Review: Samsung Galaxy S4

The list of cool things the Galaxy S4 can do is astonishing. Right out of the box, without downloading a single app, you can perform a plethora of magic tricks.

It follows your eyes, and it will pause a video if it senses you looking away. While browsing the web, you can scroll a page by just tipping your gaze downwards. It recognizes hand movements, and you can scroll through web pages by waving your hand in front of the screen. When listening to music or viewing photos, you can skip tracks or flip through pictures by flicking your hand in the air. When the phone is sitting on your desk nearby, a wave of the hand brings up a dashboard that tells you if you've received any new messages. Should the phone ring, you can use the same movement to answer the incoming call.

Pricing & Availability

AT&T: $200 for 16GB with a 2-year contract. April 30.

Sprint: $250 for 16GB with a 2-year contract, new customers pay $150. April 27.

T-Mobile: $150 for 16GB, plus $20/month for 2 years. April 24.

Verizon: Details TBA

U.S. Cellular: $200 for 16GB with a 2-year contract. "Late April"

No carrier: $640

There's more. The built-in camera software lets you make animated GIFs, erase annoying passersby from photos and add spoken notes to pictures while you're taking them. Point the camera at some text, and a cloud-based OCR engine can translate foreign words. Point it at somebody's business card and it can add the person to your contacts. There's a universal remote control. There are voice-control features. The list just keeps going. It's insane.

When I booted up the Galaxy S4 Samsung loaned me for testing, I dutifully sat through the phone's set-up wizard, which walked me through these features. I spent five minutes being amazed, and I left all of the features on.

Then, over the next five days, I never used them again.

I did normal phone stuff – texting, listening to music, browsing the web, checking Twitter, taking pictures and sharing them on Instagram. I used Google Now to find a restaurant. I paired my Jambox and sat in the sun.

But all that business of waving your hand or moving your eyes to scroll while reading – it only works in the crummy Android browser. It does not work in Chrome, where I do all of my browsing. It doesn't work in Google Reader or Flipboard or Instapaper or the Kindle app, where so much reading happens. Looking away from the screen doesn't pause a video in YouTube, only in the Samsung video player. The trick where you wave your hand to advance songs only works in the default music player, not in Rdio or Sonos, where I do most of my listening. The camera extras – the HDR feature, the photo filters, and the tool for making animated GIFs – all yield results that look cartoonish. I just took regular photos.

All those neat tricks are just ornaments. Bunting. This says something about Android, and possibly something about Samsung. Maybe it's that most Android users are likely to stick with the default tools that appear on the phone's home screen, rather than seek alternatives from Google Play. Or maybe it's that less-seasoned users – people buying their first smartphones or upgrading from an older Galaxy S phone, or people unaware of Evernote – place greater importance in the features that make their new device feel like a futuristic bauble.

But maybe Samsung feels the need to pile all this stuff onto the S4 because of some distrust of Android's ability to captivate and astound on its own. Why else would Samsung, along with almost every other Android hardware manufacturer, insist on dressing up Android's default interface in a showy skin? It's a common mantra among Android vendors: "We need to make this our own, make it better, show off what it can do." But if you're going to futz with the OS, go deep. Take the crazy wave-your-hands and follow-your-eyes stuff and extend it across the entire phone so it works in Chrome, Spotify, Kindle and Instapaper, not just the stale default apps. Better yet, give developers access. Maybe Samsung encountered technical limitations on how deeply it could alter the OS, but surely unseen cracks can be discovered and widened.

LAST YEAR'S MODEL
Can't lay out the big bills for the S4? Consider the Galaxy S III – Carriers are dropping the price of last year's Galaxy to $100 or $50. Refurbished units are even cheaper. It may be an older model, but it's still a great phone. Read our review.The phone itself is great, outstanding. If you were a fan of the S III and you're looking to upgrade your handset when the S4 goes on sale later this week, you'll be pleased. Compared to the previous Galaxy S, it's better and faster across the board. The battery is bigger (2,600 mAh, up from 2,100) and it lasts a full day without worry. The screen is bigger and sharper – 5 inches over 4.8, and 1080p instead of 720p, with a density of 441 pixels per inch instead of 306. The new camera (13 megapixels compared to 8 on the S III), takes crisp, clear photos. The phone performs just about every task with grace, speed and efficiency.

There were two sticking points for me: the colors on the screen were heavily saturated to the point of appearing artificial, and the hardware feels cheap. The back is thin plastic – it's removable so you can replace the battery or slap on one of Samsung's accessory covers – but the phone feels and looks toyish because of it. Those things aside, I can still recommend it. Fans of the wildly popular S III will find a lot to like.

Sure, the fancy software is mostly anemic or redundant, but herein lies the beauty of Android. You can turn off the manufacturer's doodads, trash the apps you don't use, change the settings, and customize the hell out of everything. Then you end up with the phone you want.

WIRED Everything you loved about the S III, but more of it. Big battery lasts all day. Super AMOLED 1080x1920 screen is one of the sharpest you can buy, and it uses the new, more durable Gorilla Glass 3. MHL 2.0 port lets you connect to an HDTV. Crisp daylight photos. OK, so the visual language translation thing is pretty damn cool (requires a data connection).

TIRED Samsung's software is big bag of "why?" Construction is cheap, and there's nothing exotic or inspiring about the hardware design. Camera software is kludgy, and low-light shots get noisy quickly. Pricing varies widely (see above) but leans toward expensive.