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Samsung Galaxy Alpha Review
It’s Android for main course, aluminium on the side in the Galaxy Alpha
When everyone complains about a phone it sometimes seems like
no-one’s listening. But Samsung has clearly taken on-board the
thousands of voices saying the Samsung Galaxy S5 feels, y’know, a bit cheap.
And it’s come up with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha by way of a retort. It’s roughly the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini – just to make sure it’s not trying to upstage the S5 – but has a metal band that runs around its outside.
Could the Alpha be just the start for a whole new range of metal-tinged Samsung phones? Probably, yes. Plus it’s a bit snazzier and a lot more powerful than the Galaxy S5 Mini if you are after a smaller phone.
READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 reviewed in detail
Meet Al
And it’s come up with the Samsung Galaxy Alpha by way of a retort. It’s roughly the same size as the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini – just to make sure it’s not trying to upstage the S5 – but has a metal band that runs around its outside.
Could the Alpha be just the start for a whole new range of metal-tinged Samsung phones? Probably, yes. Plus it’s a bit snazzier and a lot more powerful than the Galaxy S5 Mini if you are after a smaller phone.
READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 reviewed in detail
Meet Al
It’s aluminium, with the same sort of anodised finish you see on the back of the iPhone 6. So rather nice. It gives the Galaxy Alpha the cool and hard feel that is largely behind why metal phones feel more expensive than plastic ones. We’re simple creatures.
As far as design experiments go, it’s a pretty successful one. The edges are quite severe and sharp (but bevelled), rather like the iPhone 5S, but as the 4.7in Galaxy Alpha isn’t too large, handling it is dead easy.
Get over the nice feel of that band of metal and things come back down to earth. The back plate is still a flimsy piece of plastic as is the inner frame. The band of metal is just that – a thin border that sits around the phone.
It’s not the most coherent phone design we’ve ever seen either. A bit like the Nokia Lumia 930, the mix of metal and plastic means it doesn’t have the design purity of the most jaw-dropping phones. The Alpha is Samsung doing pretty, not gallery-worthy.
You also lose out on water resistance while gaining the extra bit of metal. Where the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini has treated ports and a rubber seal on the inside of its back cover so you can dunk it in water, the Alpha is not designed to withstand apple-bobbing. It’s a bummer, and shows that Samsung hasn’t really put its all into the phone. It’s just er, testing the waters.
That said, waterproofing is the only hardware extra we really missed. You still get a fingerprint scanner under the Home button, and a heart rate sensor on the back. We’d probably trade away both to have a phone you can use in the bath, though.
READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini tested
OLED Balloon
What’s not as great is the resolution. The Galaxy Alpha has a 720p screen when most phones at the price have 1080p ones. Shop around online and you can even get an LG G3 for not much more – and that phone has an even higher-res 2K screen.
In the Alpha, the limits of a 720p screen are quite obvious if you go looking for them, more so than an LCD screen. Why? It’s all down to the kind of display the phone uses. It’s a Super AMOLED display, one that uses a PenTile subpixel arrangement. Without getting too techy, this uses a pixel array that makes areas of block white look a little fuzzy, and text a bit less sharp. As a result the Galaxy Alpha looks a fair bit less sharp than even the £100 4.5in Moto G.
Top brightness isn’t quite at the same level as the Galaxy S5. While you can see the Alpha display in bright sunlight, it’s not as clear as the S5.
It still looks very good, though, and the Alpha offers you loads of control over how vivid the colours are. Fresh out of the box they’re a bit too lively – many people love them like this – but switch the screen to ‘basic’ and you get a similar sort of colour accuracy the Galaxy S5 is capable of. Like your colours truly overblown? That’s an option too. Like other OLED screens, the Samsung Galaxy Alpha also gets you incredibly deep blacks, perfect blacks in fact, and contrast is top-notch. Just a shame about that resolution, then.
Samsung Galaxy Alpha tech specs
In the last year, Samsung has done a lot to try and make its Android UI a bit more streamlined, a bit less like juggling a bag of features that keeps on spilling over. And it’s mostly successful. The basics are clean and simple, and it doesn’t waggle all of its extra bits in your face.
