I'm not sure why it comes with a persistent notification to tell you that it's enabled, but it's a handy feature if you keep your phone charging right beside your bed. In the notification pane I also appreciated how Samsung included a bunch of quick setting toggles, in fact a lot of quick setting toggles that control nearly all the important features of the phone without you having to venture deep into the vast expanse of settings.

The ability to rearrange them also comes in handy, so you can keep your most used toggles in the most visible area. Oh, and before I dive into some of the apps you can find on the Galaxy S4, the out-of-the-box configuration must be mentioned: it's absolutely horrendous. Whoever decided that touch sound should be enabled by default must answer for their crimes against humanity, as the GS4 makes a ridiculous amount of noises from the word go. Even with predictive text enabled like it should be, the keyboard is quite hard to type on, and I'd suggest opting for a third-party alternative such as the stock Android keyboard or my personal favorite, SwiftKey.

Your basic apps included with the phone - Contacts, Messaging, Email, Phone, Internet, Calculator, Clock and Gallery - are largely unchanged from past iterations and should present no surprises or exciting features for those used to the way these apps operate on other smartphones. Most of them do a decent job at what they're supposed to do, although all of them are skinned for no discernible reason other than to change up what Google concocted in stock Android.

The other apps included on the phone are where things get more interesting, and I'll start with the good ones. Music is a decent music playing app with some handy features such as the Music Square, a mood selection device that is useful for finding the exact right type of music you want to listen to, and the usual lyric support. WatchOn allows you to control your TV via the infrared LED on the top of the device, and it seemed to work fine with a number of TVs and set-top boxes located around my house. S Planner is awful. Like really, really monstrously terrible.

Download Google Calendar from the Play Store and banish Samsung's horrific excuse for a calendar app to Android app hell. There's also Samsung Apps, which is a terrible app store that I don't really understand why is included, as the Google Play Store has a far better selection with a faster and cleaner interface.

At the end of the day I feel like Samsung was lazy with the Galaxy S4's software: it's like they thought the Galaxy S III's software was good enough, so they'd just slap on some new gimmicks and let a phenomenal marketing budget do the selling work. There's no doubting that the Galaxy S4 will sell very well, but a chance to refine and improve the experience from the S III has gone missing, leaving the software in a disappointing, often bad state. The Samsung Galaxy S4 i may pack a state-of-the-art Samsung Exynos 5 Octa chipset, including two different quad-core CPUs, but my feelings regarding its performance are definitely mixed.

On the one hand, it's an extremely fast and very capable processor that cuts through tasks with little effort, and on the other it feels like a prototype chipset that's not quite ready for the mass market of everyday smartphone users. As I primarily used the i model during my testing, the majority of this performance section deals with the Exynos 5 Octa chipest, but rest assured that I'll briefly talk about what you can find in the 4G-enabled Snapdragon model.

I stress that only one of these two CPUs can be used at a time, meaning only a maximum of four cores are ever used at once. The Exynos 5 Octa is the first chipset in a commercially available smartphone that uses ARM's big. In Samsung's design, were seeing a 1. The supposed advantages of the big. LITTLE model revolve around power conservation, in that the chipset can switch from the A15 cores during high-powered tasks think web browsing and gaming to the A7 cores when tasks aren't so intense.

The Exynos 5 Octa automatically does the switching for you, apparently choosing to use the A7s when playing music and idling. The good news is that I never noticed the switching taking place, so there were never any real slowdowns that I could immediately relate to some sort of processor switch over. The bad news is that I didn't really see a clear advantage to the Exynos 5 Octa over the Qualcomm Snapdragon in battery life, but more on that will be explored later.

Using the Galaxy S4 for regular phone tasks - whether it was the Snapdragon or Exynos model - the chipset certainly feels very fast, zooming in and out of apps in mere milliseconds and churning through games and webpages like there's no tomorrow. It's not really significantly faster than its predecessor, in fact in many ways you likely won't notice the extra power from the latest ARM CPUs, but it's definitely there when it's needed. Interestingly, out of the two Galaxy S4 models I used throughout the testing period, the Snapdragon model actually felt marginally smoother to use.

