Galaxy S4 vs. Its Rivals: The Flagship That Refused to Fade

The iPhone 5, HTC One and Xperia Z went all-in on metal and glass; Samsung doubled down on plastic and sensors. The Galaxy S4 was Samsung’s bet that brains would beat looks.

Back when 1080p panels and quad-core chips were still headline material, the S4 had to outrun not just its rivals, but its own blockbuster predecessor. On paper, it largely did. Whether that translated into better real‑world use is more complicated.

Design: Same Playbook, Smaller Bezels

If you put the Galaxy S III and S4 front‑on, the evolution is subtle, not dramatic. Same basic shape, same Hyperglaze plastic, same physical home key flanked by capacitive Menu and Back. What changed was how tightly Samsung packed the hardware.

The S4 keeps the S III’s height but trims 0.8mm in width, 0.7mm in thickness and 3g in weight, while jumping from a 4.8″ to a 5″ display and bumping the battery to 2600 mAh. That’s not marketing fluff – it’s the kind of dimensional gain you feel the first time you wrap your hand around it. It’s easier to handle than its own predecessor and even more comfortable in hand than the 4.7″ HTC One.

Corning Gorilla Glass 3 does some of the heavy lifting here. The new composition lets Samsung use a thinner sheet without trading away scratch resistance. Early tests in the original review even suggested it was harder to scratch than the S III’s setup.

Does it feel as premium as a Sony Xperia Z or HTC One? No. The new texture and slimmer bezels help, and the back panel’s pattern catches light nicely, but you’re never going to confuse this for aluminum or glass. The trade‑off is functional: removable back, removable battery, hot‑swappable microSD, and an IR blaster tucked into the frame.

Display: 5-Inch 1080p AMOLED Grows Up

The headline upgrade is the 5″ Super AMOLED panel at 1080p, landing at 441ppi. Yes, it’s PenTile, but not the PenTile of early AMOLED scars. With this pixel density and a revised sub‑pixel layout (twice as many green sub‑pixels as red and blue), you’re not seeing cross‑hatch patterns unless you’re staring with a macro lens.

In practical use, the screen is what you’d expect from a mature AMOLED: effectively infinite contrast, almost excellent viewing angles, and color saturation that makes LCDs look washed out. If you hate neon colors, Samsung gives you a way out. Display modes let you dial things down, including an Adobe RGB profile that aims for more accurate color rather than showroom pop.

Brightness is still the typical Samsung AMOLED compromise. It’s not a nits monster on paper, but low reflectivity keeps outdoor visibility competitive. With auto tone enabled, max brightness drops under 300 nits, so anyone who lives outdoors is better off disabling that toggle. In side‑by‑side use, sunlight performance is roughly in line with the S III; the newer Gorilla Glass layer may be adding a bit of reflection that cancels out the higher raw brightness.

Compared to the HTC One’s LCD, the S4’s panel wins on contrast and flexibility, loses on sheer brightness and color accuracy out of the box. Against Sony’s 5″ LCDs of that era, it’s not really a contest – the AMOLED looks cleaner and more consistent from angle.

Performance, Battery and Gaming Cred

Samsung split the S4 into two hardware lines. The I9505 uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600 (four Krait 300 cores at 1.9GHz with Adreno 320 GPU), while the I9500 runs Samsung’s Exynos 5 Octa: four Cortex‑A15 at 1.6GHz + four Cortex‑A7 at 1.2GHz, with a tri‑core PowerVR SGX544 GPU. Both ship with 2GB of RAM.

Benchmarks from the original testing show what you’d expect: both variants sit at the top of the Android heap for their time. In CPU tests like Benchmark Pi and Linpack, the S600 S4 edges the HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro, even though those run the same chip at 1.7GHz. Geekbench 2 puts both S4 variants clearly ahead, and AnTuTu/Quadrant have them at or near the top as well.

GPU tests are a similar story. In GLBenchmark 2.5 1080p off‑screen, the S600 S4 beats the HTC One – likely thanks to a higher GPU clock – with the Exynos model a couple of frames ahead. In Epic Citadel, both push close to the 60fps software cap.

For gamers, that meant Android titles built on Unreal Engine and other heavier engines ran the way they should: high frame rates at native 1080p, no weird downscaling tricks. JavaScript performance in the browser was among the fastest tested; HTML5 in Vellamo was more middling, but for day‑to‑day browsing the combination of CPU grunt and the 5″ display made complex pages feel easy.

Battery is where the Exynos story gets less clean. With a 2600 mAh removable pack, the S600 I9505 landed at an endurance rating of 69 hours in GSMArena’s testing; the Exynos I9500 managed 65 hours. The whole point of big.LITTLE – handing light work to Cortex‑A7 – is efficiency, and the silicon clearly had potential. But in this generation, Samsung’s tuning left the Snapdragon model slightly ahead in real‑world longevity, even though the Exynos edged some benchmarks.

