THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Three

A LITTLE LESS REMOTE...

Over the past few weeks, I've been taking a look at how Samsung has made the Galaxy S4 better than the SIII. Quite a few of the features they've been shouting about are software-based and a rumoured to be coming to an S3 near you in future updates.

Several of the new gizmos are built-in though. There are some pretty wizzy camera tricks I'll try and cover off next week, but I discovered one of the coolest things about this new phone almost by accident.

As well as being the smartest phone on the block, the Galaxy S4 is now your new Universal Remote Control.

I am old. I know this because I can clearly remember a time BEFORE remote controls. In fact, I recall the first VCR my parents ever owned. It was cutting edge because it came WITH an actual remote. Admittedly, it wasn't a wireless remote... it was connected to the video recorder by a very long lead. (No, I'm not making this up) You could play, stop, rewind, fast-forward and possibly even record. Obviously if you wanted to do anything as complicated as set the timer you'd have to do it on the actual machine, but what do you expect?

Of course, in order to do that timer recording thing, you'd have to stop the clock flashing, "00:00" - nobody's ever worked out how to do that, so no point in putting it on a remote, right?

Needless to say, things have progressed somewhat since then.

Now you can control EVERYTHING by remote - from the telly right through to the lights and the heater. Even just watching my favourite shows now involves up to 3 different clickers; home theatre for the sound, TV for the pics and SKY for dialing up the actual show. That's a lot of buttons on a lot of remotes all taking up a lot of coffee tabletop.

Enter, the universal remote. These come in all shapes and sizes - there are universal remotes that look like remotes, then there are models that operate more like a small tablet giving you complete control over your whole house, your beach house and possibly the U.S.S. Enterprise.

The price of these varies wildly too, but it's hard to find a half decent one for much under a hundred bucks. So is it worth handing over a hundie to free up your sofa arms? Possibly not. But if the universal remote was already built into your phone, it'd be silly not to use it.

The S4 comes with something called the IR Blaster, a piece of hardware you can now find in several of the new Samsung devices. On the S4, you run it with an app called WatchOn which will guide you through a reasonably straight-forward setup process to get your phone talking to your other gadgets.

The really cool thing is, you can set up different rooms. Hell, I even took it to work and started changing channels there. Primarily just to annoy people who couldn't figure out why their remote had stopped working properly. Good times.

If I have a criticism of what really is a very straight-forward device, it'd be some difficulties I had figuring out which option to use to recognise my MySky decoder. You select devices by manufacturer and it took some fairly intensive Googling to discover Sky's set-top boxes are in fact manufactured by Pace. Once I had discovered this, I could access most of the Sky remote's functions bu not all. I can't rule out operator-error here, of course, but given I would have thought this was a reasonably common machine for New Zealanders to want to control, the WatchOn people may want to have a look at making the kiwi MySky options a bit more accessible.

Other than that, how cool is it to have a universal remote that doesn't take up any table space at all, because it's in your phone? Or your Galaxy Note 8.0 tablet - but that's a whole other story. Or at least another blog.

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part Two

TELLING ME WHERE TO GO...

Last time I investigated driving navigation on a Samsung Galaxy, I was comparing the Google-powered app on the Galaxy SIII with the very slick Nokia Drive on the Windows-based Lumias.

I gave the honours to the Nokia phones simply because their app worked offline, whereas the Google one didn't. Well... it SORT of worked offline, but not really, and certainly not as well as the Nokia version.

Enter the Galaxy S4 and its promise of a whole new navigation option. It's called Navigon and it just about does the job.

Somewhat confusingly, the original Google navigation app is still installed as well, so you need to choose which will be your default.

The Navigon app comes with the whole of New Zealand pre-installed, and I could also choose to download Australia for free. This is still not as comprehensive as Nokia Drive, which seems to offer a whole world of downloadable maps at no charge, but it's certainly a massive improvement on Google, which would only allow you to store 5 relatively small regions for offline use and even then, you'd have to go online to plan your route.

The S4's new navigation option works very quickly, asking you first for the city you're travelling to, then the street address. You then usually have a choice of routes along which you can decide to either drive or walk.

I used the app on a few of my regular routes, just to make sure it really knew what it was talking about. The only fault I could detect was at roundabouts, when the voice guidance would tell me to take the 1st exit when it meant the 2nd or 3rd. Very odd, given the map itself showed the correct route without fail. I'm sure this is a small glitch the designers will remedy in a future update and bearing it in mind, I set off on a real test of the might Navigon's abilities; Middlemore Hospital.

For any non-Aucklanders reading this blog, Middlemore is not what you'd call a central, easy-to-get to destination. Especially given I live at the opposite end of the country's only super-city and I'd never been there before.

My sister had decided to cut her wedding anniversary trip to Fiji short, by having an argument with a kayak in rough sea conditions. She lost the argument in spectacular fashion, smashing her knee up so badly it required urgent surgery back in New Zealand.

This is how she wound up stranded in Middlemore Hospital, still some distance from her usual network of friends, family and helpers in her home town of Palmerston North.

Being the doting younger brother I am, spending some time with her while she was waiting to be shipped back to the Manawatu seemed the decent thing to do, and the perfect excuse to put the Galaxy S4 to the test.

If you're online, you can simply speak your destination into the phone - this is true of any of the navigation apps I have used. It drives me nuts that you can't do this offline. When is offline speech recognition going to be a standard feature on our phones so we can do things like dictate text messages safely while driving? It's just stupid.

Anyway, even though I had to type it, I only got as far as "Middle..." before the S4 had suggested Middlemore Hospital as a probable destination and set me on my way.

I found the voice guidance less robotic than some others I've used, and less intrusive - only giving me directions when I needed them instead of hassling me with the same direction 15 times before I got to each intersection. The really cool thing this app does is when you have to do something tricky on the motorway. The display then changes from showing where you are on the road to a graphic of the motorway on or offramp in question. The lane or lanes you need to use are clearly highlighted taking any doubt out of your maneuver - even the signs on the screen match the real ones exactly.

The estimated time of arrival was as accurate as any other GPS I have used and the display was very clear and uncluttered.

In short, I got to the hospital with no problems whatsoever. The parking charges were exorbitant, but sadly, no phone is smart enough to get around that. Yet.

So the S4 has truly delivered an offline navigation solution, and a powerful, user-friendly one at that. Now if I could just figure out how to get off this roundabout...

THE GALAXY S4's NEW GADGETS: Part One

HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU...

It's been a fair old while since my last series of phone faffs, in which I pitted the Samsung Galaxy SIII against the latest Windows Phones from Nokia. The S3 won in the end, primarily due to the fact I could make it work like a Nokia Lumia, whereas I couldn't make a Lumia work like a Galaxy.

Since then I've been using the S3 pretty much exclusively, and it's consistently delivered in every area. Browsing, photos, the navigation works great (as long as you're online - more on that in a later blog though).

I found I could even pimp it up. I added a longer life battery and discovered I could charge the phone wirelessly - just like the Nokia Lumias.

I took it overseas, bunged a U.S. sim card in it, tethered iPads and other phones to it and it just kept delivering.

So when Samsung launched the S4 recently, I had to wonder just how much better it could possibly be.

Well, I've been playing with one for a few days and it definitely is a step up - in lots of little ways.

Essentially the S4 is the same phone. It's still an Android, albeit a very fast and powerful one. Although it's the same length and slightly more narrow than its predecessor, the screen is a bit bigger. It has a more solid feel to it - I don't know why, it just does. In fact, every time I use it, I seem to find something else it simply does better.

One of those things is called Smart Scroll.

According to Samsung, they've put a lot of time, effort and money into making the Galaxy S4 its most user friendly device yet. To achieve this, they've included a whole heap of extra sensors to read how you're interacting with the handset, from the way you're holding it to how you're looking at it - even what the temperature is!

This means browsing a website or reading a long document can now literally become a hands-free experience.

Who's watching who?

Smart Scroll works in one of two ways - Firstly; you can set it to detect which way you're tilting the handset. Tilt the bottom up and the the page automatically scrolls down. Tilt the phone the other way to scroll back to the top. It works in both portrait and landscape which is good because I've never understood why people try and view websites in portrait.

Alternatively; and this is kind of hard to believe till you've actually tried it, but you can set Smart Scroll to detect which way you're LOOKING at it. I'm not even kidding. Look towards the bottom of the page and it'll scroll down. Look up and back you'll go. Even Mike Hosking was impressed when I showed him this trick.

Whichever setting you choose, a small icon flashes up green in the middle of the screen to let you know when you're good to go, although you can turn this off if you find it intrusive. It isn't so I haven't.

I don't know whether it's because I wear glasses or I'm just not very good at it yet, but I found the second "looking" option a bit less reliable than the tilt option. I get the feeling it's the kind of thing you could train yourself to use more consistently if you really loved the feature. For now though, I'm perfectly happy with my Smart Scroll set to tilt. It makes me feel nicely lazy not to have to swipe up and down my emails.

Is it a must-have feature? Probably not, but it's some pretty nice icing on Samsung's latest cake and like I say, it's just one of a host of neat little tricks they've built in to the S4. The phone's now watching you all the time. If you're someone who views a lot of video content you'll appreciate the Smart Pause function, which stops your clip if you have to look away for any reason then automatically plays it again once your eyes are back on the screen.

Again, this is not something I was sitting there thinking, "Gee, I wish my SIII would stop playing my video automatically when I have to look around to answer someone's question." But since I've used it, I'd miss it if I didn't have it.

Now my phone is watching my every move, I can do more of what I like to do best; think less. After all, that's why I have a smart phone in the first place - so I can be dumber.

Next week we'll see if the the S4 can deliver on it's promise to provide comprehensive off-line navigation... as long as I don't get lost in the process.