samsung galaxy s4 lcd screen replacement free sample

Compare your new replacement part to the original part—you may need to transfer remaining components or remove adhesive backings from the new part before installing.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is an Android smartphone produced by Samsung Electronics as the fourth smartphone of the Samsung Galaxy S series and was first shown publicly on March 14, 2013, at Samsung Mobile Unpacked in New York City. It is the successor to the Galaxy S III, which maintains a similar design, but with upgraded hardware, more sensors, and an increased focus on software features that take advantage of its hardware capabilities—such as the ability to detect when a finger is hovered over the screen, and expanded eye tracking functionality, it was released the previous year.LTE Advanced mobile network standard (model number GT-i9506). The T-Mobile version of the Galaxy S4, named the model (SGH-M919), was released the same month. The phone"s successor, the Samsung Galaxy S5, was released the next year.

The Galaxy S4 is among the earliest phones to feature a 1080p Full HD display, 1080p front camera video recording, and among few to feature temperature and humidity sensors and a touch screen able to detect a floating finger.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 uses a refined version of the hardware design introduced by the Samsung Galaxy S III, with a rounded, polycarbonate chassis and a removable rear cover. It is slightly lighter and narrower than the Samsung Galaxy S III, with a length of 136.6 mm (5.38 in), a width of 69.8 mm (2.75 in), and a thickness of 7.9 mm (0.31 in). At the bottom of the device is a microphone and a microUSB port for data connections and charging; it also supports USB-OTG and MHL 2.0. Near the top of the device are a front-facing camera, an infrared transmitter for usage as universal remote control,proximity, and ambient light sensors, and a notification LED. In particular, the infrared sensor is used for the device"s "Air View" features.headphone jack, secondary microphone and infrared blaster are located at the top.plastic leather backing, similar to the Galaxy Note 3.

The S4"s 5-inch (130 mm) 1080p Full HDpredecessor, and also features a PenTile RGBG matrix. The pixel density increased from 306 to 441 ppi, surfaced with Corning Gorilla Glass 3. An added glove mode option increases touch sensitivity to allow detecting touch input through gloves. The Galaxy S4 is Samsung"s first and one of the earliest mobile phones of all time to feature a 1080p display.

Unlike previous models, the S4 does not contain FM radio support, citing the increased use of online media outlets for content consumption on mobile devices.

While the front cameras of the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2, both released in 2012, are only able to capture videos at up to 720p HD resolution, the front camera of the Galaxy S4 allows 1080p Full HD video recording for the first time in any Samsung mobile phone.

Unlike the predecessor, the S4 is also equipped with a hall sensor for the S View cover, a self-capacitivetouch screen layer for Air View and thermometer and hygrometer sensors,Galaxy Note 3 out of all historical Samsung flagship devices are equipped with.

Galaxy S4 models use one of two processors, depending on the region and network compatibility. The S4 version for North America, most of Europe, parts of Asia, and other countries contains Qualcomm"s Snapdragon 600 system-on-chip, containing a quad-core 1.9 GHz Krait 300 CPU and an Adreno 320 GPU. The chip also contains a modem which supports LTE.Exynos 5 Octa system-on-chip with a heterogeneous CPU. The octa-core CPU comprises a 1.6 GHz quad-core Cortex-A15 cluster and a 1.2 GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 cluster.IT tri-core PowerVR SGX 544 graphics processing unit (GPU). Regional models of the S4 vary in support for LTE; for Exynos 5-based models, while the E300K/L/S versions support LTE, with the Cortex-A15 also clocked at 1.6 GHz.

On 24 June 2013, a variant supporting LTE Advanced (model number GT-i9506), the first commercially available device to do so, was announced for South Korea.Samsung Galaxy S4 LTE+, but only with Telekom and Vodafone branding.CPU (Snapdragon 800) and GPU (Adreno 330) hardware as the Galaxy Note 3 SM-N9005,

The S4 comes with either 16 GB, 32 GB, 64 GB of internal storage, which can be supplemented with up to an additional 64 GB with a microSD card slot.NFC-enabled battery.

Head tracking features have been extended on the S4, summarized as "Samsung SmartScreen". The new "Smart Scroll" feature can be used to scroll while looking at the screen by slightly tilting head or phone forward or backward,Smart Pause" allows the video player to pause videos if the user is not looking at the screen. "Smart Rotation" tracks the facial orientation using the front camera to match the screen rotation and "Smart Stay" prevents entering stand-by mode by deactivating display time-out while the user is looking at it.

"Air View" and "Air Gestures" implement gestures and other functionality (such as previewing images in the Gallery, messages in the precluded SMS/MMS app, a preview of the contact name, number and details in speed dial on the telephone app"s number pad, and a preview tooltip when hovering above the seek bar in the video player and showing)Air call-accept"), to scroll through pages ("Air Jump") and swipe through gallery pictured ("Air Browse") and to move home screen icons ("Air Move").

There are additional motion gestures, including panning through and zooming into/out of an image in the precluded gallery software by tilting the phone and holding with one or two fingers respectively.home button and power button simultaneously, a user can simply swipe their hand from one end of the screen to the other end horizontally.

These interaction features were later inherited by the Galaxy Note 3 and the Galaxy S5, but most of those features were gradually removed from Samsung"s flagship phones released afterwards.

The camera app implements numerous new features (some of which were first seen on the Galaxy Camera), including an updated interface, and new modes such as "Drama" (which composes a moving element from multiple shots into a single photo), "Eraser" (which takes multiple shots and allows the user to remove unnecessary elements from a picture), "Dual Shot" (which uses the front-facing camera for a picture-in-picture effect), "Sound and Shot" (which allows the user to record a voice clip alongside a photo), "Animated Photo", and "Story Album" among others. Burst shots at full resolution are supported, but capped at twenty consecutive pictures at any selected resolution.

In addition, the Galaxy S4 is able to capture 9.6 Megapixel (4128×2322) still photos during 1080p video recording, even with enabled digital video stabilization.

