Samsung yesterday launched its Galaxy S4 smartphone, officially the most powerful phone on the market with an eight-core processor.
The new smartphone has a five-inch 1920 x 1080-pixel HD Super AMOLED display, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, 4G LTE and built-in near field communication (NFC).
The Galaxy S4 runs Android 4.2.2, or Jelly Bean, customised with an updated version of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface.
The screen is slightly bigger than the S3, but the overall device is slightly smaller and lighter, with flatter edges and a slight texture on the polycarbonate casing.
Jan Dawson, chief telecom analyst at Ovum, comments on the new phone: “As anticipated, the device features a slightly larger screen, an improved camera, and beefed up processor power and memory. The company also augmented various features previously available, including its eye-tracking capabilities.
“The Galaxy S4 is a worthy successor to earlier members of this line, and will doubtless sell well. But it highlights a couple of the key challenges Samsung faces,” he says
“Firstly, having innovated rapidly over the last several years to vaunt itself into top spot in the world smartphone rankings, Samsung now faces essentially the same challenge as Apple: how to continue to improve its devices year on year when existing phones are already top of their class, and there aren’t obvious shortcomings?
“Secondly, how to set Samsung’s devices apart from other devices that share the Android operating system that provides so much of the functionality? As rivals such as HTC and Sony up the specs of their devices and provide ever better hardware, it becomes more and more important for Samsung to differentiate on software and services.
“The improvements to eye tracking and the additions of S Translator and the hover feature and so on 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 – there should be something here for everyone, even if most of these new features won’t be used by most users.
“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,” Dawson says.
“But competitors will catch up (as Samsung has caught up in many ways with Apple) and Samsung will need to continue to stretch. It also needs to build a stronger set of content offerings that cross its various platforms, so that it can extend its leadership in smartphones into the tablet space, and give consumers a reason to buy into an ‘all-Samsung’ experience with their consumer electronics.
“Overall, there are lots of features, but based on past experience most people will never even find them on the device.”
The Galaxy S4 runs Android 4.2.2, or Jelly Bean, customised with an updated version of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface.
The screen is slightly bigger than the S3, but the overall device is slightly smaller and lighter, with flatter edges and a slight texture on the polycarbonate casing.
Jan Dawson, chief telecom analyst at Ovum, comments on the new phone: “As anticipated, the device features a slightly larger screen, an improved camera, and beefed up processor power and memory. The company also augmented various features previously available, including its eye-tracking capabilities.
“The Galaxy S4 is a worthy successor to earlier members of this line, and will doubtless sell well. But it highlights a couple of the key challenges Samsung faces,” he says
“Firstly, having innovated rapidly over the last several years to vaunt itself into top spot in the world smartphone rankings, Samsung now faces essentially the same challenge as Apple: how to continue to improve its devices year on year when existing phones are already top of their class, and there aren’t obvious shortcomings?
“Secondly, how to set Samsung’s devices apart from other devices that share the Android operating system that provides so much of the functionality? As rivals such as HTC and Sony up the specs of their devices and provide ever better hardware, it becomes more and more important for Samsung to differentiate on software and services.
“The improvements to eye tracking and the additions of S Translator and the hover feature and so on 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 – there should be something here for everyone, even if most of these new features won’t be used by most users.
“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,” Dawson says.
“But competitors will catch up (as Samsung has caught up in many ways with Apple) and Samsung will need to continue to stretch. It also needs to build a stronger set of content offerings that cross its various platforms, so that it can extend its leadership in smartphones into the tablet space, and give consumers a reason to buy into an ‘all-Samsung’ experience with their consumer electronics.
“Overall, there are lots of features, but based on past experience most people will never even find them on the device.”