Samsung’s newest Galaxy S4 smartphone is just a revamped version of its top-selling S3 phone with a bigger screen and a few software gimmicks, reviewers said.<\/p>\n
“The Galaxy is still a beautiful, high-horsepower Android phone,” New York Times’ columnist David Pogue wrote.<\/p>\n
“But basically, it’s an updated Galaxy S3. If this were Apple, who adds the letter S to denote a slightly upgraded model (“iPhone 4S,” for example), Samsung might have called this phone the Galaxy S3S,” he wrote.<\/p>\n
Samsung unveiled S4 in March in New York. It sports a 5-inch screen, 1.9 GHz quad-core processor and a 13 megapixel camera. It runs on Google Inc’s Android platform.<\/p>\n
The S3 comes with a 4.8 inch screen, a 1.4 GHz quad core processor and an 8 megapixel camera.<\/p>\n
Samsung has so far sold more than 40 million S3 smartphones, rivaling that of Apple Inc’s iPhones.<\/p>\n
“(The S4) looks for all the world like the Galaxy S III \u2014 despite having a bigger screen and more horsepower, at 7.9mm and 4.6 ounces it’s actually imperceptibly thinner and lighter than the S III. But copying the S III wasn’t a good idea.” Verge’s David Pierce said.<\/p>\n
AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg said the S4 is a good phone, just not a great one and urged readers to consider the more polished-looking, and quite capable, HTC One, rather than defaulting to the latest Samsung offering.<\/p>\n
“It’s an evolution of the prior model and despite some improvements, it still is especially weak in the software Samsung adds to basic Android. I found Samsung’s software often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional,” he said.<\/p>\n
Galaxy S4 will roll out over the next week on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks in the United States.<\/p>\n
“This isn’t a phone that’s going to convert an iPhone user, and current Galaxy S III owners aren’t going to miss out on a whole lot as far as features go,” CNN’s Adrian Covert said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t like holding this phone, and I can’t overstate how much that informs the experience of using it. It makes an awful first impression, slippery and slimy and simply unpleasant in your hand,” Covert said.<\/p>\n
The Galaxy S4 is so complicated that Samsung has given it an “Easy Mode” for the less mobile savvy users, Dan Rowinski at technology blog ReadWriteWeb wrote.<\/p>\n
However, Mashable’s Christina Warren gave the new phone a big thumbs up.<\/p>\n
“After spending about a week with the Galaxy S4, I feel it is not only the best Galaxy product to date \u2014 it’s one of my favorite Android smartphones ever,” she said.<\/p>\n
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