While the camera viewfinder user interface of the 2012"s Samsung Galaxy S3, Galaxy Note 2, the competing iPhone 5 and iPhone 5s require switching between photo and video modes, the viewfinder of the Galaxy S4 camera software shows the buttons for both photo and video capture simultaneously. The virtual buttons for video recording, photo capture and camera modes have a metallic texture.

The "Group Play" feature allows ad hoc sharing of files between Galaxy phones, along with multiplayer games and music streaming between S4 phones. The S4 also introduces Knox in the Android 4.3 update, a suite of features which implements a sandbox for enterprise environments that can co-exist with a user"s "personal" data. Knox incorporates use of the ARM TrustZone extensions and security enhancements to the Android platform.

The TouchWiz keyboard application on the Galaxy S4 has a built-in clipboard feature that allows holding up to twenty items such as text and screenshots.

Other new pre-loaded apps include WatchOn (an electronic program guide that can utilize the S4"s infrared transmitter to be a remote control), S Translator, the workout tracker S Health, S Voice Drive, S Memo, TripAdvisor, and an optical character recognition app.

In November 2013, Samsung began rolling out an update to Android 4.3 for the S4, notably adding the Bluetooth low energy support needed for compatibility with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch. However, Samsung halted the rollout following reports from Galaxy S III users that Samsung"s version of 4.3 had caused instability and increased battery usage.

In February 2014, Samsung began rolling out an update to Android 4.4.2 "KitKat" for the S4; the update adds user interface tweaks such as a camera shortcut on the corner of the lock screen, options for setting default launcher and text messaging applications, support for printing, and a new location settings menu for tracking and controlling the use of location tracking by apps.OEMs such as Samsung previously modified their distributions of Android to retain the previous behavior, allowing applications to have unlimited access to SD card contents.

In January 2015, Samsung began rolling out an update to Android 5.0.1 "Lollipop" in Russia and India, an update which brings all the features of Lollipop, such as enhanced performance and lockscreen, including a refined interface with a flatter and geometric look, as seen on the Galaxy S5.

Several different model variants of the S4 are sold, with most variants varying mainly in handling regional network types and bands. To prevent grey market reselling, models of the S4 manufactured after July 2013 implement a regional lockout system in certain regions, requiring that the first SIM card used on a European and North American model be from a carrier in that region. Samsung stated that the lock would be removed once a local SIM card is used.

At the Google I/O 2013 keynote, Samsung and Google revealed that an edition of the U.S. S4 would be released on June 26, 2013 through Google Play, with the HTC One M7, Sony Xperia Z Ultra, Motorola Moto G, and HTC One M8 releasing later on.Android 4.2.2, the phone later updated to 4.4.4, with Samsung provided updates;Nexus devices) and supports LTE on AT&T and T-Mobile"s networks.

At retail, the S4 is bundled with a USB cable, AC adapter, and in-ear headphones.hall effect sensor), the time and battery are displayed in this cover"s window area.

While some users considered all new Galaxy S4 features innovative and legitimately useful, others called them feature creepgimmicks.Smart Pause, Smart Rotation, Smart Scroll, Air View, Air gesture, Story Album and Temperature and humidity sensors.

Additionally, the Galaxy S4 is equipped with an “easy mode” that hides many features and increases the size of on-screen elements for easier readability for novice mobile phone users.

The S4 received many positive reviews, though some criticism. Gigaom"s Tofel says he would recommend the S4 "without hesitation" and says that it"s "Samsung"s defining phone".ReadWrite"s Rowinski described the phone as a "solid" and "first-rate smartphone", but criticised Samsung"s use of "bloatware, pre-loaded apps and features that you will likely never use".

Technology journalist Walt Mossberg described the S4 as "a good phone, just not a great one". Mossberg wrote: "while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer." He criticized the software as "especially weak" and "often gimmicky, duplicative of standard Android apps, or, in some cases, only intermittently functional." He urged readers to "consider the more polished-looking, and quite capable, HTC One, rather than defaulting to the latest Samsung."

Critics noted that about half of the internal storage on the S4"s 16 GB model was taken up by its system software, using 1 GB more than the S III and leaving only 8.5 to 9.15 GB for the storage of other data, including downloaded apps (some of which cannot be moved to the SD card). Samsung initially stated that the space was required for the S4"s new features, but following a report regarding the issue on the BBC series

The S4 sold 4 million in 4 days and 10 million in 27 days making it the then fastest selling smartphone in Samsung"s history (this has been eclipsed by the Galaxy S5).Galaxy S II took 55 days and the Galaxy S took 85 days.

We have a service provider; it’s Rogers here in Canada. Rogers [has] seen it, and they freaked out. They even said, ‘You could send it in through us — it’ll take three weeks — or just go see Samsung." The Samsung reps just said that they need video proof, and now we have to call it in. So we’re gonna upload this, send it to Samsung. We’ll let you know how it goes.

In his second video, uploaded a few days after the first one, Wygand states that in order to receive a replacement phone, Samsung allegedly asked him to sign a legal document requiring him to remove the video, remain silent about the agreement, and surrender any future claims against the company.Mashable, Wygand said that since he posted the second video, no further response from Samsung was received. However, an official spokesman from Samsung told Mashable, "Samsung takes the safety and security of our customers very seriously. Our Samsung Canada team is in touch with the customer, and is investigating the issue."

In the UK, companies which sold the S4 have varied in their reactions to claims by worried customers for replacement batteries under the Sale of Goods Act. Amazon, for example, have simply refunded part of the purchase price to allow for the cost of a replacement battery. O2 however insist that the complete phone, with the faulty battery, be returned to them so that they in turn can send it to Samsung to consider the claim.

Your Samsung Galaxy S4 is broken or damaged and you are looking to get your Galaxy S4 repaired? Compare now and find the best price for the required service for your Samsung Galaxy S4 and go directly to the store.

Repairing your broken Samsung Galaxy S4 is in most cases cheaper than buying a new smartphone. You can expect costs of about USD 50 for repair services of your mobile device. Replacing the display is normally a bit pricier than that. However, in almost all cases it is cheaper to get your Samsung Galaxy S4 repaired than buying a new device.

