Technology Android

[masta247]

I think the S4 is for people that missed out on the S3 last year and didn't want to invest in one several months after its release. Of course, people with S3s will upgrade as well, but this is for those people with 4Ss that want to switch to Android, but could not because the S3 came out almost six months after it.

If I didn't have a phone that was around a year old, the S4 would be great. Better camera, processor, features. But for an S3 owner, it really doesn't provide much of an upgrade. Nothing worth the hassle of selling your S3 and making enough to buy an S4 off-contract.

I know Masta said his Samsung from a few years ago was powerful enough for him, and I feel the same way about the galaxy S3 now. If the phone were to come out with a much better processor I doubt that I would really reap the benefits of it. The S3 is plenty fast for me and I can't see its hardware making me wish for a better processor or more RAM for at least another two years. I think the hardware is good enough that even cyanogen mod will be able to support it for a few more updates thus making it a solid phone to have until support wanes

I agree. The S4 is a great phone and it's better than S3 in every aspect, but for an average person it's not going to be a very huge upgrade from the S3. I mean, the difference is about as big as S2 to S3 (not counting the design though), but the S3 reached that point where it was ahead of its time hardware-wise - it was a very complete package where there's little you might wish for.

I don't know a single person with the S3 complaining about the speed. Personally I do have the Tegra 3 in my N7 which is even a little slower and it maxes out only during app loadings, so that's the only aspect that would significantly improve for now. The S4's processor is literally twice as fast as the S3's processor (and that's for the slower Snapdragon version of S4), which makes it crazy future-proof, I'd say - in case someone comes up with some new, heavier features for Android in the future. Like a resource-heavier OS update.
The graphics chip is also more powerful but frankly, Android is still very poor if it comes to gaming and any high end phone is an overkill for games we see on Google Play. Mobile platforms are still lacking severely here.
Bigger and better Super Amoled, battery etc. are minor differences and sure they make this phone the overall best smartphone and are likely to make any new owner "wow" but if you had the S3 already the difference won't feel jaw-dropping because the S3 had similar things, just a little bit less awesome. It's basically like switching to a new model of Ferrari, already having last year's model.

 

[dilla]

I don't think we've quite hit a wall in performance hard enough for manufacturers to start worrying about battery life. Even though battery life is 100X more important than performance at this point. I doubt OEMs will care enough to address that. It's literally a horsepower race but the phones are all starting to perform the same. I personally do not play those racing games that are so graphic intensive on my phone. So this whole Tegra crap has been overkill for me since day one.

 

[Pittsey]

My first phone had 8 hours standby and 1 hours talktime. I'm not complaining about battery. If I get a day, I'm happy.

 

[masta247]

Yeah, Samsung phones perform a little better than the rest, usually. The Note 2 is currently the leader lasting approx 3 days with ~3hour use/day followed by the Motorola Razr Maxx and then a bunch of other Samsung phones, including the SGS3, and then the rest.

There are great tests here: http://blog.gsmarena.com/category/battery-tests/
Note's test: http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-galaxy-note-ii-battery-life-test-is-complete-here-are-the-results/

Android phones still went a long way (relatively, there's a much longer way to go). about 2 years ago it was very good if a phone could get a ~30 hours endurance score, now they're easily getting 40-something hours on average. That's with those big ass 5 inch displays and quad core chips.

 

[dilla]

Battery life is like fuel economy, you can never have too much of it. I have to charge my S3 every night and I don't talk much on it. I usually text and Whatsapp a good bit, but very little talking. I've always had the issue of being in a house in a wooded area and where the reception is always low. I can always make an receive calls, but data tends to go in and out. Even when I put it on WiFi, which I do all the time now, I'm sure the radio still has to be working itself for the voice/text part.

If those three day battery lives of the Note 2, we can always strive towards a week. All I'm saying is take most of the R&D spent on adding cores and increasing clock speed, and put it towards efficiency of the processors and maybe some battery technology as well.

 

[masta247]

^ Unfortunately lately R&D for phone companies is mostly focused on software. Processor companies are doing R&Ds for their processors and its about getting the most performance out of a low-power ARM chip. I'm disappointed that the battery tech is still so limited, basically not much has changed for the last 10 years except of improving the amount of battery cycles, so it doesn't wear as fast. There's plenty of research going on for amazing battery technologies but we're still years away from any of those becoming commercially available.

Yeah, the battery suffers the most when your phone struggles to find reception. Also, talking doesn't normally drain your battery fast anymore, texting does it faster because when you're talking the screen is off and when you're texting it's on and screen is what drains the battery the most. If you're talking over 2G with decent reception you could probably talk whole day on a single charge.

