Samsung Galaxy All Series

SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 GAME PAD ACCESSORIES

While most of the other accessories serve a practical or useful purpose, Samsung also announced some new fun accessories.
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GAME PAD
Mobile gaming's big, so Samsung has announced the Game Pad, which turns your phone into a portable games console. The phone holder slides out the top of the Xbox-alike controller, letting you slide your phone into it in landscape mode.

Who needs a touchscreen, when you can have a full-on game controller?
The Game Pad connects via Bluetooth, so it will be compatible with any handset. Samsung states that the holder will take phones with screen sizes between 4in and 6.3in. No UK price has been announced yet.

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SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 CHARGING AND BATTERY ACCESSORIES

It's not all about health and Samsung has a range of accessories to help you make the most of battery life and make the phone easier to charge. Here's what's been announced.

WIRELESS CHARGING PAD/COVER
One of the surprising things about the announcement was that wireless charging wasn't built into the phone. However, that will be fixed when the Wireless Charging Pad / Cover is released. This kit comes in two parts.
The official Samsung kit lets you charge your phone wirelessly
The charging pad is, as you'd expect, a flat block that you lay our phone on. To get wireless charging, you have to replace the back of the phone with the new cover. We don't have a UK price or launch date.

EXTRA BATTERY KIT
Convenient charging is no use if you're nowhere near a power socket. For those situations, Samsung has the Extra Battery Kit. This ships with a spare battery housed in a carry case that doubles as a battery charger.

No power socket, no problem: carry a spare battery with you
As the Galaxy S4 has a removable back and battery, it means you can carry around a charged battery with you and swap when you need it. UK pricing and availability haven't been announced, although the similar kit for the Samsung Galaxy S3 currently costs around £25.

S VIEW COVER
The Samsung Galaxy S3 Flip Cover was a great way to protect your phone's screen, without ruining the look of the phone. For the Samsung Galaxy S4, the company has gone one further with the S View Cover.

Peek-a-book: keep an eye on updates without opening your cover
This clips onto the side of the phone, opening like a book when you need to access the screen. However, it also has a window in it, so you can see notifications on the phone without having to expose the screen.
The standard Flip Cover will also be available for the Galaxy S4, in addition to a pouch and the Protective Cover+, which wraps the phone in a rubber bumper to give it more protection.

UK pricing and availability of the cases hasn't been announced yet, although we'd expect the new Flip Cover to cost the same as the old model (£30), with a premium for the S View Cover.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 HEALTH ACCESSORIES

One key expansion area for the Samsung Galaxy S4 is through its health accessories. With fitness tech a big market, it's clear why Samsung's keen to move into this area. Holding it all together is the S-Health 2.0 app, which is designed to monitor and report on your body, talking to all of the available kit.

S BAND
S Band fits onto your wrist and is designed to be worn at all times, monitoring your daily activity. It will record the number of steps you've taken, calories burned and distance travelled, so you can find out how active you are and adjust your daily routine if you don't think that you're getting enough exercise.

S Band is designed to worn all of the time, monitoring your body
It's also active while you're asleep, monitoring how much you move during the night. This could be useful if you never wake refreshed, as you'll be able to tell how restful your night's sleep really was.
S Band is available in four different colours (pink, blue, brown and black) and is waterproof to 10m, so you can wear it pretty much everywhere. UK pricing has not been announced.

HRM
The HRM is a hear rate monitor, which works with the Running Mate app. It checks your heart rate in real time, so you can see at a glance if your exercise regime is giving you a proper workout.

HRM keeps track of your heart rate, so you can find out if you're really getting a thorough work-out
HRM is a black band that straps across your chest. It connects to the Samsung Galaxy S4 via Bluetooth. UK availability and price have not yet been announced.

BODY SCALE
With the popularity of hi-tech scales, such as the Withings Body Scale, it's no surprise that Samsung's looking to get in on the act with its Body Scale.