The following diagram (infographic) shows the distribution of the most common repairs / damages of the Samsung Galaxy S4. The statistics are based on the repair requests (multiple requests possible).

The LCD display repair or replacement of your Samsung Galaxy S4 can be required for a variety of reasons. E.g. the display of your Samsung Galaxy S4 does not respond to your touch anymore after it got dropped, the screen stays black, has broken pixels or the display glass is scratched, cracked or completely broken. Most of the time the screen can not be fixed anymore and the screen of your Galaxy S4 has to be replaced. The problem is that components like touch sensor, screen and backlight are glued together and come as one unit.

Replacing or repairing the touchscreen of your Samsung Galaxy S4 becomes necessary if the touch functionality doesn""t work properly anymore for example due to damaged display glass (cracked, scratched). Symptoms can be that the touchscreen doesn""t react to touch at all, only delayed or just when applying a lot of pressure. In most cases a damaged Galaxy S4 touchscreen can not be repaired and needs to be replaced.

The LCD display repair or replacement of your Samsung Galaxy S4 is necessary, if the glass and display are still in tact (no cracks or broken screen), but the screen has other issues. E.g. the screen stays white, grey or black, has broken pixels (spots, stripes or similar) or the background light does not work anymore. In most cases the display can not be fixed and the LCD display of the Galaxy S4 needs to be replaced.

Diagnostics/assessment of the damages is recommend when your Samsung Galaxy S4 stopped working (e.g. does not turn on anymore) and you are not able to determine the problem. Once a technician was able to analyze the issue and has estimated a price for the repair of your Galaxy S4, you are able to decide what repairs will be performed.

If you have dropped your Samsung Galaxy S4 into water, you should act fast. Consequences of a water damage don""t always appear right away. Immediately drying the device thoroughly, turning off the phone and if possible removing the battery can help increasing the chance of a successful repair. A professional assessment of possible damages of your Galaxy S4 are recommended in any case. This way serious water damage can be avoided or affected parts replaced. A technician can perform diagnostics, find all affected parts and recommend fixes. Then you can decide for yourself what repairs are actually performed.

If your Samsung Galaxy S4 does not charge properly anymore or you experience problems connecting to your PC or MAC a repair or replacement of the phone connector port could be necessary. Often it can also be a problem with the charger/charger cable or a broken USB cable. In any case a professional smartphone repair shop can help finding the problem and replace or repair the broken parts.

The battery of your Samsung Galaxy S4 does not hold charge or doesn’t charge anymore at all? In this case you should consider getting the smartphone battery replaced.

If thespeaker of your Samsung Galaxy S4 is too silent, you can hear cracks, the tone is cutting out or there is no sound at all, despite the correct settings, it is recommended to get a repair or replacement of your speaker or earpiece.

If the front or back camera of your Samsung Galaxy S4 only takes blurry photos or the camera only shows a black screen, a camera repair is able to fix the problem.

If you are not able to hear the caller anymore or only with bad quality, cracks or cutting out, it often points to a a broken or damaged earpiece of your Galaxy S4. Those problems can normally be fixed by replacing or repairing the earpiece of your Samsung Galaxy S4.

Unfortunately we are not offering a comparison of repair shops that would be able to fix this particular issue with your Galaxy S4 at the moment. We are working hard to keep adding additional repair services to our comparison. You might still want to check in with our partners whether they offer the required repair for your Samsung Galaxy S4.

Samsung launched its flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone to much pomp and spectacle last night at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Often, such over-the-top theatrics could mask a lack of substance underneath. But that"s not the case with the Galaxy S4. We went hands-on with the S4 at the New York event, and came away impressed with the innovative and well-integrated software and hardware enhancements that will keep Samsung well-ahead of its competition.

For more information and detailed specs also read our launch article. And make sure to click through to page 2 of this article to read about the Galaxy S4"s camera and imaging features.

The first thing to note about the S4 is that it"s practically identical in footprint and weight to its predecessor, and yet it"s thinner and crams a slightly larger display into that space than on the S3. The S4 measures 13.5 by 7cm (5.38 by 2.74 in), just 1mm (0.04 in) narrower than the S3 - and a notable 11mm (0.43 in) narrower than the Galaxy Note II. The S4 is also very marginally lighter than the S3.

Overall, the phone felt comfortable to handle. Where the Samsung Galaxy Note II is nigh impossible to balance in one hand for typing, not so with the S4. It"s weight and dimensions make it light enough to hold in one hand without any noticeable impact, yet large enough to get a satisfying display of text and photos.

One very noticeable dfference is the larger screen size on the S4. The phone"s Super AMOLED screen measures a comfortable 5.0 inches, a satisfying 0.2-inch bump over the S3. The resolution is better, too: 1920-by-1080 pixels, and 441 pixels per inch, a notable step up over the Galaxy S3"s Super AMOLED 1280-by-720 pixels and 306 ppi. We could see a distinct difference in the image quality between the two: The S4 looked sharper and crisper to our eyes, on text as well as images. But the distinctions were less clear when compared with the larger Galaxy Note II.

The new model uses a PenTile AMOLED display, the same type as on the S3 before it. A PenTile display arranges the display"s subpixels as red, green, blue, green, an arrangement that helps counter the fact that blue subpixels often degrade faster on AMOLED displays. It also accounts for the display not appearing as crisp as an RGB display, such as the one found on the Galaxy Note II.

Indeed, we saw this when viewing a photo on the new S4 compared with the Note II. We noticed some minor differences in color and sharpness on our own photo. The Note II"s image appeared slightly sharper, but the S4 had more balanced skin tones.

The new Adapt Display function automatically adapts screen contrast and brightness to the content you are viewing. You can also set some options manually.

With the new Adapt display mode enabled, the differences were even more pronounced. This adaptive display setting automatically adjusts the contrast and brightness of the display depending upon the content you"re viewing, optimizing based on whether you"re watching a video, looking at an image, or reading a Web page or book, for example. On the S4, the Adapt display feature is more universally applied than on the Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet. In the Note 8.0"s reading mode that mode is strictly optimized for reading apps and also adjusts for color temperature.

