HTC and Samsung's Nexus experience - Less is more or less for more?

Ever wanted a Galaxy S4 or a HTC One without Touchwiz or Sense skins? Well now you can! It seems like both companies are eager to get rid of their skins on their phones and present a Nexus style phone alongside their skinned phones. The price tag for these phones are either the same as their skinned counterparts or more expensive. So why would anyone want to pay more to have less? It's a pretty simple reason as far as I can see, more timely updates.

The Nexus feel
If anyone's every used a Nexus phone they'd see how simple the interface is. Basically a no nonsense version of Android as Google meant it to be. Very clean and straightforward, with very few apps that come as standard.

For some, this might be a bit too simple, but for most, it's quite nice to have a clean canvas that you can paint on. You're not forced to use any specific software and everything on the phone except the core apps are added by the user. For those coming from Android which has been skinned, it usually takes some getting used to though it didn't take me long to fall in love with my stock Nexus 7 tablet.

Updates from Google
Arguably the biggest benefit of having a stock Android phone, you'll get updates as and when they are released by Google. This is in contrast to waiting for the manufacturer of your phone to decide whether they want your particular phone model to receive the update and then provide it for you in a few months time. Judging by how many phones are stuck in a past iteration of Android, i.e. Ice Cream Sandwich or older, it's easy to see why this is such a big bonus.

Less for more?
Losing all the features Samsung and HTC put into their phones and gaining a stock feel seems odd at first. Even when you continue to think about it, there's not much that makes it that appealing so it will be interesting to see how sales of these phones progress. To lose features such as HTC Zoe on the One or all features Samsung have on their S4 camera and to have it replaced by the stock Android camera app seems crazy. I've used the Nexus 4 camera and the app is very restrictive compared to a skinned version. You might say, just take the app from either Samsung or HTC and put it on the stock version, if only it were that easy! Generally speaking, they work on a different framework and so this would only be possible if Samsung and HTC implemented it, but that would mean it was a modified version of Android and defeats the purpose of the whole exercise.

So...is it worth it?
No, I don't see how it is. When Google refresh their Nexus range, they'll probably bring out a phone that will be around the same spec as the One or S4 for half the price so save yourself the money and wait a few months until that happens. Either that, or go down the avenue of a custom ROM and wait until the Android developers get their hands on the stock ROMs for the two phones and flash it. I can't say for certain that this will happen but I bet it will be possible on previously skinned phones. Then you can try it out and decide which version you prefer.

Mo

HTC - are you coming or going?

So much news about HTC in this week, both positive and negative, shows the company is going through a very turbulent time. It's an absolute shame in my eyes because I could see them turning their fortunes around with the HTC One and at least attempting to compete with Samsung, not that it seems any other Android manufacturer is able to at the moment.

HTC First
Reports are coming in that the HTC First is not being launched here in the UK on the back of unfavourable reviews it has received in the US. Not surprising really, since there appeared to be a lot of excitement for a Facebook phone for a continued period of time but nothing ever came to fruition until a few months ago, at a time when people are leaving Facebook, rather than joining. It's a hit for HTC since they were the manufacturers and will miss out on the revenue of a phone which was widely publicised, but it seems everything about this phone was a mistake, including its price tag. The phone costs more than the Nexus 4 sim-free and that pretty much says it all. I don't know how much Facebook had a say in the various aspects of the phone, but I wouldn't be surprised if they are mostly to blame.

Mass exec exodus?
Maybe not quite an exodus, but several high profile executives of HTC have left over the past few weeks and it's a worrying sign for the company and its staff when something like this happens. Why would they leave unless they knew something we didn't is what I imaging some workers must be thinking, and who would blame them? Especially after one of their ex-employees went on Twitter encouraging his friends at HTC to leave and they would be much happier after doing so.

HTC One sells 5 million
An unnamed executive at HTC has gone on record to say that they have sold 5 million HTC Ones, a pretty impressive feat when in direct competition with the S4. Although Samsung may have sold 10 million S4's in under a month, it is still an achievement when you think about the relatively weak brand naming the One range has in comparison to the Galaxy range. Reviews for the One have been very favourable in comparison to the S4 and having both of the phones in my household, I for one (get it?) am much happier with the One than the S4.

