Apple’s next-generation iPhone 6 will finally match up to its key Android rivals and pack a 5-inch, Full HD 1080p display. That’s according to new rumours emerging from Japan, published in Mac Fan magazine.
The move to a larger screen would not be a huge surprise. Apple is said to have been testing larger, phablet-style phones for months, with a slew of stories of 6-inch devices emanating from supply-chain sources throughout the summer.
This new piece of tittle tattle, though, says a 5-inch number is nailed-on. While Mac Fan’s sources' credentials as sources of juicy info remain unclear, it's undoubtedly fair to say that a device of that size wouldn’t be seen as too large by most consumers.
The magazine also claims the iPhone 6 will launch in September 2014. That seems almost a given, what with the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5 arriving in the same timeframe in the past two years.
Expect to hear plenty more gossip about Apple’s next iPhone as 2014 looms into view.
LG hasn't always been a fan favorite: For a long time the company was best known for its budget handsets that did little to stand out from the competition. In recent years, however, LG has earned a reputation for creating solid, reliable devices. The LG Optimus G Pro continues that string of successes, blowing away its nearest competitor in size and design, the Samsung Galaxy Note II, and rivaling the recent HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 as one of the best Android phones on the market. The G Pro runs like a sports car engine in the body of a family minivan—an unassuming aesthetic mixed with luxury performance. Provided you can fit it in your hand (a big caveat), this quick, flashy giant might very well be the phone for you.
Built for Goliath
At 5.9 by 3.0 by 0.4 inches the Optimus G Pro is larger than almost any other phone on the market. Like last year’s Galaxy Note II, the G Pro packs 5.5 inches of screen real estate, straddling that fine line between tablet and phone.
MICHAEL HOMNICKThe LG Optimus G Pro (right) next to the Samsung Galaxy Note II (left).
On the other hand, the G Pro carries its size well. It’s definitely overlarge (people with tiny hands, beware), but I found the G Pro surprisingly comfortable to operate. In addition to a volume rocker, the left spine of the handset features a quick-launch button that can be customized to open any app on the device—handy for accessing the camera or a browser. The G Pro is slightly slimmer than the Galaxy Note II, which helped it sit better in my average-size hands. You’re also able to compress the keyboard closer to the left or right side if you really want to use the device one-handed.
MICHAEL HOMNICKThe G Pro has a great-looking display.
As for the screen, it’s a beautiful behemoth running at 1920 by 1080 resolution, with a pixel density of 400 pixels per inch. That’s a much higher resolution than what you get on the Galaxy Note II’s 267 pixels per inch and 1280-by-720-resolution display, though the G Pro's density doesn’t quite live up to what the HTC One and Galaxy S4 offer (both are 1920 by 1080 displays, with 469 and 441 pixels per inch, respectively). Unfortunately, this beautiful screen is housed in a cheap plastic exterior that relentlessly attracts smudges. The phone is by no means ugly—especially with the screen on—but it just doesn't stand out, as the lovingly-honed HTC One does.
Performs like a pro
Driving this enormous phone is the same basic architecture as the HTC One—a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and 2GB of RAM. The G Pro feels quick and incredibly responsive. The phone handled everything I threw at it with ease, including bleeding-edge games and resource-intensive applications. The G Pro comes equipped with 23GB of usable storage out of the box, though you can always add more via a MicroSD card.
MICHAEL HOMNICKThe G Pro packs a lot of performance into a slim package.
The phone’s battery shouldn’t have any problem handling an average day of use. However, the huge screen definitely chews into battery life during prolonged usage. If you’re heavy on games or constantly checking Twitter, consider toting a charger on your outings.
One area where the Galaxy Note II bests the G Pro is in multitasking. Though LG touts the ability to view multiple apps on the G Pro, that feature is fairly limited: You can't view apps side by side but instead must rely on LG's QSlide feature to do more than one thing at a time. QSlide can launch one of four apps—calendar, notes, video, or calculator—above whatever’s currently running. While the international version of QSlide includes a browser, that's not in the U.S. version. As a result, the G Pro’s multitasking capability feels lopped off at the knees.
