Handy features
Apart from the hardware, Samsung has put a lot of effort into the software side of the phone, to help ‘make life more fulfilling’. For example, you can use the Air Gesture feature to browse web pages, look through photos, advance a music track or even answer a call, without touching the phone. All you do is wave your hand above the phone in a swiping motion. This is great for ‘hands-free or hands-full’ times when you might have dirty or wet hands, be wearing gloves or when the phone is in a hands free cradle and you are driving.
The GS4 has a Hover feature like that in the Note II, only you don’t need a stylus for it to work. Now, you just hover your finger over the screen to evoke a particular bit of information. For example, you can hover your finger above an email list to read a short blurb of the email itself. You can use Hover to magnify text, select speed dial contacts, get calendar details or with customised apps such as Filpboard, you’ll be able to see a preview of upcoming articles.
And then there’s the much-hyped Smart Scroll feature. Using the Smart Stay feature originally introduced in the GS3, the GS4 tracks your face to see if you’re interacting with it. While it can still dim the screen when you’re not looking at it, now, if you are viewing a web page, for example, you can tilt the phone towards or away from you to control text scrolling. This only works if you’re looking at the phone, however. Once you look away, it switches off, and when you look back, it returns. There’s also a Smart Pause feature that works a similar way – when you play a video or movie, the system will automatically pause playback when you look away. Once the system detects that your gaze has returned, the video will play again.
There are other clever tricks, such as the Adapt sound and Adapt display which detects if you’re listening to music, reading a book or watching a movie and adjusts screen and audio settings automatically to provide an optimum experience.
The GS4’s S-Translate feature is a handy too for travelling. It can translate between nine different languages, via text, speech to text or text to speech modes. S-Translator is embedded into Samsung’s native applications such as Email and Chat-On and is also available as a native application. While it worked well in the demos, we didn’t get a chance to see how well it worked in real life.