Turbulent times indeed for HTC, let's hope their next quarter performance gives them some hope for the future otherwise who can stand in the way of the goliath that is Samsung at the moment? From a more selfish viewpoint, I want them to be around so they update the HTC One!

Mo

Battery life - when did we settle for a day?

For the majority of us that own a smartphone, we have to charge it once a day. Why? When did we settle and think 'well we can live with this'? Gone are the days where we would plug in our phones once a week and not have to worry about them running out of juice at awkward moments. Some people might argue that the days where we only used our phones for calls and texting are over too, so it was a tradeoff in the end. I disagree.

Why?

The reason we have phones that last just one day with moderate use is because we want it all from our phones. We want them to look stylish, give us push notifications, have a glorious touchscreen and allow us to play games/update statuses and anything else you can think of. Now if we were prepared to let one of these slide, like the stylish factor, then maybe phone manufacturers could fit a larger capacity battery and our phones wouldn't have such a close relationship with the wall socket. Before the iPhone came about, we didn't care much for how phones looked, we cared a little but nowhere near as much as we do now. After their release, manufacturers had a wake up call that as good as their phones are, they need to look good too. Phones became as much a fashion accessory as they did a device for communication. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not a good thing either. It's just how our tastes as consumers have changed.

How to fix it?

Android phone manufacturers have started to implement battery saving software to help the longevity of a single charge. Samsung started a while back with its power saving function, Sony and HTC both have it implemented in their phones now too. The three flagship Android phones on the market now, the S4, the Xperia Z and the HTC One, all have some form of this on their phones as standard. It means that manufacturers know consumers want longer battery life, but they cannot put a bulky battery on as it won't sell, regardless of how long it lasts for. This is their answer for the time being.

Unfortunately for us, there's no real fix either. You could get an extra battery, but you'd have to keep it topped up all the time and phone manufacturers are increasingly moving towards non-removable batteries. You could buy a battery pack to charge your phone on the go when the battery is low but they're bulky and realistically you can't use your phone while it's charging on the go. Apps like Juice Defender have been around for a while now, but they only increase your battery life at the cost of less connectivity. Most of these apps are very limited in how much battery they save, since the biggest drain of our battery is the screen, which is something you can't really disable. Either way you look at it, we're stuck.

Our only hope?

While advances in processing power and storage are extremely quick and exponential, advances in batteries in general are much much slower. It has been the case for years now. Moore's law observes that the number of transistors on integrated systems doubles abut every two years, which means that processing power doubles too. This has been the case for some time now and looking at the mobile phone market, it seems to follow this phenomenon too. While the advances of memory hasn't been as quick as this, it has still been much faster than battery capacity improvements. In a way this is also stifling advances in the mobile phone market since manufacturers can't put their fastest chips in their phones as batteries can't sustain them for long enough. This forces them to spend more money trying to make them energy efficient, essentially making the whole research and development process longer. We'll have to sit tight and hope that there is a breakthrough in this sector, otherwise we will be forever doomed to need to charge out phones once a day...

Mo

HTC One - Best phone out there?

So contrary to what I said earlier, I found a deal on the HTC One that I just couldn't pass up. I am now a fan of HTC, bar their twitter feed, and an owner of the One. It was a mixture of a cheap contract and not being able to put up with my temporary phone that made my decision a pretty easy one. If I'm honest, it was a good decision. After using the phone for five days with it being rooted, I can't see myself looking over at anyone with an S4 with jealousy.

Now that I have a HTC One, I might as well review it. There are a lot of reviews for the One, but they are either too technical, focussing on just one aspect of the phone (such as the screen) or not very thorough. I'll aim to keep it simple and go through as much of the phone's features and some of the negative points, of which there aren't many.

Display
The phone has a full HD screen, very clear and sharp and for a 4.7 inch screen, it has a very high resolution. In direct sunlight, it is still relatively easy to see the screen but you may struggle a little bit even on full brightness. We don't get the sun very often in the UK so it's not a big problem but generally speaking, most phones don't perform as well as this in the sun so it's probably as good as it is going to get.

Phone design
This is one area where I cannot stress just how beautiful the phone is. In my opinion, it's much better looking than the iPhone 5. You only have to hold it in your hand to feel the build quality to fall in love with the phone. I was a big supporter of plastic phones but no more, design such as this will definitely catch people's eyes. Front speakers are also something which it is a fantastic addition to this phone. You'll find watching videos, playing games, and listening to music a totally different experience with these speakers. They also deliver very crisp and clear sound, with HTC's Boomsound technology. Many videos dotted around to show comparisons with the S3 and other phones and it's pretty incredible for playing and for recording music.