This is because there were strange, inconsistent and infrequent occurrences where the Exynos-touting i exhibited lag, almost like the processor decided mid-way through swiping across homescreens that it would send tasks to the slower A7 cores, only to have it immediately switch back to the A15s after it obviously couldn't cope.

Out of the two Galaxy S4 models I used throughout the testing period, the Snapdragon model actually felt marginally smoother to use. Also, directly comparing the browser performance of Chrome on the i to the Snapdragon-touting i reveals that, in scrolling, the i is simply smoother and more consistent with its performance. Switching between tabs is where this difference is particularly noticeable, as the i renders the animations more smoothly and switches faster than the i Usually the crashes would be related to opening the camera, switching cameras to the front camera, or using an app that was about to access the camera, but occasionally the phone would simply hang and soon enough it would be rebooting.

I'm sure a quick software update could rectify these issues, but in the meantime it's absolutely unacceptable to have any smartphone crash on you on a daily basis. While the i may be hard to recommend over the i from the point of its instability and occasional inconsistent performance, let's take a look at the benchmarks of both devices to see which one is actually faster.

The stock browser on the Galaxy S4 i seems not to have been optimized particularly well, as it falls behind the HTC One - which has the same chipset - and the Exynos-powered i in Peacekeeper. While the i carries the lead in this test, it still falls behind the iPhone 5, although it's well above all Windows Phones. Again, despite the same chipset, the HTC One comes out performing better than the Galaxy S4 i for whatever reason. Testing out the graphics chips of the two devices sees the two devices neck and neck in the Egypt 2. I wasn't particularly impressed to see both devices get the same score, so I fired up a second graphics benchmark, this time the far more graphically intense T-Rex HD benchmark, with all the phones I had in my office.

It was a close battle though, unlike last time there were two Galaxy S III models, which shows that while the i is very slightly faster, people with both models should be satisfied. Speaking of graphics, on both Galaxy S4s I tested a range of the latest GPU-busting smartphone games for some real world tests including Real Racing 3 and Modern Combat 4, and the graphics cores in both chipsets suit gamers well. Never did I experience a slowdown in a game I was testing, even though the GPU has to render to a p display, usually pushing out 60 frames per second.

The five inch display also provides a decent amount of real estate for those looking to game on a regular basis.

The graphically intense T-Rex benchmark made the Galaxy S4 struggle. Apart from just the chipset performance of the Galaxy S4, the storage situation should also be noted. Both the i and i I tested were 16 GB models, which is the lowest storage capacity available, and of course not all the 16 GB is available for use, with a huge amount taken up for the system software; I was left with 8.

Despite the fact that the Galaxy S4 contains a microSD card slot, around 9 GB of free space on the device itself is still not a huge amount. After just one game install Modern Combat 4 my free space was reduced to 5. While the performance of the various radios in the Galaxy S4 i, which includes the faster 4G LTE radios, was perfectly fine, once again I had a few issues with the Exynos-touting Galaxy S4 i It's extremely frustrating to see strong mobile reception in the status bar of the phone, only to have perpetual loading in the browser and other internet-connected apps until action is taken to reset the network connection.

It's an issue I've never experienced outside of other Samsung phones from memory the Galaxy Note II had occasional but similar connectivity issues , although thankfully I couldn't replicate it on the Snapdragon-powered, and much more prevalent i Of the two Galaxy S4 models I was testing throughout the review period, the Snapdragon model is the one I would prefer to use on a regular basis: it's considerably more stable, just as perceptibly fast as the "octa-core" Exynos model and touting LTE for those who have access to it.

On a more general note, the phone is clearly very fast and very capable of providing a smooth experience, although the difference compared to the last generation of phones is less pronounced than it has been in the past; an upgrade from the Galaxy S III for the performance alone is an unwise move at this stage. I'm not going to beat about the bush when it comes to the camera on the Galaxy S4: it's outstanding, in fact it's one of the best I've seen on a smartphone of late.

I believe but Samsung hasn't confirmed to me that the Galaxy S4 uses a Sony Exmor RS sensor, and taking a look at the information from the camera it looks like Samsung is using the best combination available to them: the IMX sensor combined with the IUF3-Z lens module. Most aspects of this camera combination are the same as the Sony Xperia Z : you get a Starting with the camera in good lighting conditions, this is where the Galaxy S4 really shines. Here are some of the highlights from my Galaxy S4 camera testing in near-perfect conditions. View this photo full sized here.

The biggest difference with indoor shots appears to be that colors are slightly less vibrant than you would expect for the lighting in the room, but again, photos can still be visually stunning.

1. Samsung Galaxy S4 4.4.2 Connectivity Issue!.
2. tesco mobile phones pay as you go ireland.
3. Wi-Fi calling: Samsung Galaxy S4 | T-Mobile Support;
4. lenovo smartphones specs and price philippines;
5. Data Connectivity Problems [CDMA]?
6. blackberry curve 8900 os free download.

When conditions start to get tougher, such as when light is approaching 'low light' conditions eg. This is a better choice for this camera module, as it doesn't contain optical image stabilization OIS that phones such as the Lumia have, although grain starts to creep in where the Lumia thrives.

Related articles

The results end up being acceptable and still usable, but not as good as devices with OIS. If you plan on taking a lot of your photos at night, this camera is perhaps not for you, although don't ignore the wonderful daylight performance. Now all the shots taken above are were from the standard Auto mode, and that's just one of a number of modes that the camera has. A few of them we've seen before such as Beauty Face enhances facial features , Best Photo takes a burst shot and then you can select the best one , Best Face similar to Best Photo but you can choose the best faces , Panorama, Sports uses a quick shutter speed , and Night uses a long shutter speed.

Essentially it takes two photos very quickly, one with high exposure and one with low exposure, and merges them together to deliver high dynamic range HDR. Below are the results with top and without bottom HDR mode enabled in high contrast situations, and you can see that the HDR mode really enhances the normally dark areas, providing considerably more detail, although it can be at the expense of vibrancy.

• sony xperia u first charge time.
• How do I connect my Galaxy S4 or S3 to the internet?.
• wcdma not working only 2g work - Samsung Galaxy S4 - iFixit.
• joikuspot premium for nokia n8 free download!
• wcdma not working only 2g work.
• Network & APN: Samsung Galaxy S4.

Another one of the cool modes is the Animated Photo mode, which takes a short video and allows you to highlight what you want to move, before it automatically creates a GIF image for you. Below I've included what the phone produces it's normally a x image , and the results are actually pretty good so long as you hold the phone very still.

Delete Document

Two other features that you might find handy are the Eraser and Drama modes, which again make use of burst shots to either remove moving objects in the case of the Eraser or put multiple images into the shot in the case of Drama mode. Occasionally the phone doesn't recognize moving objects, but when it does the results are very good. Moving on to the last camera feature I'd like to look at, and that's the various filters that can instantly be applied to photos during the shooting process.

The processor inside the Galaxy S4 is more than capable of live-rendering a video stream with added effects, and you can choose from a large number including artist-style and Instagram-style filters. I've included two below for your viewing pleasure. Moving on to video, and the Galaxy S4 delivers some outstanding quality, with crisp visuals and very good colors for a smartphone video, also including very crisp audio from dual microphones.

Unfortunately the phone lacks optical image stabilization, so if you're moving about the video can be a little shaky, but otherwise I was very impressed with what the S4 delivers in the video recording department. In the past, Samsung has done quite well in delivering a phone that has great media capabilities, and with the Galaxy S4 it's really no exception.

Device Guides | Support

I'll start with the rear speaker on the device, and while it's no BoomSound, it does a satisfactory job of what it's needed for: notifications, ringtones and speakerphone. Through headphones attached to the 3. There are a few preset equalizer options available under the SoundAlive menu, but I tended to prefer just leaving this on normal as the alterations from other modes weren't particularly to my liking. Unfortunately Samsung hasn't included a full graphic equalizer, so you can't fine tune the sound from the device, instead having to stick with the aforementioned SoundAlive options.