Rumours RoundUp for the Samsung Galaxy S4
The world eagerly anticipates March 15, where the new Samsung Galaxy S4 or SGS4 would be revealed. It would be a dual country launch in New York (7PM) and London, which translates in Singapore time to approximately 8AM on March 15. We would update the coverage live on our website and twitter feed. Under 10 days away… and the hype continues to build up.
With every other manufacturer launching a full HD screen, 4.7-5″ screen phone, each proclaiming slimmest and best build quality, are we expecting anything less from Samsung? For now, little Jeremy has best answer – watch “the secret messenger of Samsung UNPACKED 2013,” for the first official teaser video for the Galaxy S4. The SGS3 was already a top seller and Samsung is clearly going more aggressive this year to cement that position as both profit and market leader.
Every top-end Android phone has similar specifications and in terms of performance, I would say that they are good enough for 90% of users so there really shouldn’t be a need to compare the specifications, but by virtue of having the later release, Samsung should dominate the hardware segment as well, with rumours of the Exynos Octa processor, though that has diminished somewhat over the last couple of weeks. With hardware no longer a strong differentiator, the next aspect would be in terms of the Software and overall user experience. Most geeks wouldn’t care as they customise it on their own, but I would say that geeks probably only account for 20% of the smartphone market. Most users would never bother with unlocking the phone bootloader, rooting, and less likely to load a custom ROM. Thanks to Evleaks, the following picture is rumoured to be official from Samsung.
Samsung has always focused quite a fair bit on innovative features to improve the phone user experience and apparently there’s a current leak floating about. The person, apparently a Samsung employee, revealed that Galaxy S4 would be able to track the users’ eyes to determine where to navigate on the screen. “For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.” This would be useful for example if you are reading a long website or an eBook. It is also not too surprising as there was a similar feature introduced on the S3 last year. It was for the “Smart Stay”, which prevents the display backlight from turning off while the user is looking at the screen.
The likely specifications for the SGS4 are:
- 5-inch Super AMOLED Full HD display
- 13 megapixel camera with LED flash
- Storage options of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, with 2GB of RAM
- Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
- Exynos 5 Octa (8-Core) CPU
- PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU
- 2 megapixel front facing camera capable of shooting 720p HD Videos, TouchWiz UI and Wireless charging
Release Date in Singapore
Just a recap, we saw the Galaxy S3 being announced at the same Samsung Unpacked 2012 in the United Kingdom during the month of May. This was shortly followed by sales around the end of May with Singapore being the first batch of launch customers, approximately 3 weeks after. I still remember the long queues last year at the Singtel outlets, and also probably the same for the Starhub and M1 shops as well. With Samsung even more popular this year and a concurrent US and UK launch, we are hoping that the small island of Singapore wouldn’t be forgotten. Recent phone launches have bypassed Singapore as the initial few. Separately, there are also rumours that the phone may only start sales in May due to production delays. We are hoping that the rumours of a delayed launch till May is untrue and that will erode the anticipation the phone has generated in March.