Functionality
First off, let's discuss Blinkfeed since there's no way of getting rid of it! It's not as bad as I first thought but not that useful for me either. Blinkfeed basically tries to mesh your social networks and news onto one RSS like feed so you can get everything you want from one place.

As you can see, it brings news from various media sources and merges them all together, you can scroll down for news and social updates in chronological order. It also brings up other stuff such as calendar reminders and TV shows (which you can personalise) but I do wish you could switch it off, as some people just won't find enough use for it and the amount of battery it uses is no doubt pretty high.

Next is Sense 5 which is definitely the best skin out of any Android manufacturer I've seen so far. I go as far as saying that it's better than vanilla Android and that is saying a lot. There are a lot of nice touches that Sense has that makes me need less widgets on my homescreens, one of which is the weather which is displayed at the top of your app drawer by default.

I admit that I didn't use Sense at first. I rooted the device, restored Nova Launcher and thought I was happy but then my friends wanted to see what the HTC skin looked like and afters showing enough of them, I found myself preferring it too and removed Nova and rebuilt my app and widget layouts on Sense.

HTC haven't opted for on-screen keyboards but instead left two touch sensitive buttons, the back button and the home button. The home button has the functionality of accessing Google Now and multi-tasking. Long press to get to Google Now and double press to access multi-tasking. Took me a while to figure out!

This is the multi-tasking window you see when you double tap the home button, you can swipe up apps to remove them from the list. As you can see there are just nine spaces, I haven't figured out if more than nine apps are open then would the tenth one be closed or not...?

The phone has a notification light behind one of the grills of the top speaker, but I found out the hard way that it only has one colour for notifications. So no more having personalised colours for different people, the green light just flashes when you have an email, text etc. and it's actually quite small! Bit of a shame they didn't go for a normal RGB notification light like the S3. If I had my way I would have a different coloured notification light under each grill and make them shine light a disco ball! How cool would that be?

The phone has a kid mode which restricts various different functions when enabled so that you can easily let children play on the phone. Very easy to enable and disable, I think it's a nifty feature worth mentioning for people with children.

The one thing I will mention, which isn't phone related but more web related is searching for help online will mean you'll have to sift through all other HTC phones before finding the right article, like the HTC One X or S! It can be very frustrating if I'm honest. I'm sure as time goes on, HTC One results will come up further on search engines so this might become less of a problem.

Camera
This is where HTC aren't doing themselves justice, after buying the phone I was a little disappointed that the One would not have the features the S4 has like removing passer-bys from a photo. In fact it does, using a feature called HTC Zoe, you can take a three second 'photo' and then edit the photo to remove someone using object removal. It has a whole host of other features on the camera which I have yet to fully explore but I'll definitely be using the camera on my holidays and hopefully being very happy with the results. There are a lot of comparison of photos taken on the One compared to the S4 and most are in favour of the One even if it does have 9MP less on it's camera.

Speed
2GB RAM and a very snappy processor makes running many apps at the same time a piece of cake. For so long I've had to put up with simple apps on my S3 taking more than five seconds to load up, quite embarrassing when you want to take someone's number and the contacts app is loading, many awkward situations of me staring at my phone...never again! I guess it comes with the territory of these new generation phones but it is such a relief, especially when I want to run more than three tasks at the same time. There's not much else to say here and no point doing a benchmark test, I prefer to play with a phone and see how smooth it is rather than some number on Quadrant which I can only use to show off with.

Accessories
Pretty standard here: headphones, USB cable, wall charger. The headphones are pretty good, capable of producing a lot of bass, similar to Beats headphones but without the logo. Not a surprise since the phone has Beats audio built in and HTC own Beats.

Storage and battery
The phone comes with 25GB Dropbox storage for two years and comes in 32GB and 64GB models. Moving from a 16GB phone with a 64GB memory card has been hard but I've managed it. Time to utilise the cloud! The battery is a big issue, or so I thought. The only time I remove the battery is when the phone locks up, but you can easily hold the power button to reboot so a bit of a non-issue. Apart from that, the bigger problem of replacing the battery is still there.