Gaming phones live and die on thermal and battery behavior over time. On numbers alone, the S4 had the horsepower; whether the Exynos variant could keep that comfortably over long sessions depended more on firmware updates than the core design.

TouchWiz, Sensors and the “Smart” Features Pile

On the software side, the S4 shipped with Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean and a massively expanded TouchWiz. Samsung’s strategy here was simple: pack in enough features that the spec sheet reads like a small novel, then hope users find their own subset of useful tricks.

The basics got more polished. The notification shade gained up to 20 quick toggles with a two‑finger gesture to open the full grid. Settings were reorganized into four tabs (Connections, My device, Accounts, More), which are faster to navigate than the old long list. Multi‑window carried over from the Note line, letting you run two supported apps side by side and adjust the split.

The lockscreen picked up Android 4.2 widgets plus Samsung’s own tweaks: TripAdvisor photo backdrops, custom messages, and multiple panes. The home screen and app drawer stayed close to earlier Nature UX, with folder support, hidden apps (for bloat you can’t uninstall), and up to seven home panels.

Then you get into the sensor‑heavy tricks:

• Air View: hover your finger up to ~1cm over the screen to preview SMS, calendar entries, video timelines, folders, and speed‑dial contacts.
• Air Gestures: wave over the IR gesture sensor to scroll pages, switch browser tabs, move through photos and tracks, accept calls, or move shortcuts and calendar events.
• Smart Stay/Rotate/Scroll/Pause: use the front camera to keep the screen on while you look at it, rotate based on your face, scroll by tilting your head or device, and pause video when you look away.
• Motion gestures: Direct Call, Smart Alert, shake‑to‑refresh Bluetooth, tilt‑to‑zoom in Gallery, palm swipe to screenshot, palm cover to pause music.

Some of this is genuinely handy – Smart Stay, Smart Pause, Direct Call and palm swipe are the kind of subtle tweaks you forget are there until you miss them on another phone. Others, like head‑tilt scrolling and mid‑air tab switching, feel like tech demos hunting for a real use case, and they only work in Samsung’s own apps.

Voice control was split between Google Now and S Voice. S Voice could place calls, send messages, set alarms, open apps, and control some system functions, plus it had a car mode UI. But it was slower and less accurate than Google’s own recognizer, which undercuts its reason to exist unless you really wanted the on‑device toggles.

The overall UX stayed surprisingly responsive given how much Samsung stacked on top, thanks largely to the hardware headroom. But there’s a learning curve – expect to spend days poking through menus to even discover half of what’s built in.

Camera: 13MP Hardware, Software Circus

The rear camera jumped from 8MP to 13MP (4128 x 3096), backed by a 2MP front camera. Both could shoot simultaneously using Double Shot, letting you embed the front‑camera view as a picture‑in‑picture overlay with various shapes and positions.

The UI was lifted from the Galaxy Camera: a single viewfinder for stills and video, with mode selection via a carousel or grid. It’s convenient in that you don’t have to switch modes to record; less so when you’re framing 16:9 video in a 4:3 photo composition window.

Manual controls got trimmed back compared to the S II/S III – ISO remained, but a lot of fine‑tuning options disappeared. Samsung’s answer was modes:

• Rich Tone (HDR), Night, Sports, Best Photo, Best Face, Beauty Shot
• Panorama up to 360° and ~60MP when shot vertically
• Photo Sphere‑style 360 Photo
• Eraser to remove moving objects from a scene
• Drama mode that clones a moving subject across the frame (1080p output)
• Cine Photo cinemagraph GIFs
• Sound & Shot, which couples an image with ambient audio (though sharing only sends the JPEG)

Image quality held up well in testing: lots of fine detail, low noise, slightly oversharpened edges if you’re zoom‑peeping, and color that leans a touch cool and a touch saturated – typical Samsung tuning. Dynamic range favored preserving shadows, sometimes clipping highlights unless you used HDR.

Video capture topped out at 1080p with ~17Mbps bitrate and 128kbps stereo audio at 48kHz. Slow‑mo at up to 8x meant dropping to 800 x 450 @ 15fps, while time‑lapse could speed up by 8x while staying at full 1080p30. Touch‑to‑focus worked both before and during recording, and you could grab 9.6MP stills mid‑clip.

Interestingly, enabling digital stabilization actually improved detail and contrast in tripod tests, even though it also narrowed the field of view further. That points to processing quirks rather than optics, and it’s the sort of thing firmware updates can fix or finesse.