However, there’s plenty under the surface, and that does mean the Settings menu is absolutely gargantuan. It looks nothing like the regular Android menu and newbies may get phased.
Samsung packs a bunch of extra apps into the Alpha too. Some of these have been around for years, like the S Planner calendar, but others like S Health are needed to make use of the phone’s actual hardware. S Health is where you monitor your heart rate using the sensor on the back, and it’s also the app that tracks your steps each day – if you want the Alpha to act as a fitness tracker. Samsung has a habit of making things less simple than they could be, and there are plenty of ways to clean the phone up if you don’t get on with these apps. Some can be uninstalled, but you can also hide those you can’t.
You get 32GB storage as standard, which is greater than most of the Galaxy S5s in the UK, so app storage space isn’t much of an issue.
Unlike some other Samsung devices we’ve tested in the last year or so, the Galaxy Alpha doesn’t suffer from any major performance stuttering. This seems more likely to be down to Samsung tightening-up its software rather than improvements in hardware, but the engine running here is very, very fast too.
Wiggle my joystick, luv
It uses a Samsung Exynos 5430 Octa-core processor, which has four Cortex-A15 cores and four Cortex-A7 ones. In the Geekbench 3 benchmark it scores an extremely impressive 3086 points – even more than the 2800-odd points you might get from a Galaxy S5. For a phone with ‘only’ a 720p screen, this is masses of power.
Gaming performance is excellent, and you get the extra little graphical flashy bits in top-end games like Dead Trigger 2 that were missing when we used the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini. It’s a surprise powerhouse, and has 2GB RAM too.
Those gaming skills do make us wish the internal speaker was a little better, though. Sound quality and top volume are pretty impressive for a phone this thin – although the sound is a little harsh at top volume – but the output is very much mono, and it’s too easy to block the speaker when you’re doing a bit of landscape gaming.
There is one benefit to a bottom-firing speaker, though. It means the back of the Alpha doesn’t vibrate like a nightclub subwoofer when the volume’s turned up as it does in the Galaxy S5 and the S5 Mini.
We did also notice that the Galaxy Alpha seems to suffer from the old problem of some metal-coated phones – signal issues. It’s decent enough in normal use, but if you cover too much of the phone’s sides your signal level will drop like a stone. It never totally killed the signal, but is a sign that the plastic inlays in the metal frame haven’t been implemented quite well enough.
See the little white bits in the metal surround? These are usually used to improve signal for things like Wi-FI and mobile signal when the sides of a phone are largely metal. Aside from this, though, actual call quality is perfectly fine. You just need to be a bit careful about how you handle the Galaxy Alpha at times.
Speedy Snapper
Focusing and shooting speed are excellent. In daylight you can shoot 2-3 photos a second without even using one of the burst shot modes. Samsung really is a master in this field, and it makes taking photos with your phone so much fun – not to mention making action shots easier to catch.
Camera resolution is a bit worse than the S5 – the Alpha has a 12-megapixel sensor instead of a 16-megapixel one. However, you can still get loads of detail out of the Alpha and we’re pretty impressed by its shooting consistency. It’s simply dead easy to get good shots out of this little camera.
HDRs are fast to take and super-effective, and as long as lighting is decent, colour accuracy is good. Non-flash night or indoors shots do start looking a little undersaturated, but they do in most phones. It’s good enough to replace a basic compact camera, in other words. Like the S5, shooting gets a fair bit slower in low lighting thanks to the way the low-light Picture Stabilisation mode works, but even that’s not too bad.
The Alpha is also equipped with a single-LED flash and a front camera for those selfie moments. And the range of extra modes is much the same as the S5. So you get background-blurring Selective Focus and loads of smart burst modes. You can even shoot video in Ultra HD resolution.
Short on Stamina
Given quite how small the battery is, the Galaxy Alpha’s stamina is respectable, but it’s not as good as Samsung’s best. We got 10 hours of 720p MP4 video from a charge where the S5 Mini lasted for 11 hours 54 minutes. The phone’s processor is efficient, but it’s not a miracle worker.