AT&T only
For some reason, LG made the baffling decision to lock the G Pro to AT&T, so keep that in mind if you’re considering this device.
The G Pro’s call quality leaves a bit to be desired. Noise sometimes crept into the outgoing voice, and the incoming audio sounded a little tinny (though plenty loud). The handset is also not very good at cutting out background noise—which is odd, since using speakerphone on the G Pro makes you sound incredibly distant even if you’re only 6 inches away.
4G LTE reception was fast enough in our San Francisco office location to stream video and download apps over AT&T’s network with ease (your results will vary depending on AT&T's coverage in your area).
13 is a lot of megapixels, but...
MICHAEL HOMNICKThe G Pro has a 13-megapixel camera.
Even though it's packed with pixels, the 13-megapixel camera on the G Pro didn't meet our expectations. Images taken under normal conditions were significantly fuzzier than what we've seen from the similarly spec'd Samsung Galaxy S4. The G Pro's low-light performance was better than that of Samsung's offering, but overall the G Pro’s camera performance was subpar.
The G Pro's camera app has a number of extras, including HDR (high dynamic range) and Panorama mode, both of which have their share of quirks. Panoramic shots look sharp at first glance, but lose clarity even faster than the G Pro’s standard shooting mode once you begin zooming in. The HDR setting works well, but takes too long to shoot and process images for regular use.
HAYDEN DINGMANA sample image taken with the Optimus G Pro. (Click to enlarge.)
The G Pro also features an “Intelligent Auto” mode, which adjusts aperture, white balance, and shutter speed on the fly to take better pictures. Unfortunately the mode is a bit fidgety, especially when it comes to white balance. It has a bad habit of completely changing the white balance for a split second right as you go to snap the perfect shot, leaving everything too orange or blue. It’s better to adjust the options manually.
If you’re obsessed with taking high-quality pictures on your phone, the G Pro’s camera might be a deal breaker. It certainly doesn’t hold up to the S4, and its options are quite limited. On the other hand, if you treat the camera as supplemental to the other features, or as a nonissue, it should work fine for most of your needs.
Bottom line
LG’s Optimus G Pro is king of the small—but growing—phone/tablet hybrid market (I refuse to use the term “phablet”). It’s a performance powerhouse that, despite its large size, is relatively comfortable to use even with average-size hands. The G Pro loses a few points for its limited multitasking features, but if you’re looking to buy a large Android phone and aren’t dismayed by the underperforming camera, then the G Pro is definitely worth considering.
This is the burning question of the moment: Should you buy the Samsung Galaxy S4? After spending a few days with the phone and running it through TechHive's suite of tests, I can confirm that the Galaxy S4 is an impressive Android phone. Samsung's latest offering tops its previous efforts in many respects, and Android fans are rightly excited by the Galaxy S4's imminent release (slated for the end of the month). That's not to say that the phone is perfect: For all of its innovations and cutting-edge specs, the Galaxy S4 has shortcomings that prevent it from being the ideal smartphone.
Familiar face
ROBERT CARDINThe Samsung Galaxy S4.
At first glance, the Galaxy S4 looks similar to its predecessors, the Galaxy S3 andGalaxy Note 2. The phone shares the same rounded corners, Home button, and primarily plastic design; yet the Galaxy S4 feels more polished overall. The new phone's buttons are more durable than those on the Note 2 or Galaxy S3, and its plastic components seem to be of higher quality. Measuring 5.38 by 2.75 by 0.31 inches and weighing a scant 4.64 ounces, the Galaxy S4 is slightly lighter and thinner than the Galaxy S3. However, the Galaxy S4 felt blockish next to the Galaxy S3's gentle curves and wasn't as comfortable to hold.
MICHAEL HOMNICKThe Galaxy S4 achieves its slim profile at the expense of being less comfortable to hold.