Keep track of your weight on your phone using these Bluetooth scales
This supports up to seven users via the S-Health 2.0 app, keeping track of your weight over time. While Withings' scale uploads your data via Wi-Fi to the cloud, Samsung's requires a Bluetooth connection to the phone to store weight data. To our mind that makes it quite a bit less flexible. Again, no UK price or availability has been announced.
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SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 PRICE AND UK NETWORKS

The good news is that you won't be short of choice when it comes to buying the Samsung Galaxy S4. Two of the major UK networks have confirmed that they will be carrying the new phone - no great surprise, when you consider the huge success of the Galaxy S3 and the amount of hype that has been building up to the launch of the S4.

As you'd hope considering the Galaxy S4's LTE capability, it will be available on the UK's only 4G network - EE - and Three has also thrown its hat into the ring.
Vodafone and O2 have yet to say either way, but we find it hard to believe that they will pass up the chance to stock this year's potential biggest seller.
Pricing hasn't yet been announced, but we can take a fair stab at expected prices. We'd imagine that launch prices will be the same as for the S3 when it launched back in May - a wallet-busting £499. Once again though the tough competition from Google's own Nexus 4 device may force Samsung to lower its price in order to compete - unless of course the hardware specification is a big step forward.
On contract you're likely to be looking at £30-40 a month minimum, and considerably more with a 4G service such as EE. This will be an expensive handset, though probably still a little less than the iPhone 5 costs.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 CAMERAS

Cameras are an important part of any smartphone, with many people preferring them to compact cameras. From the specifications, Samsung hasn't let us down with the Galaxy S4 camera, with a 13-megapixel rear camera, complete with Flash and a high-speed shutter mode. At the front is a 2-megapixel camera.

The 13-megapixel rear camera certainly has impressive specifications, but the front camera can be used to control the phone
Now, two cameras on a smartphone is hardly something new, but with Dual Camera you can operate both of them at the same time. It feels a little gimmicky to us, but the idea is that you can film yourself with the front camera and then superimpose yourself on the footage from the rear camera. The examples we've seen look a little twee and we're not sure that most people want their faces to appear surrounded by a postage stamp border over the footage they're recording.
You can superimpose yourself as a floating stamp in videos, if you like that kind of thing
The front camera also serves a purpose in controlling the phone with Smart Pause. This technology knows when you're looking at the screen so it can, for example, pause a video when you turn your head and look away. As soon as you look back, the video continues. It's a neat way of using the cameras for more than just still images and video.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 SCREEN

As expected, the Galaxy S4 has a 5in Full HD (1,920x1,080) Super AMOLED screen. That's a stunning 441ppi, making this one of the highest-density phones that we've seen. The HTC One manages slightly more at 468ppi, thanks to its slightly-smaller 4.7in Full HD screen. On balance, though, you're going to find it hard to tell the difference or spot individual pixels on either screen.
There was no mention of the Green PHOLED technology, which was rumoured to be making its first appearance here. However, we've been impressed with Samsung's Super AMOLED technology before and it's always been power efficient, helping to save battery life.

As expected, the screen can be operated just by hovering your finger over it, giving rise to two new features. Air View lets you hover over content, such as an email or photo, to preview it without having to open it. Air Gesture, lets you change tracks, scroll through a web page or answer a call with the wave of your hand. We haven't had chance to try the system out yet, but this should make fine-control of the touchscreen operating system that little bit easier.
Air View and Air Gesture let you operate the touchscreen without touching it
Gorilla Glass 3 helps make the phone durable, although we'd still recommend a screen protector or case if you're going to keep your phone in a pocket with sharp items, such as keys.

SAMSUNG GALAXY S4 DESIGN

With the Galaxy S3 proving to be such a success, Samsung hasn't strayed too far from that design with the Galaxy S4. The rounded edges and lozenge-shaped home button at the bottom of the phone are all instantly recognisable.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is thinner and lighter than the Samsung Galaxy S3
While the S3 looked and felt, well, quite plasticy, the Samsung S4 looks that much nicer and more like the high-end phone that it should be. It has a polycarbonate case, but it's now slimmer (7.9mm) and lighter (130g) than its predecessor.
Two versions of the phone will be available: Black Mist and White Frost. It's hard to pass judgement on the phone until we've seen it in the flesh, but in the shots we've seen it certainly looks like a step up from the Samsung Galaxy S3.