Samsung Electronics has premiered its latest flagship phone, the Galaxy S4, which sports a bigger display and unconventional features such as gesture controls … and it’s coming to Bahrain shortly.
The phone, the first in the highly-successful Galaxy S-series to make its global debut on US soil, was unwrapped at Manhattan’s iconic Radio City Music Hall last Thursday evening. Some industry watchers were clearly dazzled by its features.
The S4 can stop and start videos depending on whether someone is looking at the screen, flip between songs and photos at the wave of a hand, and record sound to run alongside snapped still pictures.
The plethora of new features ‘are good steps’ in this direction, but they can be seen as gimmicks rather than game changers.
“At this point, Samsung appears to be trying to kill the competition with sheer volume of new features,” said Jan Dawson, chief telecom analyst at IT research outfit Ovum.
“For now, Samsung can likely rely on its vastly superior marketing budget and the relatively weak efforts of its competitors in software to keep it ahead.”
The success or failure of the new model will be pivotal in the world’s biggest smartphone maker’s battle against Apple and smaller, and key to that struggle will be phone differentiation.
Apple may already be feeling the heat. Just a day before, marketing chief Phil Schiller blasted Samsung and the Google Android software, underscoring the pressure that the iPhone maker is feeling from its Korean mobile-phone nemesis.
Samsung said the Galaxy S4 will sport a bigger 5-inch display than the S3’s 4.8 inches. But because the new display will cover more of the phone’s surface area, the device itself will be the same length and slightly narrower, thinner and lighter than the previous generation.
The newest features involve different options for navigation. For example, if the phone senses someone is looking at the screen, the user can tilt it forward or backwards to scroll up and down an internet page.
The latest phone also has a sensor that lets users move their hands to the left or right to scroll between different websites they have opened or through songs or photos in an album without having to touch the phone.
It will also allow users to hover a finger over an email inbox or a photo gallery to get a glimpse of more details of what’s in the email or which photos are in an album.
Samsung is also promising an instant translation between 10 different languages for certain applications, as well as a separate translation application on the device.
The device also has a 13-megapixel camera, compared with the S3’s 8MP camera.
l The S4 will be available by the end of April and rolled out to 327 carriers in 155 countries. It will use either Samsung’s own applications processor or Qualcomm Snapdragon central processing chip, depending on the country. But the Korean company kept mum on exact dates and prices.