Ultimately, further testing will be necessary under controlled conditions and with the final, shipping S4 to determine how the different settings impact how images look on the display. Among the other display options now available are Dynamic, Standard, Professional Photo (Adobe RGB), and Movie.

Gesture navigation first gained mainstream traction with Microsoft"s Xbox Kinect. Then gestures moved into televisions and then to PCs, for example Sony"s Vaio E-series. Through it all, we"ve heard talk about integrating gestures into smartphones and tablets - and now that becomes a reality in the Galaxy S4.

We tested the gesture navigation in the Gallery app, where we navigated images simply with the forward or backwards swipe of a hand. In practice, we found the sensors a bit too sensitive, requiring precision and proximity to work smoothly. More often than not it felt like there was lag, or our swipe wasn"t registered. Perhaps that will still be tweaked in time for the U.S. launch coming later in April. Ultimately, as nifty as this feature may seem, Samsung"s going to have to offer up some training to walk folks through which apps support gestures, and what those gestures are (for example, you can also swipe in the browser to change among open Web pages, and swipe to answer an incoming call, neither of which we tested).

The Smart Scrollfeature lets you scroll through content such as webpages by tilting the phone slightly into the corresponding direction. We did not get a chance to test feature yet but it seemed to work well in the Samsung demo. Smart Pause, meanwhile, detects if you"ve taken your face away from the screen during playback, and if so, it pauses the action for you. Nifty in its implementation, and its function.

Also new is Air View, a feature that first was announced on this spring"s Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet. There, Air View lets you use the tablet"s S Pen to hover over information in a supported app, gaining a shortcut to paying or getting further information. For example, in Flipboard, you could hold the pen over a category and get a preview of the headlines. On the S4, which also comes with Flipboard, you can now use your finger to do these actions. You can also use your finger to draw directly on the screen using an included app like S Memo, just as you"d use the S Pen on the Note II. For both actions, we found our fingers less precise than using the S Pen on the Galaxy Note 8.0; but, our fingers got the job done without the albatross of a pen.

The S4 phone actually borrows heavily from software elements found in the Note 8.0 tablet, which was only just introduced in February, and will be available in Q2 2013. Multi-window provides a scrollable list of supported apps (apps like email, gallery, Gmail, Internet browser, maps, messaging, S Memo, Talk, and YouTube). Long hold the back button to see the fly-out menu, then tap and drag one app, then the second app. You could technically choose to have three things going at the same time, if you were to overlay the popup player as well.

Entirely unique to the S4 phone are the array of features around health and fitness. We liked how the apps for these features were integrated, taking advantage of the new ensors built-into the phone - including ones for temperature and humidity.

You’d think Samsung’s gameplan for this year would be pretty simple after shifting more than 50 million Galaxy S3s. Make last year’s stonkingly successful phone slightly bigger and slightly better, sell bucketloads, then kick back and blow raspberries at the competition until 2014 rolls around.

At first glance, it looks as though that’s exactly what Samsung has done: the Galaxy S4 looks almost identical to the Galaxy S3 (until you get them up close), leaving more than a few fans of the gorgeous Xperia Z, HTC One and iPhone builds bitter, tearful and with one eye on an incoming metal Galaxy Note 3.

But there’s more than meets the eye here. On top of the mandatory 2013 checklist of a big Full HD screen, quad-core Snapdragon chip and 13MP cam, we also get a stampede of snappily named new features and a promise that the S4 contains everything we never knew we needed in a smartphone.

Things like an octo-core chip that’s so advanced and rare that only 30 per cent of the handsets that hit the market will actually have it, and as yet there’s no information on where that 30 per cent might turn up. Every Galaxy S4 does at least get Air Gestures and the eye-tracking Smart Scroll for touch-free operation, plus Dual Shot, Eraser Shot and Drama Shot baked into the new camera and S Health and S Travel for your extra-curricular geek activities.

Even before the S4 was official it was being pitted against the superb HTC One on the essential specs alone. Now that it’s actually here it’s time to find out whether Samsung’s gamble on gadget innovation has paid off, and whether its single-minded determination to take the smartphone top spot will be rewarded. In short, is this the best phone you can buy right now?

Hands-on snaps and press shots have already given away the spoiler that the one area Samsung hasn’t been quite as radical as its rivals is in the design. The Galaxy S4 may not have struck out from Samsung’s stubborn “Plastic 4 Life” design principles, but that doesn’t mean this is a carbon copy of the S3.

The difference in the dimensions between the two handsets is barely noticeable, with the S4 actually arriving with a slimmer figure than its predecessor despite containing a bigger battery. In the hand the S3 and S4 do feel very similar, although we actually slightly prefer the S3’s curvier form for one-handed use. What’s really impressive is that Samsung has managed to squeeze a 5in screen onto the front of the S4 without increasing the girth, thanks to slimmer bezels that also provide a touch of iPad Mini-style seriousness.

We’re not going to lie, this is still a big phone. Plus, after months of fondling the Sony Xperia Z and HTC One, it’s clear that it’s easier to forgive the occasional stretch of your thumb to reach an icon or a shuffle of the handset in two hands to type a message if the device you’re holding is a stylish slab of high design, which the Galaxy S4 unfortunately is not.

The S4 is slim and light, yes, but with a creak or two when it flexes and raised areas on the back for the camera and speaker (unlike the uniformly smooth and flat HTC One) it’s still a slightly underwhelming first impression.

A bigger screen, higher resolution and an upgrade to Gorilla Glass 3 is only what you’d expect from a modern-day flagship phone, but the S4’s Super AMOLED display bolsters the specs with extra smarts that includes Adapt Display, which automatically adjusts saturation as well as brightness as the ambient lighting conditions change.

That’s not to say the specs don’t matter, mind you, and while the S4’s screen can’t quite match the HTC One’s 468ppi figure, that’s only because it has the same number of pixels stretched over a display that’s 0.3in bigger. There’s no denying it’s an eye-widening spectacle of a screen – the pixels look like they’re sitting right on top of the glass.

