SGS4 Wired Magazine review

[SeanBlader]

There?s more. The built-in camera software lets you make animated GIFs, erase annoying passersby from photos and add spoken notes to pictures while you?re taking them. Point the camera at some text, and a cloud-based OCR engine can translate foreign words. Point it at somebody?s business card and it can add the person to your contacts. There?s a universal remote control. There are voice-control features. The list just keeps going. It?s insane.

When I booted up the Galaxy S4 Samsung loaned me for testing, I dutifully sat through the phone?s set-up wizard, which walked me through these features. I spent five minutes being amazed, and I left all of the features on.

Then, over the next five days, I never used them again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad Samsung is trying new things, bigger screens, fancy gesture things, I've seen a few camera tricks that would be useful and nice to have, but I think HTC took the safer road with better appeal and better long term supportability. I know I wouldn't want to write the code to support all that junk.

In the end it's very tough decisions like that of choosing between the Nexus, the Galaxy, and the One, that are going to really kill the iPhone, and it's evangelists are going to have to face the fact that after an initial product release Apple only iterates. Don't get me wrong, if it wasn't for Apple we wouldn't have the cell phone market as we know it now, but Apple is a monopolist and doesn't actually innovate very much.