Samsung Galaxy S4's Improvements Will Cover Galaxy SIII
The Samsung Galaxy S4 is officially upon us. The Korean phone giant took the wraps off its
new 5-inch smartphone at a high-profile event in New York City tonight,
and will release the Galaxy S4 in the second quarter on all four major
U.S. carriers.
PCMag spoke with Nick DiCarlo, Samsung's vice president of portfolio
planning, at tonight's event, and he said that many of the software
improvements in the Samsung Galaxy S4 could make their way into existing
Samsung Galaxy S3 phones.
"Anything that we can do that's not dependent on hardware
like infrared, we'll definitely bring to all the flagship devices," he
said.
That may include the Galaxy S4's new camera features,
which DiCarlo said several times were a highlight of the new phone. When
asked why Samsung picked a 13-megapixel camera sensor rather than going
for bigger pixels like HTC did, he said the new UI was more important.
"The key thing you've got to think about in this debate
is, how easy is a camera to use and what cool things can you do with
it?" he said. "Photo quality is great, and has been great; for the
average person the day-to-day person you're not having a quality
argument about photography. For your everyday use case, the ability to
remove photobombers and that kind of stuff is really what's going to
have people talking."
When asked about what he considers the "wow" features on
the S4, DiCarlo called out the camera UI, the WatchNow TV remote and
gesture control, but also how Samsung made the device's screen bigger
while the phone is physically smaller than the Galaxy S3.
"I think that the Galaxy S3 was considered a big screen
device and we made it smaller this year. That's an amazing feat and I
think it's something that Samsung is able to do that really helps us
stand out," he said. Will phone screens keep getting bigger? "We're
going to find out at some point, but we haven't found out yet."
With so much new software in the Galaxy S4, I raised
questions about fragmenting Android into multiple platforms. DiCarlo
shot me down pretty quickly, saying he doesn't know of any
incompatibilities Samsung has introduced for third-party developers, and
that Samsung has dramatically sped up its rate of delivering Android
upgrades. There's no problem with the Android ecosystem as-is, he said.
"I think that the brilliance of the Android strategy from
the beginning was that you have this baseline that was real standard,
and we've been huge advocates and defenders of that, but that allow you
to do creative things on the top of that," he said. "I give Andy Rubin
and those guys a lot of credit for having that insight. The model works
great, right? You can have all of these cool services from Google while
also having companies like Samsung also build all of these things on top
of it without breaking it."
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