Samsung Galaxy S4 Steals The Limelight Among New Androids

New phones are continually coming out. Which should you buy? The latest being the S4, which is an excellent device from a hardware standpoint. Its 5-inch screen is larger than its predecessor, yet it's a tad lighter and smaller. The display is sharp, at 441 pixels per inch. The phone is currently priced in India at Rs 41, 500.

Indians have got lucky as the better version has been launched in India. The Samsung Galaxy S4 will come with an Exynos Octa-core processor running under the hood. Samsung’s eight-core processor has earned Samsung the honour of creating the fastest phone ever with the Samsung Galaxy S4. While 4 of the processors are super-fast, power packed processors, the other four are slower but provide stability. With an eight-core processor and 2 GB RAM, the phone will definitely not face lag issues.

Samsung packed the Android device with a slew of custom features, including new camera tools and the ability to perform tasks by waving a finger over a sensor. Many of the features, however, make the phone more complicated to use. In some cases, custom features work only some of the time. In other cases, you're confronted with too many ways to do similar things. The S4 might be for you if you don't mind spending time customizing it. Otherwise, you must bypass all the gimmicks to get to what otherwise is a good phone.

Another cool specification is the camera. If Samsung’s competitor HTC has come up with Ultra-pixel camera for their flagship the HTC One, Samsung has provided the Samsung Galaxy S4 with a 13 MP camera. The front camera is a 2 MP camera. However, the camera is not a regular, basic snapper. Samsung Galaxy S4 incorporates innovations and features in every aspect of the phone so why should a snapper be any different?

The Samsung Galaxy S4 camera provides dual-shot option, i.e the option to click photos with both cameras together. This not only provides a complete perspective but captures multiple details. The main camera takes a complete picture while the front camera takes a post-card image. The second image can then be edited and added to the main image. 

Although Samsung is the market leader in smartphone market in India, competition from Apple, BlackBerry and Nokia has put pressure on it to add new software features to maintain its lead.

According to research firm IDC, the overall mobile phone market in India reached about 218 million units in 2012, growing 16 percent year-on-year.

Of this, 16.3 million units were smartphones, but the category saw a growth of about 48 percent. Samsung was the leader in the quadcore and 5-inch plus screen size models, IDC added.

The demand for smartphones is expected to be around 34-36 million units this year. Globally, Samsung had 30.3 percent share of the smartphone market (with sales of 215.8 million units) in 2012, while Apple had a 19.1 percent share with sales of 135.9 million units, according to IDC.