The 5-inch, 1920-by-1080-pixel display on the Galaxy S4 offers an impressive 441 pixels per inch, making it one of the sharper-looking screens around, and beating the pixel density of the iPhone 5 (326 ppi) and the Galaxy S3 (306 ppi). Still, colors looked more saturated on the Galaxy S4 than on competing smartphones. The thin bezel surrounding the screen made using the phone one-handed more difficult because of the ever-present hazard of inadvertently hitting the Menu button or the Back button—a mistake that tended to happen as I was trying to type an email or text message.
MICHAEL HOMNICKLike on the Note 2 and Galaxy S3, the battery on the Galaxy S4 is removable.
The back of the phone comes off to reveal a removable 2600mAh battery, and a MicroSD card slot that can accommodate up to 64GB of additional storage. TechHive’s lab clocked the Galaxy S4's battery life at a solid 7 hours, during which it continuously played back HD video, and I managed to squeeze a full day of use out of the phone while browsing the Web, downloading apps, taking pictures, before having to recharge it.
The Galaxy S4's overall design is a a bit underwhelming. The Galaxy S4 looks chintzy next to phones like the HTC One and the Apple iPhone 5, whose aluminum bodies give them a premium look that seems absent from Samsung's new handset. The phone is by no means ugly; I just wish Samsung had used something other than plastic for the chassis.
Everything but the kitchen sink
The Galaxy S4 can run two apps side-by-side.
What Samsung's phone lacks in design, though, it makes up for in features and specs. The U.S. version of the Galaxy S4 ships with a 1.9GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor and 2GB of RAM, making the phone a powerhouse at running 3D games and other resource-heavy applications. All of that processing power comes in handy when running two apps simultaneously, a feature we most recently saw on Samsung's 8-inch Note tablet.
Another feature borrowed from the Note line is Air Preview: By hovering your finger a few centimeters off the screen, you can view the contents of folders, email, and messages without having to open them. It's pretty neat, but I didn't find myself using Air Preview all that much, as simply opening and closing content was often faster than waiting for the preview to show up.
The Galaxy S4 also supports the hands-free Air Gestures control, which lets you scroll through webpages, flip through photos in the Gallery app, and answer the phone by swiping your hand over the Samsung logo above the screen. I ended up using Air Gestures more than I thought I would, because it gave me some control over the phone without having to touch it—useful for when my hands were wet or dirty.
S Translator in action.
Other highlights of the Galaxy S4 include the exclusive Optical Reader, S Translator, and S Health apps. Optical Reader lets you scan text or QR codes, and you can use it to enter information from business cards into your contacts quickly. The app worked well for scanning QR codes, but it stumbled a bit when I tried to scan several business cards that I had lying around.
S Translator is basically Samsung's attempt to copy the functionality of Google Translate: You enter or speak your queries, and S Translator spits out a translation in one of 12 languages. Though the app managed to translate my Spanish phrases into English somewhat successfully, it seemed uninspired next to the official Google Translate app, which can translate to more languages, and can do so more accurately.
S Health keeps track of your steps and the number of calories you've burned.
I grew to appreciate S Health, Samsung's fitness tracking app, the more I used it. I'm constantly forgetting my Fitbit at home, so having the Galaxy S4 track my steps and activities without any need for extra hardware proved extremely convenient. The app can also track your calorie intake, and it uses colorful graphs to show you how close you are to your daily step count. S Health is one of my favorite additions to the Galaxy line, and I hope Samsung keeps the service around for future Samsung phones.
The WatchOn app on the Galaxy S4.
Another aspect of the Galaxy S4 that I thoroughly enjoyed was the phone's ability to function as a universal remote control. The phone has a built-in IR blaster, and the preloaded WatchOn app allows you to browse TV listings. The app isn't as straightforward to set up as the TV app on the HTC One, but WatchOn offers extra functionality such as the ability to pair with a Google TV.
Smart Stay, a feature available on the Galaxy S3, returns on the Galaxy S4 and is accompanied by two new head-tracking options: Smart Scroll and Smart Pause. Smart Stay is supposed to keep your screen from dimming as you look at it, but it was as buggy on the Galaxy S4 as it was on its predecessor and often failed, depending on the lighting in the room. Smart Scroll registers when you tilt your head or the phone to scroll up or down. This function worked as advertised, though moving my head felt unnatural and tilting the phone often caused me to scroll down farther than I intended.
