The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the most hotly anticipated smart phone ever from the Korean brand, and with a glut of top end features, it's the most powerful and desirable device Samsung has created yet.
One of the most impressive things about the phone is the fact the size hasn't changed from its predecessor - the Galaxy S4 comes in at 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9mm (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 inches)
However, despite this fact, the screen on the S4 has been increased once more, to a whopping 5-inch display with Full HD resolution. This means the same amount of pixels you'd have seen on a TV that cost well over £1,000 four years ago is now riding around in your pocket.
Let's not pretend that Samsung is a pioneer in this area though: like a great many features of the Galaxy S4, the phone borrows a lot from the other top smartphones of the moment. Both the Sony Xperia Z and the HTC One have screens that rock the same resolution, but neither of them have the jaw-dropping clout of the Super AMOLED HD screen on offer here.
On top of that, there's a much faster processor packed under the hood, ample storage space for media thanks to an expandable memory card slot, and the likes of 4G, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and pretty much any other connection you care to mention on board.
Samsung has tried to supplement this with a tranche of software upgrades too, meaning a more powerful camera, a better way to communicate with your friends and consume media, and interestingly a big push into health through dedicated apps too.
Samsung Smart watch Review
With only a few smartwatches on the market, it's tough knowing exactly what a device in the extremely young product category should be able to offer. Samsung is one of the first major companies to venture into relatively unknown territory with its Galaxy Gear, and while the product is conceptually interesting, it gives us more of us an idea of what smartwatches could be like in the future instead of what we should expect today.
Like Samsung's many other mobile devices, the Galaxy Gear boasts a number of potentially useful hardware and software features—including a full-color Super AMOLED display, a built-in camera, and S Voice functionality—but, unfortunately, it falls short when trying to deliver basic functions that one would want in a wearable companion device.
By far, the most important role of a smartwatch (aside from telling the time) is to deliver notifications, which the Galaxy Gear does a decent job doing—in some situations. Text messages and emails handled through Samsung's own Android email app are sent to the Gear just fine, letting you respond to texts using S Voice and giving you the option to delete emails. However, when delivering notifications from extremely popular services like Twitter, Facebook, and Google's Gmail app, the results are much more clumsy.
Thankfully, there are third-party apps that can provide this type of functionality, but it's a shame Samsung couldn't do it itself, especially since the Gear can be set up to receive notifications from these specific services right out of the box. Future software updates could rectify these problems, but as it is now, the Galaxy Gear's ability to handle notifications is limited, at best.
IPad Air review: (The best tablet gets better)
It’s right there in the name: The most important trait of the iPad Air is that it weighs only a pound. For a company that obsesses over making devices thinner and lighter, it must have been torture for Apple to spend nearly three years making a series of iPads that were better than their predecessors, but not smaller. Now it has.
Nearly every aspect of the iPad Air is thinner and lighter than the previous model (the fourth-generation iPad). That includes the battery, which is smaller—and less capacious—than before. Battery life, on the other hand, is pretty much the same, thanks to the improved power efficiency of the iPad Air’s A7 processor.
At the same time that the iPad got thinner and lighter, it also got more powerful. That A7 processor allows the iPad Air to run roughly twice as fast as the previous-generation iPad, opening the door for new apps that can bring power traditionally reserved for “real computers” to the tablet.