In general use, we found that the Galaxy Alpha comfortably lasts the day with charge to spare, but you really do have to cut your use significantly to get anywhere near two days, or even a full day and a half. We have a feeling Samsung may have sacrificed the battery size a bit to get the design of the phone exactly as it wanted. But just think, you’ll probably care more about stamina three months in.
Samsung Galaxy Alpha Verdic
Like the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, the Alpha also gets you absolutely loads of power for a smaller phone, and a very accomplished camera.
A few elements could really be improved, though. Battery life is fine but better in several of Samsung’s other phones, the Alpha is not waterproof and it needs to keep an eye on aerial performance if it wants to avoid an “Antennagate" style scandal in the Galaxy S6.
Ultimately, the Samsung Galaxy Alpha is a neat experiment in Samsung’s phone designs that tells us a lot about the way its mobiles are probably headed. Less plastic that’s meant to look like metal and more of the real stuff is a good thing.
Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini review
The Galaxy brand ispretty darn powerful these days. Even people who don’t know what Android is know ‘Galaxy’, and the Samsung Galaxy S5 is one of the most desirable phones in the world, too, even though it's been out for a while and has a weird dotty back.
Every year the Android king is joined by a little sprog, a mini version out to offer a Happy Meal alternative to the Big Mac. The Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini is this year’s entry.
It may be smaller, but at £350 SIM-free, it’s not actually that much cheaper. Not now that the Galaxy S5 price has been eroded after six months of being petted, patted and prodded on phone shop shelves.
Is the Galaxy S5 Mini great value? Perhaps not, but unless you’re a hardcore phone fan you do get most of the Galaxy S5 experience in a more pocket-friendly package.
READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 review
Check out those dimples
Every year the Android king is joined by a little sprog, a mini version out to offer a Happy Meal alternative to the Big Mac. The Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini is this year’s entry.
It may be smaller, but at £350 SIM-free, it’s not actually that much cheaper. Not now that the Galaxy S5 price has been eroded after six months of being petted, patted and prodded on phone shop shelves.
Is the Galaxy S5 Mini great value? Perhaps not, but unless you’re a hardcore phone fan you do get most of the Galaxy S5 experience in a more pocket-friendly package.
READ MORE: Samsung Galaxy S5 review
Check out those dimples
From a quick glance the Galaxy S5 Mini looks like a Galaxy S5 blasted with a shrink ray. All of those little S5 design extras are here.
And like the Galaxy S5, it doesn’t feel quite as expensive or as top-grade as some of its rivals. The most obvious phone to bring up here is the HTC One Mini 2. It’s made of metal, the S5 Mini is plastic, aside from the Gorilla Glass 3 front, of course.
It really is business as usual. Aside from a few important changes, that is.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini is obviously a bit smaller than its big brother. Shrinking from a 5.1-inch screen to a 4.5-inch one, those who like the S5 aside from its big body may instantly fall in love with this phone.
It is a big thicker, though, by a full millimetre, as it has to pack the same array of techy bits and bobs into a smaller plastic shell.
A millimetre? Hardly the sort of change that’s going to make the sky crack open and fire-up the apocalypse, is it? The difference is quite obvious once you get your hands on the S5 Mini, but it’s not what you’d call a tubby runt.
There’s also a great positive change in the Galaxy S5 Mini. It’s to do with water resistance: like the Galaxy S5, this is a phone with IP67 certification.
You can drop it in the toilet without it drowning, but it doesn’t have a cover for the microUSB port on the bottom. It doesn’t need one. As such, this is one of the only zero-baggage water resistant phones to date.
Without any bits to reseal after you charge the battery or plug in headphones, this is the sort of water resistant phone we’ve been waiting for. That’s waterproofing you can instantly forget is there. Aside from having an extra specially-treated port, the waterproofing works much as it does in the Galaxy S5.
