Business / Technology

Brier Dudley offers a critical look at technology and business issues affecting the Northwest.

Whether the S4 can maintain or accelerate Samsung’s growth remains to be seen. Earlier glimpses of the phone through various leaks showed a curved design similar to the S3, with gee-whiz features such as the tracking of users’ eyes to do things like pause video playback when users turn away.

Samsung is launching the phone at a much-hyped event in New York, which is webcast here.

Samsung mobile communications president, JK Shin, started by listing the S4′s highlight features.

They include:

Air View – a touchless interface.

Smart Scroll and Smart Pause – the eye-tracking systems, which add eye and wrist gestures to the mix of natural user interfaces. Videos stop and start when you turn away and back to the device, and it scrolls through emails by detecting a face and wrist motions.

Sound & Shot – a system that captures sound while photos are being taken. Sound clips can be added to the photo file before or after the shutter is pressed.

Samsung Knox – a security system for using the phone for work and play that was unveiled at Mobile World Congress. It divides the phone into personal and work spaces, which is one of the highlight features of the new BlackBerry.

Samsung Home Sync – for immediately syncing content from the device and storing them at home on a media server device.

S Translator- a speech-to-text and text-to-speech translator.

It’s going on sale at the end of April with carriers around the world, with global roaming and 3G and 4G capabilities. The 4G capability includes LTE and HSPA+, the latter with download speeds up to 42 Megabits per second.

U.S. carriers that will offer the S4 include AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, US Cellular and Cricket.

The Android-based phone does have a design similar to the S3 but is thinner and lighter, with a 7.9 millimeter thick case and total weight of 130 grams, yet it has a larger, 5-inch screen.

Samsung ups the resolution ante with the S4. The full HD Super Amoled display has 441 pixels per inch.

Inside, the phone has 2 gigabytes of RAM and storage ranges from 16 to 64 gigs, plus a memory card slot.

New sensors include infrared gesture sensors - so it senses a wave of the hand, as well as touchscreen commands – and temperature and humidity sensors. Gesture controls include waving a hand to scroll through a web page or change music tracks.

The main camera is 13 megapixels and there’s a 2 megapixel front-facing camera.

One of the cool new tricks is “dual camera” recording capability. It lets users shoot video with a thumbnail window capturing the shooter.

The camera also has an “eraser” feature that lets users tap to erase people or objects in an image. It also has a “drama” burst mode for capturing an action sequence, then choosing the best shot or shots.

Here are the specs provided by Samsung:

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