The increase to 1080p brings with it far sharper, cleaner text that makes the S3 look downright fuzzy by comparison. Contrast is excellent, too, although side-by-side with the HTC the S4 appears to have a slight blue tinge, with the One throwing up purer whites on webpages.

We’d recommend familiarising yourself with the Screen Modes section in Settings, too, as left to its own devices the S4 can overcook skintones and leave your favourite Planet Earth episodes looking like they’ve been filmed on Pandora. The Standard, Professional Photo and Movie modes are all preferable to Dynamic. As for Adapt Display, it’s so subtle we saw no real difference whether it was turned on or off.

In terms of the S4 pumping movies to your telly box, you’re amply provided for with the MHL 2.0 (mobile high-definition link) wired standard as well as being able to toggle screen mirroring and DLNA sharing to scan for compatible devices.

Samsung’s really gone to town here, absolutely packing its TouchWiz-skinned version of Jelly Bean with features, widgets and apps, not to mention gesture controls.

TouchWiz remains a little bloated compared to fuss-free stock Android, but Samsung’s done some really interesting things with the place since we last visited, and if you don’t like lively widgets like the S Travel TripAdvisor collaboration (although we’re rather partial), they can always be trashed.

We think the good-looking WatchON EPG is well worth sticking to your homescreen. It asks you for viewing preferences and your TV provider (Sky, Virgin, etc) before pulling in info and images to match so you can surf your goggle box options without interrupting what you’re currently watching. With the IR blaster, you can hit the Watch on TV button and your S4 will tune your flatscreen to the required channel.

With health tracking as popular as it now is it’s little surprise that Samsung is also pushing its own S Health suite. Pedometer apps are 10-a-penny on Google Play but none come close to this neat and addictive app’s sheer usability. There are various widgets to stick on your homescreens for encouragement, and once you dive in you’ll find a health board for calorie burning and consuming goals, food inputting tools, your step counting progress and a temperature and humidity graphic.

The pedometer keeps running continuously once started, so no steps are wasted, and if you’re not keen on strapping the S4 to your arm for your evening jog you can pick up the S Band, which tracks miles clocked and calories burned. We haven’t been able to play with it yet but it seems a tidy solution if you commit to the S Health system.

So how about the Galaxy S4’s apparent pièces de résistance, the Air Gestures and Smart Screen controls? Do they usher in a revolutionary new era of touch-free gadget operation, or are they simply gimmicks? Perhaps it’s no surprise to find they’re a little bit of both.

Take Air Gestures, which lets you scroll up and down pages and swipe between tabs by waving your hand over the screen. This could be really handy in the kitchen when your hands are covered in barbecue sauce, or when your touchscreen isn’t playing nice with your gloves, but in practice it’s only available in a handful of apps, it makes you look rather daft, and it’s a bit too hit-and-miss to be used for anything but those times that you really can’t touch your phone. That said, put in the practice and scrolling down web pages and through your galleries is satisfying when you’re not in a rush and reliable enough for geeky showing off sessions.

Air View involves less flamboyant gestures so will inevitably get more use. Borrowed from the Galaxy Note 2, the sensor tracks your finger hovering over video timelines, emails and gallery folders and brings up small previews of the contents. It works 2cm to 3cm away in our experience (unlike wafting Gestures, which can be up to 7cm away) and if you turn on haptic feedback (and your imagination) it feels a little like you’ve got superpowers.

Finally there’s Smart Screen, the eye-tracking tech that automatically scrolls down pages as you read and pauses videos if you look away. As with Air Gestures it’s a bit patchy in practice, but if you’re patient with Smart Scroll’s blinking eye animation, (almost) hands-free browsing, helped by tilting the S4 as you read and the S4 tracking your eyes, can be smooth and somewhat relaxing. Smart Pause, on the other hand, works only half the time – and don’t sit in front of a window the first time you show it to your mates because chances are it won’t work.

Since most of these controls are only compatible with Samsung apps, their appeal is limited. But if you’re willing to put the time in to learn a new way of communicating with your device, you’ll be rewarded with a geekier, techier – although often slower – way of controlling the S4.

Like the majority of buyers, it’s the Qualcomm 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 version of the Galaxy S4 that we’ve been testing, rather than the octo-core Exynos beast that only a lucky few will be able to lay their hands on.

The Snapdragon still has plenty of horsepower, of course, and as expected gaming, multi-tasking and browsing over 4G (with an EE Sim) is lightning quick, even with us piling apps in and out of its splitscreen Multi-Window feature to try to fluster it. Apps download quickly over Wi-Fi, too, and on a web browser quick draw, the S4 just pips the HTC One for loading times.

But bizarrely we have encountered a fair amount of lag during testing. Simple things such as moving around homescreens, bringing up the SwiftKey-infused keyboard and opening and closing the Gallery app have caused a touch of unsightly stutter.

We’re told by Samsung that an imminent software update will iron out some of those kinks and we’ll update this review when it’s been loaded onto our review unit. We’d expect this to give TouchWiz the pep talk it needs to run as slippery smooth as Team Stuff gliding down a Slip’N’Slide, but we’ll have to wait to be sure.

As we’re sure many Stuff readers will know, being an all-singing, all-dancing supernova requires oodles of energy, and with a 2600mAh battery that’s 25 per cent bigger than the S3’s we were excited to see if the S4 could match its predecessor’s stamina.

In reality it doesn’t quite manage it, though. While the Galaxy S4 will last you the day on a single charge, that 5in screen sucks power like an out-of-control Dyson sucks up loose change. On a video rundown test, it drained just as much juice at half brightness with Wi-Fi turned on as the HTC One. Considering that the HTC needs nightly charges and we’ve seen the low battery alert many times during our first few days with the S4, we’d wager that power users will have to find brightness or push notification compromises.

The S4 destroys its nearest rivals in the usual benchmarks: on Geekbench 2 it scores a whopping 3236 (versus the HTC One’s 2678) and on AnTuTu, its 24,280 score is some way ahead of the Xperia Z’s 20,582. Over on GLBenchmark 2.7 it’s much the same story with a score of 4591 at 41fps on the onscreen Egypt HD test – the HTC managed 3573 frames at 32fps by comparison.