 

[masta247]

Yeah, so the camera on the HTC One is THAT BAD after all...

http://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3?idType=1&idPhone1=5313&idPhone2=4238&idPhone3=5204

If you want to be extra cruel, compare it to the FIRST Galaxy S, the 3 year old phone with a 5mpx camera:
http://www.gsmarena.com/piccmp.php3?idType=1&idPhone1=5313&idPhone2=3115&idPhone3=4238

I find it ridiculous that they were actually trying to build hype around it again. Crazy Taiwanese marketing people.

 

[dilla]

HTC is the OEM, I feel, closest to Apple when it comes to their phone designs. They're very modern and sleek. I think Sony is catching up, though. I don't get why HTC is in such a financial rut either. They should be the best selling Android OEMs out there, especially with the success of the Droid Incredible, and the Hero, and the G1. And Nexus One. They were everywhere and all over the place. Then Samsung came up with the Galaxies and it was all over.

This phone really needed to be great. Couple this shit camera comparo with the delay the phone is gonna have, and there is no doubt Samsung will shit on HTC again with the S4 the way it did to the One X with the S3 just last year.

 

[masta247]

Well, the first reviews of the HTC One are out and they're pretty mixed. The design is more "Iphone-like, good ol' style" than "modern, cutting-edge tech". Sure it's aluminum but the phone is bigger than direct competition while having a smaller screen, smaller battery, no replaceable battery and sd cards and big ass bezels and also weighs much more. Pretty much the only selling point is the aluminum body that some people like so much, but in the Android world design alone doesn't drive sales.
As a matter of fact every major Android OEM (Samsung, Sony, LG) has overall superior flagships this year.

Personally I think their last year's series were better for their time and even these phones wouldn't sell well and I give it to HTC, the One X and One S were very good phones that stood out in lots of ways. They were very fresh and the One X could actually compete with the SGS3 while the One S was a perfect mid-ranger with a slim aluminum body and it was the first phone to rock 2 Krait cores.

Now they have one rather average phone and lots of problems with it.
The fact that they were supposed to make it outstanding and by the way things appear it's not going to sell as well as the competition is only one of them. They are having problems manufacturing them and logistics issues, now they've pushed it after the SGS4's release date which pretty much murders any success chance and also it's the only single product that they've announced for this year so far. They have never been in such a crappy situation and they're making matters so much worse by their new marketing tactics, basically bashing other companies and trying to promote their phones during competing phone announcements and pathetic twitter comments about the S4. I wish they picked a different route.

 

[Pittsey]

Sense is my issue with HTC.

More phones need to have Vanilla Android on. That comes first for me before specs. I prefer not to have to use other people's roms for my phone and don't really want to cook my own, as it took me 8 hours to set my S3 up how I wanted it.

That's why I am still happy with the N4 and won't be upgrading.

I don't need the most powerful phone out there. But I don't want one like the Galaxy Nexus either.

 

[dilla]

Well, rooting usually fixes that. I don't even really want Vanilla as much as I want CyanogenMod. Even if it has the same features as stock, the way it's organized in CM is just better and I'm used to it for generations now. My OG Droid, my TouchPad, and my S3 are all on CM.

 

[Casey]

Apparently S4 pre-orders are 500% higher compared to pre-orders of the S3 last year. That is pretty impressive. And that figure is coming from the stores themselves here in the UK. Looks like they might well hit that 100 million sales. See what happens. A lot of random people I know have been asking me about it.

 

[masta247]

Yeah, lots of people talking about it now. There are some people hating on it, because it's going to be a massive hit.
It might be that "it's just an update to the S3", "it's made of 'plastic' lol" and sure there are other decent phones and there might not be a need to upgrade. Sure, having a relatively recent phone I'd probably pass on it as well.
However the fact remains that this is the best and most advanced piece of commercially available hand-held technology ever made and will remain so for at least a number of months more. Just that, and lots of people will want it.

 

[Pittsey]

Apparently S4 pre-orders are 500% higher compared to pre-orders of the S3 last year. That is pretty impressive. And that figure is coming from the stores themselves here in the UK. Looks like they might well hit that 100 million sales. See what happens. A lot of random people I know have been asking me about it.

It is a well specified phone, but... They are using Apple's marketing department.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Apparently S4 pre-orders are 500% higher compared to pre-orders of the S3 last year. That is pretty impressive. And that figure is coming from the stores themselves here in the UK. Looks like they might well hit that 100 million sales. See what happens. A lot of random people I know have been asking me about it.

wow, because just last week they were saying pre-orders are 4 times higher than the S3.