The inside part of the battery cover has a rubber seal that snakes around the Galaxy S5’s battery and more vulnerable inner bits, keeping them dry. What waterproofing can’t do is make the Galaxy S5 Mini usable in torrential rain, as water still affects the capacitive touchscreen. But Samsung still gets a bucketful of brownie points for making water resistance so pain-free.
READ MORE: Iphone 6 preview
That the S5 Mini doesn’t have it is no great loss for most people, who presumably now live in a largely streaming world. Still into old-fashioned local storage? There’s a microSD card slot under the hood for you to add to the 16GB of on-board storage.
The Galaxy S5 Mini also packs in the two most obvious conspicuous ’bonus features’ of the Galaxy S5: the heart rate sensor and the fingerprint scanner.
We’ve both heard mixed reports and had mixed experiences with the fingerprint scanner. It can be used to unlock the phone as a security measure, and to confirm Paypal transactions.
The issue is that it’s not all that easy to use - much less so than the iPhone 5S’s TouchID sensor. You need to pass a finger over it rather than just hold it there, and unless you are really quite accurate it won’t work. It can feel like trying to pick a lock at times.
After trying it for a couple of days, I ended up switching it off – just as I did with the Galaxy S5. We know people who get on with the Samsung fingerprint scanner just fine, but the issue is that for it to really earn its crust it needs to be more convenient than a quick lock screen pattern swipe. We’re not convinced it is.
What about the heart rate sensor? It’s not hard to use, but it’s also not really much better than using a flash/camera combo. Apps can use these two things to monitor your heart rate – there are several good free ones on Google Play.
Still, all these criticisms apply to the Galaxy S5 too.
Black is back
That’s the same size and resolution as the Motorola Moto G, which costs just a third the price of this mobile. Is it madness?
Not exactly. At 4.5 inches, a 720p screen still looks fairly sharp, and this is a pretty nice screen.
As with other top-billing Samsung phones, the Galaxy S5 Mini uses a Super AMOLED display rather than an LCD one. With this kind of screen, each pixel is its own light source, enabling sky-high contrast and blacks darker than the inside of a black box in a black hole in the blackest reaches of deep space.
You also get control over the screen’s tone, side-stepping an issue some OLED phone screens suffer from – oversaturated colour. Like the Galaxy S5, the colours are a little hot when the phone’s fresh out of the box.
They look vivid and lively, but if you want more accurate colours to, perhaps, check out your photos, there are cinema and photo screen modes that offer much more natural colours.
It’s a good screen, but you can notice the difference in resolution if you get really close up, or zoom out a good deal when browsing – making text teeny. Part of this is down to the diamond PenTile subpixel arrangement.
This screen structure means the pixels share subpixels, reducing the perception of sharpness a tad. You do need to try to see this in action, though. Here’s a pro tip: getting your eyeball that close to the screen really isn’t comfortable.
Like other top Super AMOLED phones, the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini offers fantastic outdoors readability. The display is way less reflective than just about any LCD phone, meaning it just isn't affected by bright sunlight in the same way. Viewing angles are fantastic, too, with just a tiny blue cast to the screen at an angle – one you’ll only really notice if you’re looking at a pure white screen.
We don’t think the S5 Mini screen is dramatically better than some rivals that are a bit cheaper in all respects, though. The old-but-great Sony Xperia Z1 Compact and even the Moto G offer displays that can compete – if not beat – the S5 Mini.
READ MORE: Motorola Moto G review
Interface copy and paste
In the last year, Samsung has done a lot to get rid of its old reputation for packing in features that no-one asked for without thinking about whether they might affect how fun the phones are to use. The Galaxy S5 Mini has quite a nice-looking, simple-ish interface that’s pretty easy to use.
It’s not perfect, being a bit less attractive than the Sony Xperia Z2’s and having a bloated-looking settings menu, but it’s a big step up from the Samsung UI of a year or two ago.
READ MORE: Sony Xperia Z2 review
Pared back performance
The beating heart at the core of the S5 Mini is an Exynos 3 Quad 3470, a quad-core 1.4GHz processor with Cortex-A7 cores, and 1.5GB RAM. What’s disappointing is that this isn’t really any more powerful than last year’s Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, which has a Snapdragon 400. While it may be the dual-core version of the 400, its Krait cores are more powerful than the S5 Mini’s ones.
