(iTers News) - With the global official launch just 2 days away in April 27, Samsung Electronics unveiled much-touted Galaxy S4 smart phone in its home turf Korean market, a well-known test bed for global high-tech companies’ new breakthrough technologies.
The Galaxy S4 smart phone is to be shipped in Korea tomorrow for the first time in the world, and starting in April 27, 327 mobile service carriers in 155 countries across the world will ship the Galaxy S4 smart phones.
Running on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean OS, the Galaxy S4 smart phone is the world’s first smart phone design that has implemented ARM’s 32 bit big.Little CPU architecture ever to hit a balance in performance and power consumption.
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Powered by Samsung’s octa core CPU that is built on two quad core processors - low-power 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A7 and high-performance 1.6GHz A15 – Samsung Galaxy S4 has already acclaimed an international credit for its outstanding and breakthrough UI technologies. Yet, hands-on reviews tell a little different story.
For example, its highly-acclaimed ‘eye-tracking’ UI technology didn't work as well as it promised. The eye-tracking technology was originally designed to allow a built-in front-facing camera to keep track of user’s eyes to automatically scroll up and down line by lines of contents depending on where they gaze. Yet, the reality was that you can just scroll up and down page by page.
Activating the much-hyped ‘Air View’ was a nagging experience, because the pop-up screen was just nothing more than a little amplification of the original content. Moreover, it was really tough and stressful to exactly point your fingertip toward the target content to magnify it.
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As its built-in gesture-recognition technology is still technologically premature, the IR, or Infrared – powered ‘Air Gesture’ technology didn’t work as well as expected, either.
To flip through screen after screen with a swipe of your hand, for example, you have to repeat it at least two or three times. It was a waste of time. Instead, you had better flip through them by directly touching on the screen with your hands. You must take a notice of how susceptible the IR technology is to ambient signal noises.
Samsung also boasts of its ‘smart pause’ technology, which pauses the playback of the video clips temporarily whenever your eye gaze veers out of the screen. Yet, the technology is everywhere now, as other competitors are aggressively adopting the gaze-recognition technology. The smart pause technology To pause and play back video clips, it's much user-friendlier to use your hands than your heads. The technoloy just makes sense only if something urgent, or a call diverts your attention away from the screen. While you are watching a video clip, for example, your gaze is distracted by a call from your friend. If it restarts from the paused scene when you focus back on the video, it will be very useful.
In sum, Samsung has heavily dedicated all of its engineering resources to making the Galaxy S4 UIs a lot user-friendlier, innovating a lot on them. Running afoul of its good-will attempt, however, its UI innovations turned out to be unfriendly to users.
The Galaxy S4 comes into a 5-inch Super AMOLED, and the day of reckoning is coming to judge how well it satisfy consumers' expectations for better user experiences and differentiation.
At a product launch press conference held on April 25, Lee Don Joo, president with Mobile Communications Business said that Samsung expects to sell more than 10 million Galaxy S4 smart phones in the first release month alone.
Photos & Videos by JH Bae