With features such as Dual Shot, Samsung hasn’t missed an opportunity to get you more involved with the S4, even as part of the reworked camera. It lets you take a snap with the front-facing 2MP camera at the same time as the 13MP rear snapper takes the main image before popping your face into the scene. A gimmick, sure, but as smartphone cameras creep up in quality and versatility, there’s no harm in having some tricks to try out in the first hour with a new handset. Its counterpart, Dual Video, means you can do the same for video calls – tons more useful and still fun.

This dual camera trickery works well, but the same can’t be said for all of the S4 camera’s playful new modes – some borrowed from the Galaxy Camera. Eraser Shot struggled a few times to pick out moving people, so we were left disappointed that we couldn’t get rid of accidental photobombers.

Away from the headline features, the S4’s camera is right up there with the best for accurate colours and incredible detail – at least by smartphone cam standards. It’s also seriously quick, like the S3, so much so that you might not realise you’ve already taken the photo.

While colours captured by the S4 are on the more natural side of the palette, rival cameras such as the HTC can take images with higher levels of contrast, giving colours added oomph. The S4 is also neck-and-neck with the best low-light shooters – whereas the HTC One’s camera picks out more in the dark, it often results in noisy images and the Samsung’s own impressive low-light mode can make for more useful snaps.

The Galaxy S4 isn’t just a phone, it’s a device that wants to track and train you into becoming a Gadgeteer 2.0. Your eyes, your steps, your surroundings, your swipes: it seems that the S4 is always ready and patting at you to turn on features, stick yourself in photos and finesse the right Air Gestures.

And the more you dive into it (and stay patient with the first-generation of this ambitious tech) the more rewarding the S4 becomes. Seriously, at times you’ll wish you could high five your phone, although at others you’ll find yourself taking the easy route and prodding the screen rather than taking the time to consider whether you’ve already got the Air features turned on and whether they’re compatible with the app you’re running.

Let’s remember that these are all extras that you can completely ignore if you want, and if you do the S4 still ticks just about all of the boxes. This is the successor to one of the most popular phones of all time and it’s smarter, faster and sharper-screened. Add the microSD expansion and it’s doing everything the most discerning Android fan could desire.

The fly in the S4 ointment is the HTC One. To us, the all-aluminium design is sleeker, sexier and more sophisticated, and while it sacrifices 0.3in to the Samsung’s 5in screen, the HTC’s display has greater contrast and more accurate colours.

We’re also keen on HTC’s understated Sense UI, which offers a less-intrusive, smoother and zippier user experience than the Galaxy’s TouchWiz. We know that Samsung is always pushing out firmware updates and if those cure the S4’s occasional operational hiccups we’ll revise the review accordingly, but for the time being at least, Samsung will have to make do with third place, now also behind the LG G2, in our Top Ten list of the best smartphones. Be under no illusion, though, the Galaxy S4 is still a fantastic device, and one with tech that paves the way for all future phones.

Let’s get this out the way from the very start. The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the most powerful, most flexible, most adaptable, most all-round functional smartphone in the world, bar none. It’s just that you may not enjoy handling it very much. At least not as it comes out of the box. Don’t worry, I’ll explain as I go on…

Samsung, you see, carve entirely their own way in the phone world. Where most others experiment, often moderately sucessfully (I mean, you’ve heard of the Apple iPhone 4 and 5?), with sealed, button-less designs in glass, metal, kevlar or dense polycarbonate, Samsung rock the Android world with variations on a lightweight all-plastic design that hasn’t really changed for three years or so.

Take the largest and best screen that’s practical and economic to make. Take the fastest processor and GPU that are available. Use a relatively low cost plastic frame which comes apart in a second so that the user can swap out the battery if needed. And add microSD expansion of the phone’s storage, up to 64GB. Use a front-and-centre physical, mechanical, large and friendly ‘home’ button, iPhone-style, so that as and when a user gets into trouble, one press is all that it takes to get them back to a screen they recognise. Have a recognisable ‘menu’ key so that when a user isn’t sure what to press on screen, there’s a fighting chance that they can hit this and find useful options for what to do next.

Samsung’s huge success in the world marketplace with its Galaxy S II and III smartphones has been attributed largely to massive marketing campaigns, but even the best marketing in the world couldn’t sell something people didn’t want. And it seems that they do want Samsung’s hardware flexibility, ergonomics (side power button, central home button and capacitive menu key) and the best darned screen on the planet. Galling to the Apples, LGs and HTCs of this world and, as we’ll see, galling to the Android purists as well, but the sales stats back up Samsung here and no one’s going to argue with around 25 billion pounds in S III sales alone.

Not that this is a huge issue in the grand scheme of things. It turns out that people love accessories (who knew?!) – “I got this case for my S4 for a penny on eBay!” someone told me proudly (plus £2.50 postage, of course, but it still goes to show). Check out your own local market stall tomorrow and you’ll see swathes of cheap back shells and wrap around cases for the S III and now S4. And, with plenty of designs to choose from in plenty of materials, it’s practical to own several and change the look and feel of your S III or S4 on a daily basis. Without ever having to fondle Samsung’s original plastic back and sides.

Samsung cheekily promotes the S4 as “like nothing you’ve ever seen before”, which is clearly ridiculous, given that most people in the street would be hard pressed to tell the S4 from the S III and given the similarity in the TouchWiz interface. It’s an evolutionary upgrade though, and well worth exploring in detail.

As touchscreen-centric smartphones have grown in size, I’ve wondered each time why there’s so much bezel around the display and, thankfully, the ratio of screen to bezel has been steadily increasing. In the case of the Samsung Galaxy S4, the display now occupies over 77% of the phone’s frontal area, which is just about the highest in the industry. In practice this means that, despite having a larger 5” screen, the S4 is an almost identical size to its 4.8”-screened predecessor, the Galaxy S III, which is pretty impressive. After several years of saying that ‘enough is enough’ in terms of phone size though, please let this be the end – for the mainstream anyway.