Overall
In my opinion, this phone is better than the S4. It's a breath of fresh air in a world of incremental updates. I hope HTC claim some marketshare for their own sake (struggling profits at the moment) as this phone is underrated and its features hidden until you try the phone for yourself. I've never been this happy with a phone and left it relatively unadulterated, which I guess doesn't mean much to people who don't know me but it is supposed to say a lot! Either way, I think this phone should be given serious consideration if you're looking to upgrade soon.

Mo

Low-end Android smartphones?

So in an effort to be savvy and save as much money as possible, I decided to sell my Galaxy S3 a couple of weeks before the S4 is released. In the meantime I have to put up with a low end Android phone, the Orange San Francisco 2 (OSF2) aka ZTE Crescent. I'd like to say right now, I have a lot more respect for people who can get by on using these types of phones because they are not for me, at the same time I wouldn't wish this phone on my enemies (slight exaggeration...). I've also come to the realisation that I used my S3 across many aspects of my life. Quite scary that someone can have so much dependence on a single device.

What's so bad?
Let's start with the speed. the OSF2 has a measly single core 800 MHz processor, compare to the S3 which was a quad core 1.4 GHz processor. For normal day-to-day processes, the phone struggle. SwiftKey has gone out of the window and Kii keyboard is being used as a replacement. SwiftKey just locks up the phone and predictions would often be behind my typing and the frustration was too much. Then there's the matter of games, the phone is rooted and it's on Android 4.2.2 and I still haven't been able to come across a single game that I've had on the S3 that works on this. That might be partly to do with the fact that I can't access the Play Store for some reason, but even using my Titanium Backup games, none are working! Boring lectures are now going to be just that for me...boring and without distractions.

The amount of screen time I've racked up on this phone is pretty much the same as my S3, which might be down to the fact that any task on the phone takes about 5 times as long to complete than on my S3, even a simply text or call. Another very important point is the lack of internal storage, it's nearly non-existent. After you account for the ROM partition and cache you are left with 160mb to use for apps. You do have a microSD slot but unless you move apps to the SD card (only some will let you do this), you'll be able to install a couple of apps and you're full up!

What's so good?
It's a cheap phone. That's really it.

Uses for a smartphone?
Compared to the average smartphone user, I think I use my phone a lot more and so my predicament is made even worse. On an average day these are some of the different uses I found for my smartphone:

• Alarm clock
• Phone calls
• Instant messaging
• Games
• Online Banking
• Exercise (Endomondo and Jefit)
• Voice recording
• Pictures
• Videos
• Music
• Organiser
• Calendar
• Getting directions
• Browsing the web
• Social networkings (Twitter and Facebook)
• Viewing documents/presentations
• Emails
• And some more which I can't remember off the top of my head

Basically, my phone is a pretty big part of my life, which I'm not saying is something to be proud of, but it does make it much harder. I envisage walking to lectures without being able to listen to music and have to admire and take in the sights and smells that I've experienced near enough everyday for the past 4 years as opposed to having my head firmly in my phone and music blaring in my ears. The phone can't play a song without interruptions when the screen is off let alone when I need to use it for something else.

Improvising is hard, there isn't a good substitute or way round for some of the things listed above but my Nexus 7 has stepped up to help. It's also made me realise just how useful cloud storage is for some apps. Let's take Jefit as an example, for those of you who don't know what it does, the app tracks your workouts and keeps a log of how much you lift so you can monitor your progress. It syncs your workouts at the end of each session and so you can get the app on a different device, log in and it will download all your logs and routines ready to go. This is one thing ticked off that list, plenty more obstacles to come across yet!

11 days until the Galaxy S4 is released, I imagine I'll have to take it one day at a time. Yes, I know some people might think I might be exaggerating but believe me, I wish I was.

Mo

Jellybean up, Gingerbread down - full steam ahead

The Jellybean iteration of Android experienced a bit of a jump this month, claiming 25% of the whole Android platform, up from the 16.5% it had last month. Part of this is down to the way Google now collect this data, as they noted that:

'Beginning in April, 2013, these charts are now built using data collected from each device when the user visits the Google Play Store. Previously, the data was collected when the device simply checked-in to Google servers. We believe the new data more accurately reflects those users who are most engaged in the Android and Google Play ecosystem.'