 

[masta247]

I'm incredibly curious what's next in the smartphone game. We have 5 inch freaking 1080P screens, 13mpx cameras and quad core processors and it all seems funny when I think about it. I will have higher res screen on my phone than my 21 inch PC display. More performance than my laptop and the GS3 already has a camera that is better than many modern point and shoot cameras.
Phablets will settle at around 6 inches with very small bezels, 7 inch is a small tablet that doesn't pass as a big ass phone anymore so the screen size race is likely to stop.
Mobile gaming did not evolve the way everyone would expect so modern GPUs are an overkill and there's "Rogue" from PowerVR that is a couple of times faster than current high-end mobile GPUs already and is yet to be used in next year's phones, same as that Tegra 5 mobile GPU based on their desktop GPU architecture. That's all great but there are no games that could even use past gen graphics well, and it doesn't seem to change.
ARM don't have anything coming that is faster than Cortex A15 (ok, there's Cortex A57 but it's not around the corner yet). Now what? Seriously, we could expect that next year they'll want to shrink phones again - I mean shrink the bezels, body overall to make big display phones even more pocketable. That would make everyone happy and likely it would be enough to make people switch.The cameras might still improve. But what else, and what's next?

By that question I don't mean "they have not much to do now". I mean that I'm curious about upcoming innovations forced by the fact that the current size+performance race seems to be the cow that you can't really milk anymore. It was easy to increase the amount of pixels on your screen or clock the CPU higher. Having a screen resolution higher than Full HD would be freaking ridiculous, granted that first big-ass 4K TVs cost about 25k dollars and there's not much you can do with 4 A15 cores.

Most of all the next CPU series will become widely available in 2015 or so, they'll be 64 bit processors so Android will become 64 bit and it'll be able to take advantage of more than 4 gig of ram as well. To be fair though the difference between A9 and A15 in real life usage scenarios mostly means barely snappier OS and shorter loading times, and that's it.

What new things will these phones do for us at that time though? I'm curious to see.

 

[dilla]

They're gonna redefine what phones do. Kinda like redefining what computers can do, from the early 90s and until now. Same with cars. These things get redone in ways that you just laugh at what they were a decade ago.

Remember what the internet was for? Then music came along with Napster. Then file sharing in general. Now we have Spotify and and all that jazz.

You never know, man. It will be interesting to see what the function of a phone is in five years as opposed to what it is today and as opposed to what it was in 2000. If we are putting our wallets on there, I have no freaking clue what's next.


Anyway, I'm gonna start saving up for a iPad Mini. I may start with selling my TouchPad on the island, where it may fetch a good bit more money amongst the students, or even the locals. Maybe one of the two iPod touches I have as well. I may just wait for the next iteration which will hopefully have a better processor and Retina display. I think the new one is rumored to be out this Summer, or maybe that's simply the new iPad. But I should have enough by the holidays. Also MacMall may convince me to buy the first gen one if it gets discounted well enough at that point.

 

[ARon]

why not the new nexus 7 that is supposed to be coming?

 

[masta247]

I'm super satisfied with the N7 and the next one is supposed to be even better for the same price. When I'm using my N7 on the go and see people use their Ipad Minis I have that feeling of superiority deep inside, and it's stronger than me, I feel almost like a fanboy but it comes from knowing both devices well. I mean, the Ipad Mini isn't bad but it just looks retarded in comparison. I also feel like they've been screwed in their butts by Apple for paying almost twice as much for old hardware. And that they didn't know better, the N7 was already out when the Ipad Mini came out.

 

[masta247]

Holy crap. The first battery life tests for the SGS4 came in (and that's for the Snapdragon version without those low power A7 cores). It's in the same freaking league as the Motorola Razr Maxx and Note 2, it's almost the king of battery endurance:
http://blog.gsmarena.com/samsung-galaxy-s4-battery-tests-are-done-heres-how-it-did/

It scored 63 hours of Endurance test on GSMArena. To put it into perspective, that's 2,5 times the battery life of the Nexus 4. Also, it comes with a replaceable battery and scored around the top for each single test.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 should get even the heaviest users through a single day, while most can expect two, three work days out of it. The battery life is pretty well balanced, with the Galaxy S4 getting near the top of the chart in every test, so it doesn’t matter if your personal usage patterns involve more talking or more web browsing, the Samsung flagship has excellent battery life.