Samsung Galaxy S4 Or Samsung Galaxy S3 – Don’t Upgrade
The Samsung Galaxy S2 fell out of a time warp, 5 years before it should have been made. Measured feature per dollar, it’s still the best phone on the market in Australia, 2 years later.
The Samsung Galaxy S3 was a spectacular upgrade to that spectacular product when it was released. I still have mine now. When I first saw the eye sensor capability in action I was amazed. The S3 sits there quietly until you look at it and then turns itself on. That’s my ideal girlfriend.
Now they’ve released the next iteration. The Samsung Galaxy S4. Unfortunately, it is, in every practical way, the same phone as the Samsung Galaxy S3 4G. They’re from the same manufacturer, they look almost identical.
Going by Vodafone’s pricing, the S3 looks like it’s $15 a month cheaper than the latest. That’s $360 over the course of a 24 month contract. Why would anyone pay that when they’re the same phone ?
Samsung Galaxy S4 or Samsung Galaxy S3 Features and Specifications
Australian Phone Trends & The Galaxy S4
The volume of Australian phone purchases are gently trending towards the major annual release cycles from Samsung and Apple. The change is led largely by adverts. For the first time ever this year, Samsung will be spending more on marketing than R&D and they’re whipping Australians up in to a frenzy of stupid.
According to Recent Google Research 35% of people now buy the latest and greatest device each year. That’s up 37% on last year.
In 2013, those major releases will be the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the iPhone 5S / 6. This clustering of purchase has the same effect as Christmas in other businesses. For telcos, it means stock delays and other sales channel operational problems. It’s hard to overstate the resulting frustration for the customers buying and the carriers trying to connect them. Queues at retail stores. Long back orders for Online and Telesales departments.
It’s trivial to point out the importance of phones to people’s lives, how quickly technology is evolving or that Australian’s disposable incomes have risen dramatically over the last generation. Samsung spending a rumoured $10 marketing the S4 in Australia alone is likely to harness these factors to alter perceptions and make the S4 is the must buy Android device of the year.
Can we, for a moment, please, consider the facts.
You Can Never Practically Use The Improvements In the S4
Both are Quad Core phones. The S4 has 4 x 1.6GHz chips, the S3 has 4 x 1.4 GHz chips. With the exception of a few games, there are almost no apps or other software elements which have been rewritten to take advantage of the parallel processing that Quad Core Processors provide. Adding an extra 200 MegaHertz to the processors on the S4 will have zero discernible effect on the speed of the experience a user gets. Quad core processors can help battery life but both the S3 & S4 have them so both get the benefit.
The screen on the S4 is 0.2 inches bigger than the S3, a minute alteration. Someone with an S3 can hold it very slightly closer to their face to get the same effect. The S4 has 441 PPI screen resolution to the S3’s 306. But both are so close to the limit of the human eye’s capability to detect a pixel that the difference is meaningless.
Similarly, the 14 MegaPixel camera on the S4 takes pictures with far greater detail than the S3’s – but no one will benefit. It’s possible to print a high quality picture – on paper – you know, if you ever did that, with an 8 MP camera. That is, if you ever downloaded a picture from your S3 to a memory stick and took it to Big W to produce it, you could print it so it would cover the size of 2 x A4 pieces of paper next to each other, without seeing an iota of granularity. Why do we need 14 MP ?
The screen size change, the camera upgrade, the increase in processing power are all capabilities that users will never, practically, use.
Everything Else Is The Same
The body on both is plastic with minimal changes. It had to be the same. Why would Samsung change the design when you sold 50 million of the original ? What’s the point in having the latest phone if your friends can’t tell the difference ?
Both use the fastest network speeds – 4G or LTE.
Both have expandable memory so there’s no need to do more than buy the 16 GB version of either and some cheap memory when you need it, in 3 months, when it’s half the price of what it is now.
Don’t Buy The S4 For The Software
People will say that the software is the distinguishing feature. With the hardware developments between the last version and this being so incremental, Samsung have put a lot of work in to the software on the S4 to differentiate it. Some will say this is the reason to upgrade. Rubbish.
Most users never use the long tail features on a mobile phone.( AIMIA, page 28 )
Adding in features like the ability to navigate the device with a wave of your hands above it, is ridiculous. The only potential use case for this sort of feature is that the owner’s hands are sticky. I could level a fair guess at why the Samsung marketing team’s hands are sticky, but I don’t believe it will benefit the bulk of buyers.
To be fair, there are a few software additions to the S4 which are actually useful. There is some nice camera management interface and an upgrade to the already great video player to name but two. But it still doesn’t matter because Samsung will be offering a free software upgrade to S3 owners so they get all the advantages of the S4 software’s non hardware dependant features.
Samsung Galaxy S4 Comparison – Summing Up
The Samsung Galaxy S3 and the Samsung Galaxy S4 are the same phone. There is no spoon. The Emperor has on no clothes.
The Samsung Marketing team are spending $10 million to make you believe a lie. If people are prepared to spend $360 buying capabilities they’ll never use, we should sell them common sense at exactly that price.