New Delhi: Samsung has announced the launch of its latest flagship Galaxy S4 in India at an event in New Delhi on Friday. Samsung has priced the Galaxy S4, which takes on the likes of the Apple iPhone and HTC One, at Rs 41,500 in India. The Samsung Galaxy S4 will be available in stores from 12 noon on Saturday, April 27.
The Galaxy S4 has a 5-inch Full HD Super AMOLED display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels at 441 ppi. The Galaxy S4's screen is 56 per cent larger than the iPhone's. It weighs 130g and is 7.9 mm thick and is slimmer than its predecessor, the Galaxy S III.
The phone comes in two variants, one powered by a 1.9 GHz quad-core Processor and the other by a 1.6 GHz octa-Core processor. Samsung has launched the octa-core version (1.6 ghz quad core processor + 1.2 ghz quad core processor) in India. The selection of the processor is differed by markets.
Samsung has launched the 16GB model in India. The phone's memory can be expanded up to 64GB via a microSD card slot. The phone has 2GB RAM and extracts power from a 2600 mAh battery. Its battery is 20 per cent larger than that of the S III.
Running Android 4.2.2 OS, the Galaxy S4 has a 13 megapixel auto focus camera with flash. It has a 2 megapixel front camera with Full HD recording at 30fps.
In its review of the Samsung Galaxy S4, the Associated Press found the the S4 to be an excellent device from a hardware standpoint. Its 5-inch screen is larger than its predecessor, yet it's a tad lighter and smaller. The display is sharp, at 441 pixels per inch. Samsung packed the Android device with a slew of custom features, including new camera tools and the ability to perform tasks by waving a finger over a sensor.
Many of the features, however, make the phone more complicated to use. In some cases, custom features work only some of the time. In other cases, you're confronted with too many ways to do similar things. The S4 might be for you if you don't mind spending time customizing it. Otherwise, you must bypass all the gimmicks to get to what otherwise is a good phone, said the AP review.
"The Galaxy is still a beautiful, high-horsepower Android phone," New York Times' columnist David Pogue wrote.
"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.
"(The S4) looks for all the world like the Galaxy S III - 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.
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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
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.
However, Mashable's Christina Warren gave the new phone a big thumbs up.
"After spending about a week with the Galaxy S4, I feel it is not only the best Galaxy product to date - it's one of my favorite Android smartphones ever," she said.
Meanwhile, supply issues have snarled the US rollout of Samsung Electronic's latest flagship smartphone, which will go on sale at carriers Sprint and T-Mobile later than expected, the wireless service providers said on Wednesday. Samsung attributed the disruption to unexpectedly strong demand for the Galaxy S4, the South Korean company's direct challenge to Apple Inc's iPhone.
"Due to overwhelming global demand of Galaxy S4, the initial supply may be limited. We expect to fulfill inventory to meet demands in the coming weeks," the company said in a statement.
(With inputs from Associated Press and Reuters)
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