Of the bunch, however, Smart Pause deserves some ridicule. With Smart Pause enabled, your videos will pause whenever you look away from the screen—or at least that's what it's supposed to do. In reality, tilting the phone in a certain way caused playback to stop, which made watching videos on the phone during my bumpy commute an exercise in frustration. Smart Pause is off by default, and I recommend leaving it that way.
According to Samsung, the Galaxy S4 has more than 100 new features, but that means very little when many of the phone's headlining capabilities come across as broken gimmicks. Apps like S Health show that Samsung can make great software when it tries; I'd love to see the company put more effort into practical endeavors rather than wasting time and resources on half-baked novelties like head-tracking.
Dual cameras, drama shots, and more
A photo taken with the Galaxy S4.
The main shooter on the Galaxy S4 is a 13-megapixel camera with a single LED flash. Photos taken with the Galaxy S4 looked great, with vibrant colors and minimal digital noise. Photos taken indoors came out looking surprisingly good, though the results varied greatly from location to location. The phone has a Night mode for taking photos in dark environments, but my Night mode shots came out extremely grainy.
The Camera app benefits from a wide array of shooting modes, including Macro and Panorama. One mode lets you record audio while taking a photo, and another allows you to erase objects or people from your shots. I'm not sure why you'd want to record audio while taking a photo, but the ability to remove unwanted subjects from photos worked extremely well in my tests. I used it successfully to remove some bystanders from a photo of a bridge.
The Camera app on the Galaxy S4 features an impressive array of shooting modes.
Two of the Camera app's shooting modes, Dual Camera and Drama, are especially interesting. Activating Dual Camera turns on the front-facing camera while the main camera continues to run, enabling you to "insert" yourself into any photos you take. I can see the feature appealing to families that don't want to leave anyone out of a vacation photo, but I had trouble properly framing my subjects while simultaneously making sure that my face was within the front-facing camera's rather small viewing angle. Dual Camera worked better when I held the phone in portrait mode, but who takes photos that way? (Terrible people, that's who.)
Drama mode on the Galaxy S4.
The Drama shooting mode takes multiple exposure shots and stitches them together to form a single photo. As you can see from the image above, the mode works best for capturing images involving lots of movement, or when you're trying to re-create the Abbey Road album cover. When you take a Drama shot, you can select the photos that you'd like to use in the final image by tapping on them, though the Galaxy S4 usually did a good job at picking the best images and stitching them together on its own.
The HTC One has a similar mode that uses the phone's Zoe camera. However, the feature on the Galaxy S4 required less digging through menus. In fact, though the camera apps on the HTC One and Galaxy S4 shared many similar features, they were almost universally easier to access and operate on the Galaxy S4.
Unfortunately, all of these excellent capabilities come at a price: Though the Galaxy S4 runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, it lacks the ability to take PhotoSpheres—arguably one of the coolest features of the stock Android 4.2 camera. It's possible that Samsung could restore PhotoSpheres later, but I'm disappointed that the option won't be available at the phone's release.
Bottom line
MICHAEL HOMNICK
When the Galaxy S3 launched, it was widely regarded as the best Android phone of its time: It had the best design, loads of features, and an impressive list of specs that set it head and shoulders above the competition. The same cannot be said about the Galaxy S4. Yes, the phone is loaded with extras, and its specs are nothing to scoff at; but the Galaxy S4 doesn't do much to differentiate itself from the pack. If anything, the phone is more iterative than revolutionary, and some aspects of the handset—such as Samsung's TouchWiz overlay and the phone's plastic aesthetic—make the Galaxy S4 feel like it's stuck in 2011.
Despite its flaws, the Galaxy S4 is a solid phone and a worthy successor to the Galaxy S3. The Galaxy S4's camera is exceptional and apps like S Health make this new model worth considering. Is it the best Android phone out there? No, but that shouldn't stop people from buying it if they find Samsung's additions to Android appealing.
