Sadly, the S4 was not the moment Samsung chose to get adventurous with its smartphone design aesthetics, and instead opted for a very light visual refresh of its previous plastic fantastic, the Galaxy S III. Well, this is the part where I state the obvious: the Galaxy S4 is not the prettiest smartphone in the world. I've generally lauded Samsung for its attention to detail on smoothness, but there are a few rough edges on the S4 that I wasn't expecting. The settings menu consistently has issues loading, hitting the home button sometimes generates visible UI choppiness, and the lockscreen gesture takes far too long to actually unlock the phone. Occasional stutters: I was really surprised to notice some now-and-again performance hiccups while using the S4.My review unit is already creaking and snapping in typical Samsung fashion. Build quality: It really doesn't seem all that much better than the S III, apart from the metal power button and volume rocker. I include some of the new features (smart pause, smart scroll) in that statement with no hesitation. Gimmicks: Someone needs to go in and cull some of the unabashedly useless garbage that is festering in Samsung's endless settings hierarchies.OK, so you get a microSD card slot, and that's great and all, but I can't put apps or games (or Google Music, or Play Movies, or some other content-heavy services) on that, and there's no sign of an impending 32GB S4 coming to the US. Storage: 9.6GB of usable internal storage.The camera has some great new features, and stuff like S Health and the WatchOn remote give me hope that Samsung is trying to evolve beyond mere gimmicks and get serious about great software products. Software: Surprise, surprise - some of Samsung's new software features aren't totally useless.It wasn't great, but it was well within the bounds of what I'd call "acceptable." Battery life: Considering the gargantuan amount of features enabled every time I turned on the screen of this phone, battery life never really gave me trouble.There are some really neat new photo-taking modes, and the camera itself takes some stunningly detailed photos. Samsung did an absolutely stellar job on the GS4's new 13MP camera, and the revamped camera software, too. It's sharper, much brighter, colors are more accurate (especially thanks to the new color mode setting), and it is kind of amazing that a 5" screen fits in the same frame size as the 4.8" one on the GS III did. Display: This is a vast improvement over the 720p panel on the Galaxy S III.
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