Samsung Galaxy S 4 Review - Part 1
by Brian Klug on April 24, 2013 12:01 AM ESTNAND Performance
The Galaxy S 4 ships with either 16GB or 32GB of NAND on-board, but allows for expansion via a microSD card slot. The latter is a quickly disappearing feature on modern smartphones, but it remains a point of differentiation offered by Samsung. We were sampled a 16GB version of the Galaxy S 4, which arrived with 9.62GB of usable space after the OS and app pre-load.
As always we're using Androbench (with modified settings) to quantify NAND performance. Thankfully NAND performance has been steadily improving on modern smartphones/tablets, and the Galaxy S 4 is no exception. Sequential read performance actually sees a tremendous boost compared to most of the other devices in our charts here. Optimizing for sequential read performance makes a lot of sense, but it's good to see Samsung being competitive on all fronts here.
It is worth pointing out that NAND is treated very much as a commodity in these devices, and it's entirely possible that you'll see performance deviate from what we've shown here depending on what controller/NAND/firmware combination you get in your device.
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Notmyusualid - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
Exactly - mine won't see a case at all.I wanted to hold out for my removable battery & SD slot, but since my SGS2 had such poor audio, (thus meaning I often missed calls in a noisy communications / server environment), I gave in, and my new HTC One will arrive tomorrow.
I might have lived with the plastic though, I had no case on my SGS2, and loved how light it was.
A 4" version of either the SGS4 or HTC One with no skimping on internals would have me jumping for joy though...
Thegonagle - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I usually put phones in a case when I'm going out (and definitely if I'm carrying my smartphone on the job instead of my flip phone), but I like using them naked at home. So design still matters.cdef - Saturday, April 27, 2013 - link
This phone really doesn't even need a case unless the owner is especially clumsy. Gorilla Glass 3 is pretty impressive. My Galaxy Nexus is unscathed after two years with it's "fortified glass" of unspecified brand. Naked phones FTW.sAiyAnstAr - Thursday, May 2, 2013 - link
I don't use cases anyway, so that point to me is not valid. I have the HTC Sensation and ONE X and have dropped them both numerous times on the face and back. The ONE X's plastic case is more worse-for-wear even though its newer than my Sensation.Diorarat - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Gs4 is a cheap plastic phone. It is cheap because of the played out the design. When I shell out cash for a premium phone I want to feel that it is premium. When I hold a gs4 it feels like playing with cheaper variants that look the same. There is the galaxy note, galaxy s3, galaxy s3 mini, galaxy grand, galaxy mega, galaxy duos and a lot more. Don't get me wrong, i had a galaxy s3 and it was a beautiful phone when it came out. But Samsung abused it's popularity by making all phones look the same at the expense of the premium feel of the galaxy S line. Htc is by far the best designed phone you can get with the same price range. It packs the same punch as a galaxy s4 at the same price with better hardware. "build, sounds, and camera *depending on how you use it"blue_urban_sky - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I believe that plastic is also chosen so it can be removable.dyc4ha - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
The Chinese version of the HTC One has a removable back plate with dual sim AND microsd expansiontheblueprint - Wednesday, April 24, 2013 - link
I'm living in China now and I just found the removable back one quite disturbing, it boost the thickness to 10.2mm, and I have to give up theunibody aluminum, which is the only thing that one is superior to s4. In this case I would definitely go for a s4 with Exynos 5410blue_urban_sky - Friday, April 26, 2013 - link
I'd like to see that it must be an engineering nightmare to pull that off well.Chloiber - Thursday, April 25, 2013 - link
Right, because all removable backs up until now (including all Nokia phones from the last 10 years) have been plastic.Oh wait!