Now I can't really tell how sincere this is, as it could just be an attempt to make it look like Android is moving forward rather than staying about the same in terms of software versions, but then again Google doesn't gain much from doing so as this argument usually rages amongst fanboys and the 'old fragmentation is rife on Android' war. So I guess you'll have to judge for yourselves, but it's worth noting that in essence Google is trying to cut out those who don't regularly access the Play Store, which I think is a bit unfair as they still could be using their phones.

Other flavours and their performance
Since the way the data is collected has changed, you should be a bit cautious comparing figures month-on-month this time around but I've done it anyway for comparison  It seems Gingerbread is starting to fade (finally), claiming 39.8% of the overall share, down from 44.2% last month. Still a majority but falling very quickly. Ice Cream Sandwich is gaining slightly with 29.3% of the shares, up from with 28.6% last month and as mentioned above, Jellybean is up from 16.5% to 25%.

This chart taken directly from the Google blog represents the numbers as a pie chart.

What does this mean?
Well, not much as there is still a division between three different versions of Android and with Key Lime Pie coming up very quickly (touted for a summer release) it will likely cause more fragmentation. What's clear is that Gingerbread is stubborn as it's likely that older devices which are no longer officially supported are stuck on the OS but Jellybean is powering ahead and should overtake as the main OS in the near future, with the sales of the Galaxy S4 no doubt accelerating that.

Is it a problem?
I don't think it's a particularly big problem, most apps on the Play Store are compatible with phones that have Froyo and above on them, which translates into 98.2% of all Android phones, with only a slew of new apps now requiring Ice Cream Sandwich and above to operate. As long as developers create apps that are compatible with legacy phones then it's not a problem and since there is no sign of it stopping then I'm not worried about older devices becoming a relic that have no compatible apps available for them. It also wouldn't make sense for developers to create apps specifically for the later versions of Android as the older one still have a commanding slice of the shares.

Mo

Best deals for the Galaxy S4...

...or lack of!
I mentioned in my previous blogposts my next phone purchase was going to be the Galaxy S4. There's still about a month left before it's released but my sister had recently managed to get the Sony Xperia Z for £26 a month so I was optimistic for myself. How wrong I was, having scoured all the comparison sites and different outlets, the cheapest deal I found was for £32.04 per month for 24 months after cashback, giving a grand total of £768.96. This deal gives a mediocre package of 600 minutes, unlimited texts and 1GB of data, pretty decent for a normal smartphone but not so much for a top end phone nowadays. I put together a comparison table for various deals but unfortunately for me, I'll have to keep looking...

Network	Mins	Texts	Data (mb)	Upfront cost	Monthly cost	Duration	Total cost	Link
Vodafone	Unlimited	Unlimited	4GB	£29.00	£57	12	£713	Click
Orange	600	Unlimited	1GB	£0	£32.04	24	£768.96	Click
Three	300	5000	Unlimited	£0	£33.31	24	£799.44	Click
O2	Unlimited	Unlimited	1GB	£0	£34.29	24	£822.96	Click
T-mobile	2000	Unlimited	Unlimited	£99.00	£36	24	£963.99	Click
Vodafone	Unlimited	Unlimited	2GB	£0	£42	24	£1,008	Click
EE	Unlimited	Unlimited	3GB	£29.99	£41	24	£1,013.99	Click

Buy now? Buy later?
Let's wait and see, these are only a small number of deals but I wanted to find some from across the board for comparison. Only EE offers 4G, the rest will all be on the 3G network but I think EE have got a greedy pricing structure and would advise anyone to wait until other networks get their 4G up and running to get it cheaper. You should also note that T-mobile will slow your data connection down after you exceed their fair usage policy, whereas 3 will not.

What's a good deal?
I've found the Xperia Z and the HTC One for £26 a month, so I know the S4 should fall to around that price too, until then I'll hold out. Bear in mind there's still a month left before the S4 is released so you won't be missing out if you want the phone on launch day and because of that I think you should hold out for a better deal too.

