Samsung Galaxy S4 VS Galaxy S3 Features: Should you upgrade?

The much awaited flagship phone of Samsung, the Galaxy S4 has been finally officially released. Prior to the release, a lot of hype was created beginning with the first photo leak which appeared a month back in the website. Now that we have gotten our hands on the device, we can decide whether the S4 actually live up to its hype and whether it is worth upgrading for the Galaxy S3 users.

Display: First up let’s take a look at the hardware side of this device. The first thing you will notice is that Samsung Galaxy S4 has one of the biggest displays compared to other latest Smart phones in the market. The SGS 4 is equipped with a 5 inch 1920X1080 full HD (1080p) AMOLED screen with 441 ppi. Thus, the S4 screen is bigger than that of HTC One (4.7 inch), iphone 5 and Galaxy S3 (4.8 inch) but smaller than Galaxy Note 2(5.5 inch). The screen ppi of Galaxy s3 was only 360 ppi and 720 x 1,280 pixels. Also, the Galaxy S4 has corning Gorilla Glass 3 whereas Galaxy S3 has Gorilla Glass 2- regarding this we still don’t know how big a difference it is, all we know is that the former is superior.

Design: Both Galaxy s3 and Galaxy S4 have similar polycarbonate body except the latter feels more durable and less like plastic and has a better grip. One of the easily noticeable design differences between Galaxy S3 and S4 is the silver band on the Galaxy S4 which looks more metallic. The Galaxy S4 is also “thinner” (about 1mm thinner than Galaxy S3) and lighter than its predecessor. The S4 also has a slightly curved bezel making it look sturdier.

Camera: Galaxy S4 features a 13 megapixels camera which is powerful and produces significantly better images compared to Galaxy S3’s 8 megapixels camera. Previously, S3 had a problem of producing low quality images in dim lighting conditions; this problem seems to have been solved in the Galaxy S4.

Processor, RAM and Storage: The Galaxy S4 is powered by its proprietary octo-core Exynos 5 Octa chipset which has four 1.6 GHz Cortex A15 cores and four Cortex A7 cores at 1.2 GHz and is powered by PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU. This chipset is designed for better power management where the powerful 1.6 GHZ Cortex A15 cores are enabled for multimedia and other resource intensive tasks and while in standby or light tasks the processing work is handed to the 1.2 GHZ Cortex A7 cores. Samsung Galaxy S4 will also come with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset in different regions including US. The Galaxy S4 has 2 GB of RAM which is double than what Galaxy S3 had. The S4 also comes with huge internal storages from 16,32 to 64 GB which can be further extended up to 64GB via microSD.

Operating System – OS: The Samsung Galaxy S4 ships with the latest Android Jellybean 4.2.2 which is faster and has better interface and added features such as the photosphere camera which the Galaxy S3’s current os, Jellybean 4.2.1 lacks. However, if you are willing to install custom ROMs, Cyanogenmod has released the latest CM 10.1 custom 4.2.2 Jellybean for the Galaxy S3.

Cool Software features: The Galaxy S4 comes with cool software features such as eye tracking which allows eye scrolling, S-translate which enables multilingual translation i.e if someone speaks in Japanese “S-voice” will translate than into English so that you will understand, ‘S-health’ which is a pedometer and can also be integrated with other devices to monitor blood sugar, pressure and other vitals. “S-band” device can be used to monitor heart rate, track your entire day’s activity and even keep you informed about your “sleep efficiency”. The “air guestures” feature allows you to interact with the screen by simply waving your hand above the screen surface. Functions such as swiping left-right or scrolling up-down can be done by simply waving.

Battery: Galaxy S4 has a higher capacity battery at 2,600 mAH compared to Galaxy S3’s 2100 mAH.

Connectivity: S4 supports all the connectivity features that were in S3 like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4G, NFC and infrared.

Price: Though, the price of Galaxy S4 is not yet released, it is speculated to be priced somewhere around $650 which is closer to the price of an unlocked iphone 5. The carrier price might be around $200.

Conclusion: The Galaxy S4 is obviously superior to Galaxy S3 in all aspects. However, this doesn’t mean Galaxy S3 is a low performer. Though less advanced than Galaxy S4, the Galaxy S3 is still a powerful handset. If your major concern is simply running regular apps and games and you are not much concerned about the slightly inferior display in the S3, then you might not want to upgrade. However, if you are one of those people(app lovas) who love to cram up their smartphones with hundreds of latest apps and graphics intensive games, use it to take pictures most of the times and also spend a lot of time watching videos in the smartphone, then Samsung Galaxy S4 will definitely make you happy. Due to its top notch features, many have even termed the Galaxy S4 as the Iphone 5 killer. Well, the coming days will show whether the majority of users will decide to own a highly powerful device or simply decide that what they currently have is enough.