Tech Review Blog

Multimedia

Although the Samsung Galaxy S4 multimedia features aren’t quite as advanced as those of the HTC One, which pairs Beats audio with forward-facing stereo speakers, it holds its own on this front.

It looks small, but Samsung Galaxy S4 speaker pumps out a surprisingly strong sound, with music playback enough to satisfy most casual users. During video playback, as well as benefitting from the stunning screen, the Samsung Galaxy S4 digs out nuances that some rivals would miss, while avoiding too much distortion at higher volumes.

With 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions available there is an option that will suit even the heaviest of multimedia consumers. For those wanting to keep costs as low as possible, a microSD card slot lets you expand the memory by up to 64GB, too.

These quoted capacities should be taken with a considerable pinch of salt, however. Our review model, the 16GB version, had a little over 9GB of accessible storage, almost half of what was listed.



The Samsung Galaxy S4 supports all manner of audio and video file types with the standard and well-known MP3, MPEG4, DivX and WMA file types joined by more obscure Sorenson Spark and VP8 file types.

Ensuring that this range of multimedia content is at your disposal as and when desired, the Samsung Galaxy S4 home screens can be adorned with a selection of music and video centric widgets, offering instant access you’re your digital content.

Simple and effective, these widgets are easy to position and a joy to use, improving the overall user experience and cutting down the amount of time spent jumping in and out of designated apps just to change a track.

Further bolstering the handset’s multimedia credentials, the silicone tipped in-ear headphones that come boxed with the Samsung Galaxy S4 are a perfectly acceptable pair of earbuds that offer detailed sound without ever breaking new ground.

Apps

The Galaxy S4 gives users ample opportunity to top up their handset’s app collection with not one, but two designated app stores vying for your custom and cash. But the presence of two app stores, Samsung Apps and the more familiar Google Play Store, only confuses matters. Samsung Apps has less choice that its Google Play counterpart, and things become confusing when price discrepancies between the two stores appear for the exact same apps, casting doubt into every app purchase.


The S4 gave us no problems when running apps. Unlike the Sony Xperia Z, it handled a heavy-duty Real Racing 3 session without any issues.

Far from a one-off anomaly, price variations encompass most apps with neither store proving particular cheaper than its rival in the long run. Examples of these price fluctuations include TuneIn Radio Pro, a £3 purchase through Samsung Apps that will set you back £3.31 via the Google Play Store. Not limited to any particular app category, the Sonic CD game costs just £2.35 through Google Play compared with the £3 Samsung Apps frequenters are forced to pay.

Further compounding the confusion, given its exclusivity to Samsung branded handsets, Samsung Apps is still missing a number of recently released high-profile applications, such as the new Cut the Rope: Time Travel.

When Apple introduced the famed Retina display to the third-generation Apple iPad, it set a bar so high that the rest of the industry struggled to catch up. That’s until Google and Samsung joined forces to produce the Google Nexus 10.

Incredibly, the display on the Nexus 10 has an even higher pixel density than the iPad’s. Its 10in screen is an IPS panel with a resolution of 2,560x1,600, giving a pixel density of 300ppi, some 14% higher than the iPad’s 264ppi. The result is a screen with stunningly crisp graphics and super-sharp text.

We simply can’t do the screen justice here, it’s really quite astoundingly sharp

It’s also a good-quality screen. We measured its maximum brightness as 436cd/m2 and contrast as 807:1, so brightness is similar to that of the iPad but contrast isn’t quite as high. In our subjective tests, we felt colours weren’t quite as vibrant as on Apple’s tablet, so images didn’t have quite as much punch.

Not as classy as the iPad but better than Samsung’s recent own-brand efforts

The tablet isn’t as lovely to behold as the iPad, but we still like it. Instead of metal, the Nexus 10’s chassis is built entirely from grippy rubber-coated plastic. The black chassis is curvier than the iPad’s, and the bezel around the display is broader as well. At 603g, it’s 49g lighter than the iPad, which makes it very comfortable to hold. We’ve no problems with build quality, and the fact the glass on the front is Corning’s tough, scratch-resistant Gorilla Glass is another big bonus. The Nexus 10 feels like it would survive a drop better than the iPad.

It isn’t short on features, either. Around the edges you’ll find Micro HDMI, a 3.5mm headphone output and a Micro USB port. You can only charge the Nexus from scratch with the included charger, but it can be topped up via USB if you leave the charger at home. Wireless connections, meanwhile, can be made via Bluetooth, NFC or dual-band 802.11n Wi-Fi. There’s GPS, a 5-megapixel camera with flash on the rear and a 720p webcam on the front. The main camera takes pretty impressive pictures, but composing shots using an unwieldy tablet is never easy. The only thing missing is a memory expansion slot to add to the Nexus’ 16GB (or 32GB) of storage.

With all those pixels to shunt about, you might be worried that the Nexus 10’s dual-core 1.7GHz Cortex-A15 processor wouldn’t be able to cope, but the tablet performs admirably thanks to its top-end Mali T604 graphics core and 2GB of RAM. Critically, all the games we threw at it, from Asphalt 7 to Shadowgun, barely skipped a beat. The only problem is the screen is so good that it’s easy to spot where the developers have taken shortcuts.

The Nexus 10 coped with both local and online 1080p video files, and notwithstanding the slightly below-par contrast, they looked stunning. This makes the Nexus 10 a far better device for mobile video fans than the iPad, given its huge range of available video players and easy drag-and-drop file transfer from a PC - no syncing problems or Dropbox workarounds here.

In general use, too, the tablet’s Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) operating system runs very smoothly. There’s not a hint of lag anywhere, whether scrolling from homescreen to homescreen, browsing through app launcher screens or, critically, when typing with the on-screen keyboard. The keyboard lets you type by swiping from side to side, as with the third-party Swype keyboard, but we found it more comfortable on a screen this broad to stick to traditional tapping.

As it comes with Android 4.2, the Nexus 10 also supports multiple user accounts - a first for tablet devices and something that’s unlikely to be available on iPad ever. If you live with friends or family, this means you can share the device, with each user having their own email, bookmarks, apps, home screens, settings and preferences. It’s a brilliant implementation of a feature that’s been well overdue on tablets. Buy one, keep it on your coffee table, and let all the family use it.

If there’s anywhere the Nexus 10 struggles, it’s with complex, picture-heavy web pages. This may sound strange, considering the tablet has enough grunt to play back movies and games with barely a dropped frame, but on the Flickr website and the BBC home page, for example, scrolling and panning lagged and stuttered. It’s not a horrendous problem, but it’s enough to be noticeable.

More serious, though, is the fact that this high-resolution screen saps the battery. When playing our test video on loop at mid brightness, the tablet lasted only 8h 34m, which is almost two hours less than the Nexus 7 and a long way behind the iPad’s 11 hours plus. It’s still enough to watch four films in a row, though.

The slightly below-par battery life, and the fact there’s no 3G (or 4G) version of the Nexus 10, are its only real drawbacks, and it’s hard to argue with the fact the tablet is £80 cheaper than the equivalent iPad. The Nexus 10 really is a bargain, and anyone looking for a good-value alternative to the iPad should be sorely tempted.