Mo

LG and HTC's attempt to steal limelight

A lot of attention was focussed on Samsung's midweek launch event of their new flagship phone, the Galaxy S4 but while this was going on, HTC and LG were not so quietly trying to steal some of the limelight with what I can only describe as borderline distasteful advertising, well in HTC's case anyway. I have to hand it to LG in that their advertising was at least clever and funny, but if anyone had a look at HTC's twitter feed at the time then you might have seen some of their tweets. I'm a fan of Samsung, I'll admit, but not to the point where I will foam at the mount to defend them and the constant tweets that came from HTC made it quite hard for me to even contemplate taking their phones seriously or even their company. I'm all for advertising but not in that way.

LG be trolling...

Here's LG's advertising in Times Square:

Courtesy of Gizmodo

You have to give them credit for come up with this, plastered right above Samsung's ad, you can see LG advertising their phones, the Optimus G.

HTC be boring...

And here's HTC's tweets:

 

Quite a few retweets but I don't understand this kind of tactic, there were a lot of people for and against this one Twitter. I guess all publicity is good publicity and in HTC's case, a lot of people are talking about this stunt they pulled so maybe they got what they wanted but I for one don't approve of this style of shameless self-advertising and behaviour. At least try to be original or funny so people don't feel like the only reason you set out to make fun of a rival is because you can't compete with them.

At times I felt a little bit sorry for HTC and it was a bit cringeworthy. From their performance it's easy to see they, as well as most other Android phone makers, are struggling but this really isn't the answer. Try to stay professional next time eh? Failing that, try to be funny than pathetic. Thanks.

Mo

Clash of the Titans - S4 vs HTC One

We finally got what we all wanted, well most of us did. The S4 has been announced and we did actually see quite a few features which weren't leaked before the event. I watched the launch event and like a lot of launch events it was quite flashy and pretty fast paced. I wasn't a fan of everything they did and at times it was a bit dull and in between the gimmicky features, I saw quite a lot of things that Samsung are bringing out that I think are very useful additions to a phone.

Let's compare phone specs, as if they haven't been done already to death:















Design
The design of the two phones are very different with Samsung deciding to stick to its S3 design and HTC brining out a very sexy looking phone made of aluminium. HTC have always made good looking phones with amazing form factor and this is no exception, although the plastic of the Samsung might be more durable, I have to give this to the One as it does look fantastic.


Screen
The S4 has a Super AMOLED 5 inch touchscreen while the One has a Super LCD3 4.7 inch touch screen. Both have the same resolution, 1080 x 1920 pixels, often referred to as 'Full HD'. Since the S4 has a slightly bigger screen, the ppi (pixels per inch) pixel density is slightly lower as it covers a larger area so we get 441 ppi for the S4 and 469 ppi for the One. The winner really depends on how you look at it, but given the S4 has Cornering Gorilla Glass 3 instead of 2 to protect the screen, I am tempted to just give it to the S4 but let's call it a draw.

Storage
Quite an easy one here, the S4 comes in three different storage capacities, 16/32/64gb while the One has two, 32/64gb but the winner is the S4 by a mile as it has the ability to increase storage using a microSD card up to 64gb. I can't see it any other way, microSD slot is always a winner in my eyes.

Connectivity
Boring stuff here, but basically the two phones have more or the less the same type of connectivity here. They are both LTE capable, so 4G in areas which it is available, they both have v4.0 Bluetooth, NFC, infrared ports and microUSB v2.0. The only slight difference is that the S4 has USB on-the-go which means you can plug in extra storage if you ever need it, something which will probably be available for the One if you decide to go down the custom firmware route. We'll call it another draw.

Camera
The S4 has a 13 megapixel camera while the One has a 4 megapixel camera which they have marketed as the 4 Ultra Pixels camera. At first glance you might think that S4 wins but early camera comparisons have shown that the One does indeed appear to perform better. I think it's always important to bear in mind higher megapixels isn't always better and the One indeed seems to prove this. Have to give it the HTC One for the camera.

Processor and graphics
On paper there doesn't seem to be a competition here. The S4 has the Exynos 5 Octa 5410 which is an eight-core processor while the One has a Qualcomm APQ8064T Snapdragon 600 processor which is quad-core. So the S4 has four more cores than the One, but again until these are properly benchmarked then it's not easy to compare. In terms of the GPU (graphics processing unit), it's another difficult one with the S4 sporting a PowerVR SGX 544MP3 and the One with the Adreno 320. A lot of fancy words and numbers there but S4's GPU has three cores clocked at 533 MHz which is roughly between the performance of the iPhone 5 and the iPad 4. The Adreno 320 is a little bit older and has already been featured in the Nexus 4. Overall I think we'll have to give this to the S4 in theory and wait to see what happens in reality.

