REVIEW: The Samsung Galaxy S4 the fast rising smartphone star in the Caribbean?

The SG4 unboxed

You’ve heard me say it alot…the Caribbean and Latin America are still two of the bright and growing spots for Blackberry. Tt’s been a long love affair and until recently Samsung was not a contending suitor for the hearts of Caribbean consumers.

Samsung was synonymous primarily with low end phones here, but with the entrance of the SG2, then the ground breaking SG3 and now the SG4, I am seeing a palpable wrestling match between Samsung  and Blackberry.

And that wrestling match for the attention and dollars of Caribbean consumers can be seen first in the smartphone resellers market somewhat. Nowadays, it seems if you are selling a second hand Blackberry and a second hand Samsung GalaxyS3, the S3 goes first without a doubt. And then where you are seeing the love affair growing with Samsung Smartphones is amongst developers who are lovers of Android because of it’s open developer ecosystem and global dominance in the consumer space. They are developing apps for Android smartphones and tablets so they are buying the SG3s and Sg4s and the Samsung Galaxy Notes as well. The questions is though, whether this is just a right now shiny new toy flirtation with what’s hot in the marketplace, because Blackberry has put the world on ignore before releasing the impressive Z10 or Samsung will score a long term relationship with the Caribbean.

Without question, Caribbean consumers are excited about having the latest flagship device from Samsung on the market. I got a SG4  to review and as I usually do I give it a good heavy usage test before writing a word. I did the usual initial stuff…the transfer of all data and numbers from the SG3 to the SG4 and that went pretty smooth.

Then I could pay attention to the following facts –

1. It’s lighter, thinner and sleeker than the SG3.

2.  The screen is slightly bigger and sharp as hell, you could see a pimple on a gnats behind with this level of sharpness. In other words it sports a 5-inch full-HD screen with a resolution of 1080×1920 pixels, and pixel density of 441ppi.

3. An increase in the processing power. Samsung Galaxy S4 is twice as fast as its predecessor Samsung Galaxy S III

4. Improved front and rear facing cameras and photos so sharp they almost seem surreal. In tech terms, it packs in a 13-megapixels rear shooter and a 2-megapixel one on the front. You can do a dual-shot, by using both front and back camera, remove people from photos in eraser shot mode, it also has a Cinemagram like feature called Cinema Photo and other tricks. Not even covering Trinidad Startup Weekend for 3 days could make all of these features get old.

5. A whole host of new features and capabilities in general, many of which I can’t wrap my head around and some of which I am still to explore.

Now the SG3 was a pretty damn good device to begin with but they have pushed the boundary on a couple of things with the SG4 such as:

• Air Gesture – uses infrared sensors to recognise your hand gestures to control the device – with out you having to touch the screen. Learn more here
• Air View – this allows you to hover your finger above the screen to preview content (e.g. email messages, images, videos, etc.) without having to actually open it. Whoa!
• S Health – which uses various sensors to help you manage your health. I like the fact that you can track how many steps you take daily.
• Smart Scroll – where you can read/scroll content by tilting your head or the phone
• Smart Pause – which pauses videos when your face turns away from the screen
• S Translator -which knows 9 different languages. Really knows. Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and English are all understood in both a text-to-speech capacity as well as a speech-to-text capacity.

If the love and market crave for the second hand version of the SG3 is anything to go by, the SG4 will surely help to seal the deal as being the new loved smartphone in the Caribbean. The Gadget price and time will surely tell.