Samsung Galaxy S4 Review

The S4 is what happens when a company that has just won decides the next step is more of everything. The 5.0-inch 1080p Super AMOLED was the first full HD AMOLED in a phone and it was superb, if oversaturated in its default mode. The Snapdragon 600 in US models and the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 elsewhere, the first big.LITTLE chip shipped in a phone, were the fastest silicon of that spring, though the Exynos could not run all eight cores at once and ran warmer for it.

The 13 megapixel camera was a clear step up from the S III and close to the best of 2013. Then Samsung buried it. Air View, Air Gesture, Smart Scroll, Smart Pause, Group Play, S Health, S Translator, an IR blaster and a launch staged as a Broadway musical; the software took nearly half of the 16GB of storage, which became a consumer complaint in the UK, and the gestures rarely fired when you wanted them.

The polycarbonate body, a slightly larger S III, looked cheap beside the aluminium HTC One launched the same season, and the removable back flexed. It shipped on Android 4.2.2 and was updated as far as 5.0.1 Lollipop, decent for the era. At $199.99 on contract and $639.99 outright it sold forty million in its first six months, the line's peak, and it is the phone that made 'bloat' the standard word for Samsung software for the next five years.