover your finger over a picture and it blows it up for preview it. Again its another one of those features in my eyes that’s a showoff feature and not a need to have, useful feature.
After messing with the camera I look at the screen, its just like any other Amoled screen. Over saturated colors and nice blacks. Nothing screens wow like some other phones screens do.
Next I open up the camera app, snap a quick picture and am very impressed. The image is crisp, clean and the auto focus and auto detect of photo to take is great. I try out the dual camera feature and snap a pic of myself with the front camera and one of the yard with the rear camera, its a cool feature that reminds me of a postcard. The next feature I try is the sound picture, I take a picture and it gives you up to 9 seconds to record a voice message.
Over the course of the week I’ve tried basically every app that was preinstalled and to be honest none of them are need to have apps. Ive replaced the stock SMS app with handcent, use both the gmail and Yahoo mail apps over the native email app. Still using Nova over the stock loved or hated touch wiz.
Overall I’m not impressed, I find myself wanting something different and wanting to go back to my Z. In all to me this reminds me of the whole iPhone 4/4S scenario, you know basically the same phone just with a little better specs. So to all you S3 owners maybe you should save your upgrade for something besides the S4. Oh and to top it all off it has a LOCKED bootloader!!!!!
Pictures to come later!
About JohnD
John used to be an iPhone lover but has not looked back ever since he came over to Android, name the phone and he would have owned it, a chef during the day, he loves his tech.