Samsung's New Galaxy SIV

Announced at 7am this morning, it was slow in camp and hence with nothing else to do, I whipped out my phone to check out the new S4 announcement. I'm actually quite surprised cause a lot of the camp mates here are aware of the launch and were pretty eager to find out about the phone too.

Looking like a modified S3, it comes as no surprise it's not much of a head turner to many, and a number of people were disappointed. The way I see it, it's like the iPhone loh, hardware is one thing, software is another. But quite frankly in terms of software, Sammy's bringing a lot of its flavour to the table, with built in features that aren't standard in Android, such as air gestures, dual camera recording, a translator, story albums and even a health app that comes with accessories like a fuel-band like thing, weighing scales, and even a HRM.

Those features are great though I don't see a lot of people here using them unless Sammy starts promoting those features like they do in the USA ads, so most likely the biggest steal for locals would be it's 5inch Super AMOLED screen with a pixel density of 441 aka 35% sharper than the retina display, and it's 13 megapixel camera if the photos it takes are on par, close to, or superior to the iPhone 5.

Geek heads would probably be looking forward to the International version which will likely ship with Exynos 5's 8-core processor, which seem a little overkill for day to day functions but I guess if you're a power user and actually make use of all of the S4's features, 8 cores do come in handy.

With Samsung's KNOX feature, it looks like Sammy's ready to take on Blackberry's business solution head on too, making it both a business phone and personal phone, essentially two profiles on one device, similar to what BB touts with the Z10.

With a goal to hit 155 countries and 327 carriers when it launches, it looks like they're trying to beat Tim Cook at his game in terms of mass distribution. Apple has set such a gold standard that everyone's trying to beat them at their game, which ultimately benefits the end user.

Personally, it's a decent looking phone, not the prettiest for sure, but apart from the design, it seems to have a lot going for it to start its own eco-system, which is probably what they are trying to do with the likes of Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It's ambitious but hey, if you don't aim high you won't know how far you can go yeah?

If you have time to waste, check out their hour long conference...I'm personally not much of a theatre person, and when theatre mixes with marketing, its just rather over the top for me.