Geekbench 3 tells the story without too much subjectiveness. Where the Galaxy S5 Mini scores around 1113 points, the S4 Mini gets around 1067 according to Geekbench’s own results table. Not much of an upgrade for 12 months’ progress, is it?
This is also only around the same performance as the Motorola Moto G, a phone that – we’ll repeat – is a a third the price, or less than half in its 4G version. There’s another elephant in the room too: the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact.
That phone has a Snapdragon 800 CPU, and now costs a little less than the S5 Mini SIM-free. The Snapdragon 800 is a much more capable processor.
But where do you see that extra power? It’s not really in everyday performance, as we found that even the super-powered Galaxy S5 is a bit laggy now and then.
Gaming does show up the difference a bit. It’s not just a question of performance, but also graphical quality.
Mid-range processors such as the S5 Mini’s Exynos and the Snapdragon 400 tend to miss out on a few visual effects in the top games, compared to superphones such as the Galaxy S5 and, more interestingly, older but more powerful (and now cheaper) phones such as the LG G2, Nexus 5 and Xperia Z1 Compact.
It’s this slight lack of power that makes us pull a face at the Galaxy S5 Mini’s price a bit. And even with the slightly lesser graphics, we did see a few instances of low(ish) frame rates in 3D games. We didn’t encounter anything that was remotely unplayable – but it shows Samsung is rather pushing it with the price of the Mini.
READ MORE: Tips for long life of your Mobile Battery
Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini tech specs
Much like the Galaxy S5, you really have to try to drain down this phone’s juice in a day. We found that you can comfortable get a good day and a half’s use, without touching any power-saving modes or being careful with how much 3G/4G data you fling around the place.
Performance is pretty great for video playback, too. As well as offering contrast greater than the screen of your local cinema, the battery lasted for 11 hours 54 minutes when playing a 720p MP4 video on loop. Mid-level screen brightness appears higher than in most LCD screen phones as well, so you’re getting a punchier picture and it’s going to last way longer, too.
The Exynos CPU doesn’t seem quite as good at holding charge overnight as the Galaxy S5’s Snapdragon 801, as we lost almost 10 per cent charge while snoozing, but otherwise performance is about as good as Samsung’s top dog.
A photographic journeyman
It has an 8-megapixel main sensor, where the S5 has a fancy ’n’ new 16-megapixel ISOCELL one.
The best part of the Mini’s camera is speed. It’s a very fast little thing, capable of shooting away with virtually no pauses between shots, unless you shoot using the HDR mode, where there’s a slight pause.
As usual with higher-end Samsung phones, the S5 Mini offers a little goldmine of extra modes, many of which you may never touch. You can make a virtual tour of your home, remove objects in a scene, burst shoot and touch up portraits.
In the last year, Samsung has learnt not to ram its camera app so full that you’re just paralysed by the choice, though, so several extras are left as download options.
Image quality is good, with decent sharpness, reliable metering and generally pretty good image quality. However, it’s not a patch on the Galaxy S5, as we expected from a glance at the specs.
Photos are generally less contrasty, detail is a bit lower, the Mini is a bit less adept at dealing with high light contrast in a scene and the HDR isn’t quite as impressive. It doesn’t shoot video at 4K, either, just (up to) 1080p. However, we imagine most people will be happy. People who haven’t already been spoilt by the big daddy S5 that is.
We are a little disappointed the phone doesn’t have the same 16-megapixel camera if we’re honest. After all, the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact had the same sensor as the Xperia Z1 – which was the step up model at the time.
Little details lost and found
And the Galaxy S5 Mini does have its fair share of higher-end extras. There’s 4G, of course, the fingerprint scanner and heart rate sensor, plus the IR transmitter up on the top. This lets the Mini kick your home entertainment remotes into touch – it can replace them like a dedicated universal remote.
Samsung may have streamlined its interface a bit, but the hardware is still pretty gadget-laden.
Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini verdict
Most important of the lot, you get the S5’s fantastic screen contrast and black level, and the option to have either more accurate or larger-than life colour.
Look a bit deeper and you do see a few cuts here are there, though. The CPU is far less powerful, and some games just don’t look quite as good as they would on something such as the Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. Plus, the camera is a lot more ordinary than the Galaxy S5’s. It’s not bad, just not quite as remarkable.
While some may not mind these cuts, we can’t help but feel that Samsung’s asking for slightly too big a bundle of cash for this little Android.
READ MORE: Nokia Lumia 930 review
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 preview
Everything we know, and everything we think we know, about the follow up to our favourite ever phablet
The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is one hell of a phone - a supercharged 5.7in monster that earned five stars in our review and has sat high up our Top 10 Smartphones list ever since. And we're already so over it.
Fickle, maybe, but ever since the first rumours starting trickling in about the Galaxy Note 4 we've been counting down the days till its release. Read on to find out why we're so excited.
DESIGN AND BUILD - BYE BYE, FAKE LEATHER
It would be fair to say that opinion was divided on the Galaxy Note 3's fake leather back.
Our review, while praising the fact that it made for a much easier-to-hold device than the slippery Note II, also added that some might label it tacky. That's something of an understatement, so the fact that its successor will definitely arrive with a different look will be welcomed by many.
Speaking to Reuters, Samsung's senior vice president of product strategy Yoon Han-Ki stated that the Note 4 would arrive with a "new form factor". Quite what that will involve is open to speculation, but at the very least we'd guess it will either mean a grippy, dimpled plastic back as seen on the Galaxy S5, or a more premium metal build of the type we expect to see on the Galaxy S5 Prime.
Either way, it'll hopefully signal the end of Samsung's brief dalliance with skeuomorphism.
We'd also expect the Note 4 to be fully dust- and water-proof. With seals over all of its sticky-in bits, the Galaxy S5 is waterproof to the IP67 standard, meaning it can survive a 1m dunking for up to 30 minutes. As long as Samsung can work out how to seal the slot where the Note 4's Stylus sits, there's really no reason why the tech wouldn't make its way to the bigger phone.
SCREEN - twice as nice?
Here's where things get really interesting. There are already plenty of rumours doing the rounds about the Note 4's screen, and if they all come true we'll be looking at one very special display.
Size-wise, we're expecting a modest jump from the Note 3's 5.7in to 5.8 or possibly 5.9in. Why? Well Samsung's upped the Note's screen size with each new version, from 5.3in on the original to 5.5in and then 5.7in. It's also done the same with its flagship 'S' phones, from 4in to 4.3 to 4.8 to 5 and then to 5.1in on the S5. Leopards don't change their spots, so we'd be amazed if the Note 4 didn't get a bigger display.
More excitingly, it also looks like being Samsung's first 2K phone (assuming the S5 Prime doesn't arrive before it). At its Analyst Day conference last November, Samsung showed off a graph which indicated that it would launch a phone with a 2K screen - that's 2560 x 1440 pixels - sometime in 2014. With the S5 sticking with a 1080p display, the Note 4 looks a good bet for the upgrade. And with LG having now confirmed that the LG G3 will itself feature a 2K display, there'll be pressure on Samsung to follow suit on one of its flagship devices.
But there's more.
SCREEN - 3 is the magic number?
The Note 4 could also arrive with - wait for it - a 3-sided display. Yes, really.
Rumours have been rife that the handset could feature a flexible screen which curves round the side of the device. The side displays would be used to either provide information - ticker-style notifications, weather forecasts, 'song playing' info etc - or to allow quick access to apps such as camera and instant messaging. The advantage would be that you could run a full app on the main display - a game or film, say - but easily see notifications without having to exit the app.
Sounds incredible, but the tech all exists. Samsung showed off a flexible 'Youm' screen at CES 2013, and has also demonstrated curved tech in the Samsung Galaxy Round phone. A patent recently revealed by Galaxy Club demonstrated just such a phone, and while there's no guarantee that it will become reality on the Note 4, we can always cross our fingers and hope.
