Perhaps the biggest news to hit the wires last week was the official announcement of Samsung’s next flagship smartphone. Speculated about for months prior to its official unveiling last Friday, the Galaxy S4 was shown off by Samsung executives, (and hired actors), as being a super-thin, super-capable smartphone that adapts to its surroundings.
The event took place in New York City and saw 318,430 people join-in socially with the gig, sending a combined total of 609,248 tweets about the Galaxy S4 and its features.
42% of those tweets contained hashtags, such as #unpacked, #thenextgalaxylaunch and #thenextgalaxy, with most people who tweeted about the event originating from Brazil, Indonesia, Venezuela, Singapore, Thailand, Spain, Malaysia, France and India, according to Salorix.
Described as a “life companion” – (largely due to the robust, long-lasting materials the smartphone has been made out of, but also due to the fact that the S4 is much more than a smartphone, allowing you to track the progress of your health and fitness routine with “Life Care,”) the Samsung Galaxy S4 measures 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm, (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 in), and features a 5-inch Full HD super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display, capable of 16 Million colors. The display carries a resolution of 1080 x 1920 pixels (~441 ppi pixel density), and will arrive with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 display protection when the new handset begins shipping at the end of April.
Just as with Apple’s iPhone, the S4 will arrive in 16, 32 and 64GB flavors and each model will feature 2GB in RAM. In addition, each of these models will carry a microSD card slot, allowing users to extend the storage capacity of their S4 by up to 64GB.
As far as networking goes, the handset will support GSM (850, 900, 1800 and 1900), alongside 3G HSDPA, (850, 900, 1900 and 2100) and 4G LTE (market dependent). Regarding speeds you can achieve with the device, Samsung says on HSDPA you’ll get 42.2 Mbps, while switching to HSUP will see you with speeds of 5.76 Mbps.
Those interested in taking photos with the smartphone may be pleased to hear that Samsung’s new flagship will ship with two shooters. The first is a 13 Megapixel rear-facing camera capable of taking shots of up to 4128 x 3096 pixels. This camera module features both autofocus and LED flash, alongside other useful features such as; Dual Shot, simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization and HDR.
This rear-facing camera module is also capable of taking 1080p video at 60fps, and 1080p video at 30fps when it is in dual-video recording mode. The handset’s secondary shooter is 2 Megapixel, which will take video at 1080p at 30fps when in dual-video call mode.
Internally, the S4 carries an Exynos 5 Octa 5410 chipset, with a Quad-core CPU at 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15, and a Quad-Core processor at 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7. In addition, those out there who are picky about their smartphone’s graphic abilities should be pleased with the S4′s PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU.
Shown off at the event, the Galaxy S4 will also carry a variety of internal sensors which have been designed to enhance your “life companion”’s abilities. These include; an accelerometer, gyro sensor, proximity sensor, compass sensor, barometer sensor, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and gesture sensor.
Added features, such as; Dual Camera, Sound & Shot, Drama Shot, Group Play, Story Album and Samsung Hub will further your personal use of the Galaxy S4, with your business life contained in a sort of “locker” known as ‘Knox’ – (a play on Fort Knox).
Other notable features you can expect to see from Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, include; Wireless charging (market dependent), S-Voice natural language commands and dictation, Smart stay, Smart pause and Smart scroll.
“Air gestures” – (a new technology which claims to allow users the ability to control the S4 without actually touching the handset), are also part of the overall package, with every customer who purchases the S4 receiving 50 GB in Dropbox storage.
The handset also features active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic, (for those times when your environment is too noisy), TV-out (via MHL A/V link), SNS integration, an MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/H.263 player, MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player, organizer, image and video editor, Document viewer, (which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF), Google Search, Maps and Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa, Voice memo and dial commands, and finally – Predictive text input (through Swype).
Also available with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset (Quad-core 1.9 GHz Krait 300 CPU, Adreno 320 GPU), Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is expected to go on-sale around the world, on April 26.
We’ll be sure to let you know when you can get your hands on one. For now, though, we recommend that you watch Samsung’s UNPacked media event in full – above.