Hands-on with Samsung’s New Galaxy S IV 1080P Smartphone

As technology continues to grow at such a rapid rate, the constant need to impress and innovate, especially in the smartphone world has never been higher. Apple is no longer the sole dominator in the smartphone kingdom and after a huge success with the Galaxy S III and Note 2, there was a ton of anticipation and speculation building around Samsung and the release of the Galaxy S IV.

We were lucky enough to head down to New York City to catch the Galaxy S IV announcement and go hands on with Samsung’s latest device. For those of you who had high hopes that Samsung would ditch the plastic design in favor of something sturdier ala the HTC ONE, you’ll quickly find yourselves disappointed, as the Galaxy S IV build quality is nearly identical to the Galaxy S III.

If you can get past the plastic design, the Galaxy S IV is actually both thinner and lighter than it’s predecessor and features a jump in screen real estate, going from 4.8 inches up to 5 inches. More importantly than just a bigger screen, the Galaxy S IV now boasts a full 1920 x 1080 Full HD Super AMOLED display with a massive 441 pixels per inch. Colors were crisp, really saturated and honestly, seeing the S IV’s display in person was my favorite thing about the phone thus far. We recently took a first look at Sony’s Xperia Z and while that was also 1080P, it was a little dull, with poor viewing angles and definitely upon initial impressions, the Galaxy S IV display was much more enjoyable.

While Samsung didn’t mention it, the Galaxy S IV will boast a Quad-Core 1.9GHz CPU on the US model and an 8-Core 1.6GHz Exynos CPU on the International model. I’m sure some US consumers will feel they received the short end of the stick, but the fact of the matter is that most apps don’t even take advantage of four cores, let alone eight and regardless, even at 4 cores, it is very well powered. Other specs include 2GB of RAM, up to 64GB of internal storage (expandable an additional 64GB via MicroSD), a 13 megapixel rear facing camera, 2 megapixel front facing camera, a 2600 mAh hour battery and it’ll also be running Android 4.2.2.

Now as far as specs and clock speeds are to us geeks, Samsung really focused on software to separate itself from the pack. They showed off S-Translator, which acts as a personal translator that can translate voice, all the way to emails to various languages and it works damn well. One of our favorites was Air View, which we saw on the Galaxy Note 2, but this time it’s enabled on the Galaxy S IV, sans S Pen. It works great to skim/preview email, and you can even us Air Gesture to swipe through pictures, or even scroll through web pages without laying a finger on your phone. Dual-Camera while really neat, didn’t seem too practical, allows you to simultaneously use both the front and rear camera while taking pics or recording video. So what do you think? Were Samsung’s efforts in software enough to make up for the lack of premium build quality on the Galaxy S IV? Was the 1080P display enough to justify an upgrade? Let us know in the comments below as we leave you with our hands on gallery of the Galaxy S IV.