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Hello everyone. OK I managed to get hold of another Samsung Galaxy S4, I've got two of them now.
One from the very first batch that was produced
and this one which is slightly later
probably about three weeks later in the production run.
Now one of the things that's interesting to note is that a lot of the observations I made a
couple of weeks ago
have now been found to be pretty much accurate.
While some people say that they
haven't encountered any problems, people are having quite a few issues.
Now like I say, this is a later build.
It came out with the firmware already preloaded obviously from Samsung
slightly newer version than
the one that came on my week one build as it were, day one build.
Although that firmware was still
absolute trash.
I'm not kidding you
the device was laggy, unresponsive overheating it set one of the worst
3D Mark scores I've ever seen on a Galaxy S4
and so I flashed to the latest UK leaked build
known as ME2 I think it is.
And lo and behold quite a lot of the problems disappeared
I'm afraid what Samsung have done is they've released the end Galaxy S4 with firmwares
on there which are simply not up to scratch right now
and you do need to update your device when you first get it out of the box if you
want a reasonable experience anyway.
Now, one of the things that I was really critical of with Samsung on my day one device
was the quality of qa they'd done.
One of the issues I had was this band around the outside
that effectively it's part of I suppose you could call it the screen housing.
But you could see a very distinct
moulding issue as it were
where the button wasn't quite flush, it looked like it had a small raised lip on the
edge there
interestingly
it's not as pronounced on this device but you can still see
this little issue is there.
You can still get your thumb,
fingernail just in under there but the further you come down the housing
the more likely you have to
slide off the lip.
It's very interesting. It certainly appears that when they're actually manufacturing these
this is probably the final point that's actually placed on
so it bands round that side and then it is clipped and some pressure is applied there maybe
but certainly as it stands at the moment
some of these manufacturing issues are still there.
And it maybe that this is just how this Galaxy S4 model is going to
operate unfortunately.
The heat problem I've discussed previously
it does seem to be an issue with the Qualcomm S600 snapdragon processor
especially if you're running wifi and you've got the brightness turned full up.
Now onto the issues that Samsung seem to have caused for themselves.
If you head over to sammobile.com you will find a really good write up all
about really the turmoil that occurred within Samsung's chips division
when they were trying to get the Galaxy S4 ready for launch.
And it would certainly appear that they really didn't know what
parts were going into this device right up until just maybe six or seven weeks before launch
that includes the 9505 and the 9500 model
and they were swapping out everything from
the wireless chips to the wifi to the cpus
and we can see the evidence of this actually within the source code and the firmware as
they've released.
There's a lot of junk code in there that doesn't actually relate to any of the parts
that they ended up putting in the devices.
CPU revisions and so on.
You kind of wonder have we actually lost quite a lot of our storage space because
of Samsung not being able to make up its mind?
There's also been some interesting information about why we didn't
end up with the Octacore processor
and actually guys be very thankful we didn't end up with the Octacore
processor because it now appears that it was crippled.
It doesn't actually work correctly with Arm's big little technology or little
big technology whichever way you want to put it.
And one specific area which is how it's able to govern
which cpus are going to be used or which cores are going to be used at any one time
is not really working as efficiently as it could be
that explains why our friends using the Octacores are finding the battery life and other
issues related to how long you have to keep this device running for.
In essence, Samsung's chip division were not able to get the Octacore processor
running really as successfully as they should have done
and so they switched out and used the Qualcomm instead.
What we have here in the Galaxy S4 is a great device
but only just
because when you look at what's kind of happened to Samsung when they were
building the Galaxy S4
it's a miracle this thing even made it out of the door let alone actually works when it
arrives with us.
So it does explain why we have all of these strange niggly problems.
The headphone jack issue
that you would have thought there's no way Samsung would release a smartphone with
a headphone jack
compatibility problem with a range of headphones out there.
That's the kind of thing that would only happen if you rushed to market
because you weren't spending enough time
perfecting the hardware that you've chosen to put into the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Guys, Samsung might very well sell
80 million Galaxy S4s if the rumours are believed!
But it won't be Samsung's flagship device. It won't be the one they're the
most proud of and I
think long term
consumers are going to be a bit
Hmm, my experience of Galaxy S4 wasn't great.
Maybe I'll look at a different manufacturer next time.
The rush to market, the problems the Galaxy S4 has had during its
you know creation
and its manufacture
it just leads me to think that
this particular device from Samsung may go down in history as
not their crowning achievement.
We wait and we look forward to the Galaxy Note 3 now
to see if they can perfect
either the cpus they're going for
the overall design and manufacture of the device or if they can actually get their own
silicon up and working efficiently.
But as it stands right now the Galaxy S4 is a great device
but that just falls short of absolute greatness.