Plus, LG already has a premium device with a curved, flexible screen in the form of the LG G Flex. Samsung generally doesn't like to play second fiddle to LG, and how better to trump it than with a 3-sided Note 4?
POWER - THE BEST YET?
Right now, your guess is as good as ours. Well maybe not quite as good as ours, but close. What we're trying to say is that beyond reasoned speculation, we don't know what the Note 4's innards will consist of.
A report in The Korea Times hinted that Samsung was considering kitting out the Note 4 with a 64-bit processor of the kind found in the iPhone 5s, and also that it might feature speedy LTE-A tech. Beyond that, zilch.
What we can say is that the Note 4 will be a beast of a phone. The Note series has traditionally been Samsung's most powerful device, and in an interview with Bloomberg, Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of the company’s mobile business, stated that the Note 4 would be "targeting consumers who want more professional use and tend to be willing to pay more for handsets."
We'd expect either the Snapdragon 801 processor that you'll find in the Galaxy S5 or even the Snapdragon 805, 4GB of RAM (the Note 3 has 3GB) and hopefully a nice big battery. MicroSD storage is a given, to supplement the 16/32/64GB that we'll likely get within the device.
In short, it'll be among the most powerful phones yet.
CAMERA - SPECIAL K?
The Note 3's 13MP camera is a cracker, producing superb pictures which rival those from the LG G2. But expect the Note 4 to be even better. The Galaxy S5 got a spec-bump to 16MP plus a clever software mode that enables it to refocus shots after you've taken them. We'd be very surprised if the Note 4 didn't get an upgrade to at least match the S5, but it's quite possible it'll surpass it.
The Galaxy K Zoom - Samsung's new half-phone-half-zoom-lensed-camera - has a 20.7MP sensor, and it's not impossible that'll find its way into the Note 4. Here's hoping.
The Note 3 can already shoot 4K video, so there's not much more that can be improved on this front. 8K, anyone?
PRICING AND RELEASE DATE
The Note 4 will almost certainly be announced at the same time as the IFA 2014 show, which is due to kick off on 5 September.
All previous Note releases have coincided with the German tech show, so there seems no reason to expect any change this time round. As for pricing - well as we've already seen, Samsung are after the premium market here, so don't expect it to come cheap.
As always, we'll update this story with every new snippet of info we get, so keep checking back for the latest.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 3 is one hell of a phone - a supercharged 5.7in monster that earned five stars in our review and has sat high up our Top 10 Smartphones list ever since. And we're already so over it.
Fickle, maybe, but ever since the first rumours starting trickling in about the Galaxy Note 4 we've been counting down the days till its release. Read on to find out why we're so excited.
DESIGN AND BUILD - BYE BYE, FAKE LEATHER
It would be fair to say that opinion was divided on the Galaxy Note 3's fake leather back.
Our review, while praising the fact that it made for a much easier-to-hold device than the slippery Note II, also added that some might label it tacky. That's something of an understatement, so the fact that its successor will definitely arrive with a different look will be welcomed by many.
Speaking to Reuters, Samsung's senior vice president of product strategy Yoon Han-Ki stated that the Note 4 would arrive with a "new form factor". Quite what that will involve is open to speculation, but at the very least we'd guess it will either mean a grippy, dimpled plastic back as seen on the Galaxy S5, or a more premium metal build of the type we expect to see on the Galaxy S5 Prime.
Either way, it'll hopefully signal the end of Samsung's brief dalliance with skeuomorphism.
We'd also expect the Note 4 to be fully dust- and water-proof. With seals over all of its sticky-in bits, the Galaxy S5 is waterproof to the IP67 standard, meaning it can survive a 1m dunking for up to 30 minutes. As long as Samsung can work out how to seal the slot where the Note 4's Stylus sits, there's really no reason why the tech wouldn't make its way to the bigger phone.
SCREEN - twice as nice?
Here's where things get really interesting. There are already plenty of rumours doing the rounds about the Note 4's screen, and if they all come true we'll be looking at one very special display.
