Archive for May 25th, 2013

Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One compared (Part 1)

The Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One are two of the most popular devices on sale at the moment and are going head to head for the top smartphone spot. In fact the HTC One has already won a couple of industry awards, including Best New Mobile Handset at MWC earlier in the year.

I’ve been using the HTC One for a few months and the Galasy S4 for a couple of weeks so I thought it was about time that we started to compare some of the key features of both devices.

For the sake of full disclosure, I should say that I was not expecting to like the Galaxy S4. I wasn’t a big fan of its predecessor, the S3 and I was already using and very much enjoying the experience of the HTC One. However, after just a short period of time with the S4 I like it too!

The questions I most frequently have via Twitter at the moment is ‘Which is better the S4 or the HTC One?’ or ‘Should I buy the S4 or the HTC One?’. I think these questions are almost impossible to answer in isolation, there are many factors to be considered as each device is, obviously, different and therefore better at some things than others.

At time of writing this first part, of what a suspect will end up being 3 or 4 posts over the next week or so, I haven’t been able to make up my mind either. I’m switching between the S4 and One throughout the day depending upon what I want to do so I am also hoping that writing these comparison articles may help me decide too!

So in this first part I’m going to talk about the cameras on each device. As we have discussed in other posts on the site before, HTC have been quite brave with the choices they have made with the HTC One camera. Instead of chasing more and more megapixels HTC have gone the other way and reduced the pixel count down to 4.0MP while increasing the size of the individual pixels on the sensor. The result, they call the Ultrapixel camera, yields an over 300% increase in the amount of available light, and more light equals better pictures, in theory.

Samsung have have been rather more conventional with the S4 opting for a 13MP sensor. That’s not to say that it’s not a good sensor and that it’s not a good upgrade from the S3 but it’s the approach to cramming in more pixels.

So lets take a look at some of the photos. In all the samples below, there is no editing or cropping. HTC One on the left, S4 on the right: