So I finally sat down Thursday night and watched the whole Samsung Galaxy S4 unveiling video instead of just reading the liveblogs, and I have to say, I was not prepared for how much of it was a stage play. Like an actual play, with actors, at Radio City Music Hall, complete with a guy in a tuxedo doing a magic-show voice. I kept waiting for someone to burst into song.
The phone itself, once they got around to it, is fine? Great, even, on paper. Five-inch 1080p display, quad-core (or octa-core depending on region, which is its own weird story), 13-megapixel camera, still has a removable battery and a microSD slot, which honestly matters more to me than almost any spec Samsung mentioned in the two hours before that. But they buried the actual phone under a pile of gimmicks that I cant imagine using more than twice before turning them off forever.
Smart Scroll, where it tracks your eyes and scrolls the page when you tilt your head. Smart Pause, which stops a video when you look away, presumably so you dont miss a second of it when your cat walks in front of the TV. Air Gesture, so you can wave your hand over the screen to skip a song without touching it, which sounds useful right up until you picture yourself actually doing it on a crowded train and feeling like an idiot. And S Translator, real-time translation for texts and calls, which is the one feature in the whole presentation I'd genuinely like to see work in real life, except I have zero faith it'll be any good at launch. These things always ship half-baked and get quietly improved (or quietly dropped) a year later.
The skits were the part that really got me though. There was one where a guy is standing outside in the rain trying to keep a phone dry with an umbrella while a nurse character shows him some water-related trick, and another with a "typical American family" scene that a bunch of outlets are already calling out as pretty tone-deaf and dated, and they're not wrong. It felt like watching a corporate training video from 1998 that somebody decided to blow up onto a Broadway-sized screen. Apple's keynotes can feel stiff and over-rehearsed in their own way, sure, but at least they don't make me sit through a scripted scene about a guy translating a menu in Chinese while actors mime being impressed.
Setting the theater stuff aside, what actually struck me is how much this launch felt like Samsung throwing everything at the wall. Eye tracking, gesture control, a whole "Group Play" thing for sharing photos across devices in the same room, an S Health app with a pedometer and a body fat scale that pairs with the phone (there's a scale now, apparently) — it's a lot. I get why they do it. When your hardware year-over-year gets a little iterative, you need something to put in the headline, and "the screen got sharper" doesn't sell a keynote. But I'd rather they picked two or three of these and made them genuinely great instead of shipping ten half-features that'll get a firmware update in July and then never get mentioned again.
None of this is going to stop me from wanting one, if I'm honest. I've been on a Galaxy S3 since last summer and the battery life on it is starting to embarrass me in front of people, so an upgrade path with a bigger battery and a still-removable one is basically the whole pitch for me. I don't care about the eye tracking. I care that the phone doesn't die by 4pm on a day I forgot the charger.
It ships end of April in most markets from what I've read, so we'll see in about six weeks whether any of the eye-tracking stuff actually works reliably outside a controlled stage demo with perfect lighting and someone who's practiced the gesture forty times. My guess: it works fine in bright rooms and is basically useless the second you're outside or your hands are cold. I'll update this post if I'm wrong, but I've been burned by "gesture control" promises before and I doubt this is the year that changes.