Size-wise, we're expecting a modest jump from the Note 3's 5.7in to 5.8 or possibly 5.9in. Why? Well Samsung's upped the Note's screen size with each new version, from 5.3in on the original to 5.5in and then 5.7in. It's also done the same with its flagship 'S' phones, from 4in to 4.3 to 4.8 to 5 and then to 5.1in on the S5. Leopards don't change their spots, so we'd be amazed if the Note 4 didn't get a bigger display.
More excitingly, it also looks like being Samsung's first 2K phone (assuming the S5 Prime doesn't arrive before it). At its Analyst Day conference last November, Samsung showed off a graph which indicated that it would launch a phone with a 2K screen - that's 2560 x 1440 pixels - sometime in 2014. With the S5 sticking with a 1080p display, the Note 4 looks a good bet for the upgrade. And with LG having now confirmed that the LG G3 will itself feature a 2K display, there'll be pressure on Samsung to follow suit on one of its flagship devices.
But there's more.
SCREEN - 3 is the magic number?
The Note 4 could also arrive with - wait for it - a 3-sided display. Yes, really.
Rumours have been rife that the handset could feature a flexible screen which curves round the side of the device. The side displays would be used to either provide information - ticker-style notifications, weather forecasts, 'song playing' info etc - or to allow quick access to apps such as camera and instant messaging. The advantage would be that you could run a full app on the main display - a game or film, say - but easily see notifications without having to exit the app.
Sounds incredible, but the tech all exists. Samsung showed off a flexible 'Youm' screen at CES 2013, and has also demonstrated curved tech in the Samsung Galaxy Round phone. A patent recently revealed by Galaxy Club demonstrated just such a phone, and while there's no guarantee that it will become reality on the Note 4, we can always cross our fingers and hope.
Plus, LG already has a premium device with a curved, flexible screen in the form of the LG G Flex. Samsung generally doesn't like to play second fiddle to LG, and how better to trump it than with a 3-sided Note 4?
POWER - THE BEST YET?
Right now, your guess is as good as ours. Well maybe not quite as good as ours, but close. What we're trying to say is that beyond reasoned speculation, we don't know what the Note 4's innards will consist of.
A report in The Korea Times hinted that Samsung was considering kitting out the Note 4 with a 64-bit processor of the kind found in the iPhone 5s, and also that it might feature speedy LTE-A tech. Beyond that, zilch.
What we can say is that the Note 4 will be a beast of a phone. The Note series has traditionally been Samsung's most powerful device, and in an interview with Bloomberg, Lee Young Hee, executive vice president of the company’s mobile business, stated that the Note 4 would be "targeting consumers who want more professional use and tend to be willing to pay more for handsets."
We'd expect either the Snapdragon 801 processor that you'll find in the Galaxy S5 or even the Snapdragon 805, 4GB of RAM (the Note 3 has 3GB) and hopefully a nice big battery. MicroSD storage is a given, to supplement the 16/32/64GB that we'll likely get within the device.
In short, it'll be among the most powerful phones yet.
CAMERA - SPECIAL K?
The Note 3's 13MP camera is a cracker, producing superb pictures which rival those from the LG G2. But expect the Note 4 to be even better. The Galaxy S5 got a spec-bump to 16MP plus a clever software mode that enables it to refocus shots after you've taken them. We'd be very surprised if the Note 4 didn't get an upgrade to at least match the S5, but it's quite possible it'll surpass it.
The Galaxy K Zoom - Samsung's new half-phone-half-zoom-lensed-camera - has a 20.7MP sensor, and it's not impossible that'll find its way into the Note 4. Here's hoping.
The Note 3 can already shoot 4K video, so there's not much more that can be improved on this front. 8K, anyone?
PRICING AND RELEASE DATE
The Note 4 will almost certainly be announced at the same time as the IFA 2014 show, which is due to kick off on 5 September.
All previous Note releases have coincided with the German tech show, so there seems no reason to expect any change this time round. As for pricing - well as we've already seen, Samsung are after the premium market here, so don't expect it to come cheap.
As always, we'll update this story with every new snippet of info we get, so keep checking back for the latest.