The Galaxy S4 does feel slightly more solid in the hand, compared to the Galaxy S III, thanks to straight sides (remember, the III was curves everywhere, in an attempt to put more distance between it and Apple’s iPhone lawyers), though the faux-metal band that runs round the rim is just that – fake. It’s all plastic, of course, with the wafer thin removable back plate being the biggest offender here – yes, it’s nicely ‘glazed’, but feels warm to the touch, clammy and is a fingerprint magnet. Which is where I came in, above, declaring that you may not want to handle the bare S4 – I’ll warrant that most owners plump for an in-situ case of some kind.

The Galaxy S4’s display is of subtly different pentile layout and of higher resolution, now 1080p. From a normal usage distance, the extra resolution is hard to notice, to be honest, though if you look up close then the characteristic pentile ‘fuzziness’ on text is largely absent. One downside of the new screen tech is that outdoors visibility has suffered slightly, as shown below, but 1080p resolution is clearly the standard screen real estate for 2013 and it would be churlish to turn down the S4’s upgrade in pixel density.

Not much has changed around the periphery of the phone – with an MHL-enabled microUSB port on the bottom and 3.5mm headphone jack on the top, though the latter has been joined by an infrared port, another nod to 2013 tech fashions, with Samsung supplying WatchOn, an application that is ‘powered by Peel’, seemingly the industry experts in infrared communications with home TV electronics. It didn’t work for me, failing to talk to my 2007 Toshiba DVR, but I’m sure most people will have better luck.

On the back, the speaker has been relocated to the bottom of the device, where there’s slightly more room, for a larger component that pushes out significantly more volume and quality than the S III – I’d rate the Galaxy S4’s speaker to be equivalent to that on the Apple iPhone 5, though nowhere near the output of the HTC One’s stereo monsters, of course.

The camera’s larger too, you can just see the difference if you put the two shooters side by side, with the Galaxy S4 having a larger F2.2 lens, giving better low light performance, at the expense of field of view. I didn’t care though – the photos from the S4 were generally stunning, see the examples below, and it was only the usual ‘low light, moving subjects’ use case that caused it even a slight stumble. It’s true that noone really needs 13 megapixels, but the excellent image processor here does at least make them all count to such a degree that you’ll end up experimenting in a way that you’d normally reserve for a more powerful standalone camera.

It’s not all good news though – for the Galaxy S4 camera, Samsung has re-used the interface from its niche product, the Galaxy Camera, Which is fair enough, since it’s been well received, but it’s clearly not optimised here and, in this launch firmware, there’s up to half a second shutter lag after tapping the on-screen capture icon. In practice, this cause me to miss several shots of people and pets. No doubt future updates will bring this lag down, but it’s irritating in the meantime.

As you’ll have seen from the music hall launch, Samsung place great store on a bunch of extra camera modes, some of which are familiar, e.g. HDR, Night, Sports, Panorama, and some of which are new and… somewhat gimmicky. Drama and Eraser modes duplicate and erase (respectively) moving objects from a brief burst of photos, though you have to know you want to use these ahead of time and they’re very fiddly to get right. They give good demo, but aren’t that useful in the real world.

Similarly there’s the dual camera option, whereby a small thumbnail of yourself from the ‘front’ camera is superimposed on the photo being taken by the main camera. It’s a cute idea, and as a dad who’s always left out of every photo because I’m the one shooting it, I wanted to like this. However, it’s stymied by the positioning of the front camera on the Galaxy S4 – it’s so close to the top-left hand edge of the phone that any normal two handed grip on your smartphone sees the back of your index finger in shot instead of your face.

Under the Galaxy S4’s removable back we have a 2600mAh battery (up from 2100mAh in the Galaxy S III) and this does a good job of lasting through a busy day. As mentioned just now, being to replace the battery is somewhat unusual in the world of smartphone flagships, but I’m all for it, for three reasons. One, you can buy a new battery a year down the line when the capacity of your current one is down to 60%, without needing to pay a fortune down some service centre. Two, you can buy a spare battery and keep it as a pop-in spare, in a pocket, for really busy days or perhaps a camping weekend away from mains power. And three, it opens up a market for extended batteries and other accessories, flip covers, and so on. A subject I’ll come back to in a future feature.

Also obvious under the battery cover is an empty microSD slot. With Android 4.2.2 and TouchWiz now occupying almost 7GB, out of the box, you’ve only got 9GB free of the 16GB quoted on the spec sheet. Now, these days all Android applications have to live in the internal ‘system’ disk – 9GB sounds like a lot, but a few large games and a few 1080p videos and the average user is struggling. It’s a pity Samsung didn’t see fit to start users off with a microSD card, surely only a handful of dollars on the build cost? With a card installed, photos and videos get saved to microSD, plus the larger games spot the card and hopefully download their large resource files to it.

After some external pressure, Samsung has acknowledged all this as an issue and has promised some ‘optimisations’ to free up system disk space. We shall see.

Also under the hood, but unseen, is the engine – a Snapdragon 600 or Exynos 8-core, according to market, with 2GB of RAM (rather than 1GB on the Galaxy S III). I’m not into benchmarks, preferring to look at real world performance. In theory, the Galaxy S4 should blaze through everything, but in practice it’s hard to spot much difference to its predecessor, for two reasons. Firstly, the extra screen resolution and the extra interface routines (of which more below) mean more work for the processor, partly offsetting the capability bump. And secondly, the TouchWiz transitions tend to dominate one’s impression of the device’s speed – somewhat ironic since (along with splash screens) transitions became popular on computers in the first place as ways of masking the loading time of slow applications.

Even allowing for these factors, the Galaxy S4 can still feel slow sometimes. Load up a couple of meaty web sites (I used The Verge and BoingBoing) in a couple of tabs and let them load fully. Now switch between them and, with 2GB of RAM to play with, displaying the pages should be instant – it’s not, with the tab being brought into view often taking up to two seconds to re-display.

Or open up a photo for editing using the built-in editor, again the delay before the photo appears is around two seconds. Now, I realise that two seconds isn’t a lot, but this device should be a lot faster than this. In places, it does scream along, and yes, I’ll bet it demolishes all comers in benchmark tests, but back in the real world it’s clear that Samsung has quite a bit of optimisation left to do. Updates ahoy!