Sensors and features
The S4 will come fitted with the usual accelerometer, gyro, proximity and compass, all of which the One has too but on top of this, the S4 will also include a barometer, temperature and humidity sensors. These are going to be used for various features that come with the S4. Talking about features, Samsung have introduced a lot of new things that the S4 will bring. Overall this round goes to the S4 as Samsung appear to have added in many little things, some gimmicky, that I can see being quite useful such as touch-less gestures, dual camera, drama shot, S-translate and so on.

Battery life
I don't know why HTC continue down this road but they've fitted the One with a non-removable 2300 mAh battery while the S4 has a 2600 mAh battery that is removable. It's a no brainer for me, the S4 wins in this category as I have the choice of buying an extra battery if I wanted to and overall it does have a higher capacity battery fitted.

Final remarks
Samsung - 6
HTC - 4

Obviously this is my view but I find the S4 more appealing that the One, maybe because of a slight brand loyalty to Samsung nowadays or it might just be that it is the better phone, either way I firmly believe that Samsung will sell many more units than HTC and this is most down to their incredible marketing budget! Having said that, my next phone is likely to be the S4.

Mo

Come and meet the next Galaxy!

Wouldn't you know it, I decide to set up a blog and there's very little going on in the Android world at the moment. Well I'm sure there's some stuff going on but nothing that interests me. I use Appy Geek on my Galaxy S3 to get all the latest tech news (well, Android news) and every day I come across articles that I have a view on...except for today.

The Galaxy S4...

I guess I'll talk about the Galaxy S4 since I've been salivating over it for so long and already thinking about selling my S3 in anticipation. I think my friends might appreciate this too as long as I talk to someone else about it and not them. It's not even like my S3 has done me any wrong, I think I'm just a fashionista for phones. I'm sure a lot of people know the rumours about the S4; a 5 inch screen 1080p screen, 2 gigabytes of RAM (random-access memory) and a 13 megapixel camera. The rest of the details are a bit shady and contested with some sources saying the CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) of the S4 will be made by Qualcomm, while others are touting the Exynos processor. Either way you can expect it to pack a punch, but it seems the octo-core Exynos processor that Samsung announced has been shelved for now as they had problems trying to manage the power hungry chip.

...and the Galaxy range

The S4 will no doubt sell, the Galaxy range is becoming somewhat similar to the iPhone name in that it's recognisable and increasing in popularity. I've never seen so many people with Galaxy phones when I walk around town. I do think that Samsung might not be bringing much more to the table than its counterparts this time round. Sony and HTC have both announced their phones and the specs are very similar to the rumoured specs of the S4. The only difference is that Samsung have established their range of phones much better than the other two and no doubt that will clinch it for them when it comes to sales, but if they think they can rely purely on the Galaxy name then they should think again. Take a look at Apple and their iPhone and how the name is slowly (in my opinion) becoming less cool and alternatives are being taken much more seriously. If it can happen to Apple, it most definitely can happen to Samsung.

The Competition

Having had a play on the Sony Xperia Z, I was very tempted to pre-order it. The screen was incredible and Sony's own apps and skins were enough to make me think twice about sticking with Samsung. I haven't had a play around on the HTC One, but I was never really a fan of HTC's Sense skin but I imagine it will be a very impressive device with beautiful build quality. All manufacturers of Android phones like to customise their devices (which always leads to delayed roll-out of the latest version of Android), but some of the features that Samsung has are just too tantalising for me to want to switch to a different manufacturer. For example take Smart Stay, which sounds like a massive gimmick, is actually really useful for me when I'm reading something and it's not the only Samsung feature I use. Multi-window is another that I've found very useful in some circumstances when you just don't want to keep switching between applications and it's the perfect solution!

To wrap up...

March 14th can't come quickly enough, I would use the 'I'm throwing money at my screen but nothing is happening' meme but I think it's getting a bit old. Instead I'll just wait patiently for a couple of weeks for the Samsung event and try to hatch a plan on how to acquire the S4 as cheaply as possible (as I've done every year around this time). For now I'll just slowly get more annoyed at the number of people who own an S3, they're making me feel less geeky about owning a smartphone which isn't an iPhone!

Mo