So I'm going to bitch a little bit here, from a place of extreme privilege. Before I do that, I'll just say that I am both aware of and agree with Louis CK's rant a little while ago (the Russian is free, you're welcome) about how people like to complain about shit that is, in the end, still a damned miracle. So I get it, what I'm about to talk about crosses into that some, but I think from a rightfully irritated place.
I got a Galaxy S4 yesterday, and it is objectively an amazing piece of technology. It is much lighter and thinner than my previous smartphones (though a bit taller and wider, lacking a keyboard), and I was really sad to give up the physical keyboard. But progress marches ever forward, and at least I can still buy cars with manual transmission, so I will take my victories where I can find them. The S4 is an extremely anticipated phone (I'd say "was", but I'm certain everyone who is anticipating it has not yet gotten it) due to the amount of processing and entertainment power packed into the little sumbitch. It is, effectively, a small tablet at this point. The screen dominates the front in a way few other phones ever have been so dominated - most phones obviously surrender most of their frontal real estate to the screen, but this thing leaves room for very, very little else like borders or physical frontal buttons.
Honestly, I don't even use these things as a phone much anymore. I think I burned something to the tune of 60 talk minutes last month, and that was about average. I have an office phone for most of my work needs, and none of my friends seem willing to vocalize into their little Facebook/Camera/Text machine. I think my experience is not that unique, either - boards and communities are littered with posts about people focusing on the networking and accessory use of these phones. What does the car dock do? How easy is it to connect to Bluetooth machines? How much battery does the 4G radio burn? How crisp is the screen resolution? How quickly can it fire up and play games? And so on. Despite cell phone call audio quality not noticeably improving for the last five years, no one seems to really care.
So when a phone that people were getting all panty-soaked over fails in a few interesting ways along these lines, I wonder wtf is up. Rightly so, I think. I had a Droid 4, and a Droid before that. Before that, a Blackberry (one of the ones older than the Droid, I don't recall the model number). The Blackberry was my first real smartphone. So there's a little history for you to frame these things. What I felt was really neat about the Droid was an experience that most iPhone users took for granted but was very slow to evolve among the Android OS phones - integration. There were very few custom-built cases or holders or docks or whatever for particular Android phones. The Droid itself had these, of course, as they were the flagship phone of Droid and Motorola at the time. The Droid 2 and 3 and 4 all followed a similar pattern.
What these phones had going for them that I would later find was relatively unique was a focus on integration - the SmartActions in the Moto Android overlay allowed you to fire off a bunch of auto-commands based on certain conditions, making things feel seamless. Putting the phone into the car dock made it automatically recognize it was there. Turning on the Bluetooth just had it automatically try to connect to whatever paired device it had saved. All of these things can be reproduced, in some way, by various third party apps that I am having to monkey together, but by this point, it should be effectively standard. Why do I have to tell the S4 to connect to my car's bluetooth when I turn the BT on and it's the only possible connection? Why won't the crappy third-party car dock (the one I had to get because there's not one for the S4 specifically) trigger the car dock mode when it's not getting power through a car charger? What's with all these stupid green/black buttons on my drop down menu and why can't I get rid of the useless pieces of crap? Where is my damned on-off toggle for wifi? OH THERE IT IS, BURIED IN SOME CRAP.
Why doesn't the home screen have landscape mode, ffs. When a goddamned new phone or app does not have a landscape mode for the home screen, that, to me, is just shorthand for lazy crap.
What do I get in exchange for this poor attention to details that should be standard at this point? Well, there's Air Gestures, which is a neat gimmick but more of a marketing point than an actual useful feature. You wave your hand vaguely over the phone to make stuff stop or go. Answer the phone? Wave this way. Move a page, wave that way. You have to wave over the phone, so it's only barely more convenient than just reaching and hitting the button. Or, if you're reading something, guess what - the S4 is not a TV! You probably have the thing in front of your face anyway, so it's likely better to just move stuff normally, otherwise you look like you're batting at invisible flies. The flies are here! Air Gestures will train people for a year or so (before moving on to their next phone) to constantly make airy, dismissive gestures in front of them to make things go away. Samsung is aiding and abetting douchebag behavior.
There are other uses for Air Gestures, to be sure. But, like most weird, niche movement recognition interfaces, I'd wager 99% of the population using these things has no use for them.
And you do get the Smart Whatever Thing. The thing that reads if your eyes are on the screen. You can train the thing to stop playing a video if you look away. You can make it follow your eyes and scroll text when you read down. I have to hit 20 buttons to make my phone connect to my car now, when it used to be as easy as setting it in the dock, but at least now Chrome knows what part of that Christina Hendricks photo I'm looking at.
But then, I'm sure it always knew.
I guess my irritation is that it feels a little weird when you take it all together. Are you targeting this phone at the superuser? Then it's missing a lot of features that are pretty much standard now. Are you targeting the phone at casual users? Then it's got way too much shit on it. Half of these apps are just "Hey I Don't Know How to Organize Photos and My Social Media Is Super Hard, Samsung, Do It For Me Thanks" variants of whatever shape and size.
It's still a great phone, as they go. The fact I can boot it up in under 15 seconds, hit a few buttons, and stream an exceptionally clear re-run of 30 Rock is amazing. When you think of how complex the process of delivering that is, it is literally amazing. But the phone is not billed as "A fucking miracle pressed into a small case, you better fucking love it," it's the "most anticipated phone of the year" and "a symbol of cutting edge technology and convenience." I mean, if I got a car that didn't come with power locks or windows, I'd be a little confused but I'd understand that shit is not technically standard. But if I was sitting in a $60,000 Porsche and had to ask how to roll the windows down, it's a whole other deal.
What Samsung has done is sold me on a Porsche that has manual windows, but instead of that, I get a customized apple-corer in the dashboard. For all the apples their marketing folks think I probably eat.
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