Samsung has something for everyone in the Android-powered Galaxy S 4 ($149.99). It’s this year’s no-brainer: the phone to get if you don’t want to worry about which phone to get. No matter what you want to do, the Galaxy S 4 can get it done. That makes it our Editors’ Choice for full-touch smartphones on T-Mobile.

Physical Features and Phone Calls
The Galaxy S 4 looks like a refined Galaxy S III at 5.4 by 2.75 by .31 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces. It’s still plastic, in white or black, with chrome trim, and a subtly patterned, smooth back. The edges are squarer, forgoing the ‘pebble in your hand’ metaphor that ruled the S3. It doesn’t taper. But it’s almost exactly the same size as the S3, with the new phone’s larger screen made possible by a smaller bezel.

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4.5

Outstanding

HTC One (Sprint)

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On the front, a 1,920-by-1,080, 5-inch Super AMOLED HD display boasts a spectacular viewing angle and shimmering colors. The physical Home button, below it, joins the traditional Android Menu and Back buttons. I like this setup a lot more than the perplexing two-button approach on the HTC One.

The Galaxy S 4’s back is removable, giving you access to the battery and microSD card slot. You can also replace the back with an optional flip cover that sports a window near the top; when the cover is flipped closed, you see the time and alerts through the window. I had trouble getting the flip cover to stay closed when sitting on a desk, though. The front just wouldn’t lie flat.

An excellent voice phone, the S 4 is really, really good, and that’s not just because of T-Mobile’s new HD Voice. In my tests, call quality was unusually sharp and clear, and the earpiece and speakerphone both got quite loud. Transmissions were sharp, too, with excellent noise cancellation that doesn’t damage the quality of the voice. Transmissions from the speakerphone were a touch tinny, but very clear. Just like on the Galaxy S III, you can personalize the call sound profile to your own sense of hearing, which is one of the phone’s best hidden features. The S 4 also supports T-Mobile’s excellent Wi-Fi calling system.

Basic Performance and Networking
The Galaxy S 4 is the fastest smartphone we’ve benchmarked so far, thanks to its 1.9GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor. Yes, some other international S 4 models will get the Samsung Exynos octo-core, but that processor isn’t necessarily any faster or better, it just takes a different approach to a low-power mode. 

Along with the processor, Samsung gets props for running Android 4.2.2, the latest version of Google’s mobile OS. Some of the newest features aren’t available here, though: Multi-user mode is for tablets, and Samsung’s custom camera app omits Google’s Photo Spheres.

The 1.9GHz Snapdragon torched the processor-dependent Antutu benchmark, but it also did unusually well on Basemark OS, which launches real applications, and on the GLBenchmark graphics benchmark. Even pushing all the pixels on a 1080p screen, this is the fastest Android phone available. I topped off performance testing with the hideously heavy Need for Speed: Most Wanted game, which ran like butter on the S 4.

Spectacular speed results carried over to network testing, too. The Galaxy S 4 is an LTE phone, although you can switch it off if you aren’t in one of T-Mobile’s few LTE cities. You don’t lose much, either. On T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network in midtown Manhattan I got speed up to 14Mbps down and 2.3Mbps up using Ookla’s Speedtest.net application. That’s solid 4G by anyone’s measure.

The S 4 also supports GPS, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, and NFC. I connected a Plantronics Voyager Legend Bluetooth headset  and media playback and voice dialing went off without a hitch.

Battery life isn’t extraordinary, but it’s good. I got 10 hours, 50 minutes of talk time, and 4 hours, 48 minutes streaming constant video over HSPA+ with the screen set to maximum brightness. As we’ve seen with these 1080p phones, that high-res screen really takes a toll. 

(Next page: S Everything)

S Everything

S Everything
Let’s get all of this out of the way first. The Galaxy S 4 is far from a stock Android phone. It’s practically encrusted with Samsung-exclusive features. If you’re a purist, you’ll run screaming over to the LG Nexus 4. But there’s still a lot here to love and a lot to play with, even if some of the stuff doesn’t quite work.

Already exhausted? The S 4 comes with an Easy Mode, which is a brilliant idea, although maybe not necessarily here. Easy Mode gives you a very simplified home screen: clock, weather, date, six standard app icons, and a second screen with nine large, customized icons. The calendar shows large type, too. Will the target audience for Easy Mode be buying a smartphone of this caliber? I’m not sure, but I guess it’s a good thing to have available.

Head back to Normal mode and start on the lock screen. The default Home screen reads “Life Companion” in a ridiculous quasi-script, and when you touch it, there’s a lens flare and a little sound like someone playing the rim of a glass full of water. You can customize all that, of course, and you can tweak your Android home screens with a huge number of widgets, and determine what shows up on the quick-settings bar when you drag down the notifications pane.

Oh, the settings! Samsung may not encourage you to install your own ROM, but the Settings screens are a tweaker’s wonderland. You can change when the notifications LED lights up, what notifications you get and when, what widgets go on the home screen, whether or not the touch screen should work with gloves, which apps can load in multiple windows…there’s a lot.