Compared with the HTC One’s “UltraPixel” sensor and OIS, the S4 went for a more traditional high‑res approach. You gave up low‑light prowess and stabilization in exchange for daylight detail and mode overload.

Media, Audio and Connectivity: Box Ticker Mode

Samsung treated media playback as a first‑class use case. The Gallery added time, location and album sorting, plus a spiral view that looks cool for about five seconds before it gets annoying. Air View previews images and folders, built‑in editing covers crop/rotate/effects, and there’s even OCR to detect text in images and convert it into shareable text files.

The music player supports most common formats, including FLAC and WAV, and even has folder playback – still weirdly rare on stock players. Features like Music Square (mood‑based playlists), a 7‑band EQ with SoundAlive enhancements, Smart Sound (volume normalization) and Adapt Sound (per‑ear headphone calibration via test tones) push it closer to a standalone media player than a throw‑in app.

Video playback is equally aggressive. The player shows live thumbnails of your videos in a grid, complete with real playback at reduced framerate – a pure flex of the underlying SoC. It handles MP4, AVI, MKV, XviD, DivX, AC3 and more without complaining and supports multiple subtitle files, Pop‑up Play (floating video window), chapter preview and Air View timeline scrubbing.

Audio output quality in lab tests was excellent: clean, low distortion, minimal stereo crosstalk even with headphones. Volume, though, was only average. The loudspeaker test on the final retail S4 rated as “Good” and, interestingly, marginally louder than the HTC One’s dual front‑facing speakers, though HTC’s setup offered deeper sound.

Connectivity is exhaustive for its time: quad‑band GSM and 3G, an LTE variant, Wi‑Fi a/b/g/n/ac (2.4 and 5GHz), Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, DLNA via Samsung Link/AllShare, IR blaster for TV and set‑top control via WatchON, MHL 2.0 over microUSB with USB OTG support. The only catch is that you need your own MHL and OTG adapters; neither is in the box.

Software Extras: Group Play, S Health, Hubs and More

Samsung didn’t stop at the system level. It layered a bunch of ecosystem‑style apps on top:

• Group Play: create a local Wi‑Fi network between nearby Galaxy devices to share photos/documents, build a multi‑channel speaker system (assigning left/right/surround roles to each phone), or play specially‑enabled multiplayer games like Asphalt 7 and Gun Bros.
• Samsung Link: remote access to content on linked PCs and cloud services (Dropbox, SkyDrive, SugarSync) via your phone.
• WatchON: IR remote plus TV guide integration based on your ZIP code and provider. It can abstract messy living‑room setups into one unified remote, even if you’re juggling a TV, set‑top box and AV receiver.
• S Health: basic activity and environment tracking with a profile for age/weight/activity level, and support for optional accessories.
• S Translator + Photo Reader: speech and text translation between major languages, with OCR to feed printed text into the system and optional text‑to‑speech output.
• Samsung Hub: a unified content store for books, music and games, including some titles from Gameloft and EA you wouldn’t see in Google Play at the time.

Productivity wasn’t ignored, but it was weaker out of the box. The S4 shipped with Polaris Office as a viewer only, not a full editor, though third‑party options from the Play Store filled that gap easily. S Planner handled calendar duties with Air View previews, and the usual clock/tools packaged in.

For navigation, the GPS (assisted by a barometer) locked quickly even without A‑GPS. Google Maps Navigation with cached vector maps turned the 5″ panel into a legit sat‑nav replacement, provided you were fine planning routes while online.

Where It Stood Then – and Why It’s Still Interesting Now

Stacked against its contemporaries, the Galaxy S4 landed as arguably the most well‑rounded Android flagship of its generation, even if it wasn’t the most beautiful. The HTC One had better materials and OIS, the Xperia Z had IP57 water resistance, and niche players like the Oppo Find 5 undercut the big names on price. The S4 answered with a sharper AMOLED, higher‑res camera, removable battery, microSD slot, IR remote, heavier media support and sheer feature density.

The Exynos vs Snapdragon split was more of an experiment in platform strategy than a clear value decision for buyers. Samsung managed to keep performance nearly identical across two wildly different SoCs, which is good for devs and users, but the Octa’s theoretical efficiency advantage didn’t fully materialize in that first implementation.

Looking back with some distance, the S4 feels like peak “old Samsung”: maximalist, occasionally gimmicky, but genuinely ambitious in using hardware and sensors to do more than chase benchmark charts. A lot of what worked – Multi‑window, Smart Stay, IR remote control, rich media support – quietly became table stakes or inspired features elsewhere.

If you strip away the hype, you’re left with a device that pushed display tech, performance and software breadth forward, while stubbornly clinging to plastic and a familiar shell. For plenty of users, that was a trade‑off worth making.

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