Much hate is directed at manufacturers for adding their own interface touches to their Android phones, some of which is justified but, in the case of TouchWiz, it’s possible to make a case that Samsung has added as much to delight the end user as to annoy those expecting stock Android. The case for Samsung’s defense would like to point out the ‘infinite’ carousel homescreens, the ease of adding or removing these, the way applications can be hidden or re-ordered on the main app menu, and the extended settings carousel and brightness control on the drop-down notification pane.

A large part of the bad press Samsung gets for TouchWiz can be attributed to the extra applications that get added to each Galaxy phone, even when they duplicate existing Android/Google staples. From the company’s point of view, the Samsung Hub, ChatON, WatchON and Samsung Apps are all there on the Galaxy range to help grow Samsung’s own ecosystem, though you have to wonder how successful (or otherwise) it has been. At least, using the aforementioned ‘hide’ function, it’s easy to tuck these away, never see them again and simply use Google’s already rather extensive Play store and services.

The case for the prosecution of TouchWiz gains a bit more momentum with the usual Galaxy home key S-Voice travesty – surely every user eventually disables this to make the home button work immediately and not half a second later (when TouchWiz decides that enough time has gone by and that a second press isn’t coming after all)? Plus S-Voice isn’t as good as Google Now in the first place, which is also here, baked into the OS and more traditionally accessed, with either a long press of the menu key from any homescreen or with a tap on its widget.

On a more positive note, one aspect of Samsung’s additions to Android which rarely get any credit is the bundle of codecs and libraries which Samsung ships ‘under the hood’. In practice, this means that a Galaxy smartphone will play almost any video file, however weird and wonderful the codec used, will display any subtitles and produces excellent multimedia results.

Samsung has added a mountain of extra interface ‘aids’, not all turned on out of the box, thankfully. Some of these work quite well, some are destined to remain ‘pub demos’ and others are simply train wrecks. But you can’t fault Samsung for trying to push the boundaries of how we interact with our smartphones.

For example, there’s a new sensor in the cluster above the screen, whose sole purpose is to watch for hand gestures above it. These are the so-called ‘Air gestures’, letting you answer calls hands-free, flick between Gallery images and scroll web pages up and down, all with a quick wave in the right direction, perhaps because you have dirty or greasy hands and don’t want to have to stop and clean them. These work well but obviously are somewhat niche in application.

Then there’s the ‘Smart screen’ eye tracking, using the Galaxy S4’s front camera, intended to keep the screen on while the software detects you’re still looking at it, to pause video playback when you look away and to scroll web pages when the camera spots that you’re now looking at the bottom of the currently displayed content. All very innovative, but in practice it’s far easier to use the touchscreen – trying to ‘control’ web page scrolling using your eyes to ‘tell’ the browser what to do gets very tiring, very quickly. In addition, the eye tracking doesn’t work well with glasses or in low light.

By ‘browser’ above, Samsung means you to use ‘Internet’, its recoded version of the old stock Android application, though Chrome is also shipped with the Galaxy S4, adding extra confusion for a new user. I’m guessing that the only reason for this is that it wasn’t possible to get the eye tracking working with the latter browser.

Finally there’s ‘Air view’, using ‘super sensitive’ screen technology to detect when your finger is near the screen but not touching, and popping up previews of Gallery images and text messages. It’s a nice feature once you get used to the ‘hovering’ distance needed, but Air view doesn’t work in more than a handful of applications that are under Samsung’s control – I’d expect more applications to be enabled for this this in a future update.

A mixed bag then, but full marks for trying. However, there’s a slight sting in the tail of TouchWiz that many new users will be affected by. Somewhat unbelievably, out of the box, the Samsung virtual keyboard doesn’t auto-correct mistyping – it simply puts up what it thinks you meant in a suggestions bar, and if you don’t spot this and tap on it then your original mistype will stay in the text. In fact, for the older Galaxy S III this was all you got, period, leaving knowledgeable users to seek out a better keyboard in the Google Play Store. For the Galaxy S4, there is an ‘auto replacement’ option, but it’s buried deep in Settings and it’s off by default. Which is unfriendly, to say the least.

There’s more to the Galaxy S4 that I haven’t had time to even mention yet. There are original Samsung applications like Group Play (channels audio from multiple S4s), Optical Reader (go on, guess what this does), S-Memo (graphical note taking), S-Health (a complete health suite that uses the phone’s sensors, but which also needs extra accessories, apparently ‘coming soon’) and Story Album (intelligently groups photos together according to date and presents them in ‘arty’ fashion). Plus all the core Android functions and features you know so well.

There’s extra hardware too – a barometer, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, GPS support for both the USA satellites and the Russian GLONASS versions. There’s NFC, of course, though built into the battery rather than the phone (so be careful if you do source a replacement battery – check it has the same NFC transceiver included).

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a lot of smartphone in a relatively ‘small’ form factor and in a remarkably thin and solid body. It’s true that there are some performance caveats and it’s true that Samsung still has work to do in terms of firmware updates, but the company has a good track record here and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the S4 to anyone wanting the best of 2013. The phone is supremely beweaponed, flexible in terms of hardware, customisable in terms of interface, and is in many ways the ultimate smartphone.

Read back over the previous three thousand words and you’ll appreciate why it’s priced at a premium – the 5” 1080p display alone is horrendously expensive to replace should you manage to break it. Which means that you’re strongly advised to keep the Galaxy S4 in a case of some sort. Which, in turn, means that you won’t have to feel the S4’s fingerprint-attracting, clammy plastic back a hundred times a day.

So configured, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is an awesome piece of technology. Will it be bettered in 2013? For geeks, the only direct contender I can see is itself, with Google announcing (just for the USA, so far) a stock Android version of the exact same device. Which is a win for Samsung either way, of course. For general users in mass markets, despite its minor flaws, the Galaxy S4 is probably going to be without peer… until the Galaxy S5 arrives, of course!