Multiple window mode has arrived from the Samsung Galaxy Note II( at Amazon)(Opens in a new window), and it’s convenient, letting you split the screen in half and look at two Web pages, maps, email, or a few other apps. Samsung’s S Voice still provides comprehensive voice commands; it’s not as natural-language as Siri, but it’s far superior to the very basic voice commands on the HTC One. S Translator deciphers foreign languages, whether by itself, in text messages, or in Samsung’s email app (though not in Gmail). Polaris Office reads Microsoft Office documents and PDFs. S Note takes notes, although it’s not as fun as it is with the S Pen on the Galaxy Note.

Past greatest hits like Smart Stay (which prevents the screen from turning off when you’re looking at it) and customized audio call quality have been joined by a bunch of other useful, preloaded apps. I’m most excited about S Health, which combines a working pedometer, thermometer, humidity meter, and calorie counter. Though it’s not available yet, S Health will later hook up with a body-monitoring armband for more exciting self health assessment. Otherwise, Optical Reader is a business card and QR code scanner, while Story Album tries to make photo albums out of photos taken in the same place.

WatchOn falls in the middle group of usable inventions. It’s another iteration of the Peel Remote, the TV program guide software we’ve seen on several Samsung tablets and the HTC One. Peel does a good job of showing what’s on TV right now, but I don’t know many smartphone owners who watch what’s on right now, and the app’s Achilles’ heel is that it can’t see or access DVRs. You can also rent or buy TV and movies from Samsung’s store or Netflix, and watch them on your HDTV using an MHL cable, a Samsung Smart TV, or Samsung’s AllShare Cast Wireless Hub ($99.99).

WatchOn could save itself with its basic IR remote support, but even that has some issues. Like the HTC One, the S 4 has an infrared emitter, and it’ll control a broad array of TVs, DVRs, and other gadgets. Controlling my TiVo, though, I found it entered channel numbers frustratingly slowly.

Now we get to the ugly; some ideas which should probably have been left on the drawing table. The new Samsung Hub store is a damp squib, a misfire that serves the company (by getting people to buy DRMed media which only works on Samsung devices), but doesn’t serve consumers. It has a solid selection of music, a rather strange collection of movies, and a hideously weak choice of books. Samsung should leave the media business up to Blockbuster, Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, all of whose apps run just fine on the Galaxy S 4.

Also, Samsung’s Air View and Smart Scroll aren’t quite ready for prime time. Air View lets you preview certain types of content by hovering a finger over them, but it’s just a little physically awkward to hold your finger like that, and the information you get is rarely very helpful. Smart Scroll is supposed to let you scroll Web pages by tilting your head (it’s a camera-based trick) but I found it spastic and unreliable.

There’s more. Oh yes, there’s more. Just like with the Galaxy S3, this is a phone where you can discover new things a year after you have it.

(Next page: Multimedia and Conclusions)

Multimedia and Conclusions

Multimedia
Samsung’s megapixels face up well against HTC’s UltraPixels in its One, given good light. The Galaxy S 4 has a 13-megapixel main camera and a 2-megapixel front camera, and both are of perfectly decent quality.

This being Samsung, of course, there’s a ridiculous number of special modes, some of which are absolute genius, some of which are novelties, and some of which don’t work. Do I need to make a list? OK. Here’s goes:

HDR: great. Everybody does that now. Dual Shot, where you use both cameras and get your own face into the photo you’re taking, is actually surprisingly useful. Animated photo is Cinemagram, which, well, animates your photos. Eraser is kind of amazing; it really does remove photobombers. Best Face is BlackBerry’s TimeShift feature, letting you merge several group shots so you get everyone smiling. Drama Shot is a strange gimmick which puts several versions of a moving subject into your photo; it’s very picky and hard to use. Beauty Face, seemingly useless, appears to slightly blur photos.

So much. There’s so much. But how about the pictures themselves? They’re good. The 13-megapixel main camera takes sharp photos and allows plenty of room for cropping and zooming, which is where the S 4’s camera really jumps ahead of the HTC One’s UltraPixels. As soon as you try to crop or zoom, the One falls apart, but the S 4 has headroom.

In macro mode, the S 4’s images were a bit noisier than the One’s, and colors weren’t quite as rich. There was a touch of a greenish cast sometimes. But the differences are, admittedly, at nitpicky levels.

Low-light performance was a mixed bag. An image captured at 1/40 second with decent definition on the One, was captured at 1/30 and a little dimmer on the GS 4, but it was still usable. But in some indoors situations, the GS 4 dropped to 1/15 second, the boundary where things start to become blurry. That’s frustrating, but also par for the course with any mobile-phone camera other than the HTC One, the Nokia Lumia 920, and sometimes the iPhone 5. The front camera is a perfectly average 2-megapixel shooter; I prefer the One’s, which has a much wider angle.

The GS 4’s 1080p video recording is superior to the HTC One’s, able to keep a consistent 30 frames per second indoor and out. You lose the One’s HDR video mode, which is definitely something to consider if you do a lot of shooting with bright backgrounds, but you gain both 120-frames-per-second slo-mo and 8x quasi-time-lapse video, which can be really fun to play with.

Music and video playback are top notch here; the S 4 supports all expected formats up to 1080p, including DivX and Xvid video. The photo gallery app can handle Dropbox and Google, but not Facebook libraries.

Conclusions
The Galaxy S 4 goes up against the HTC One and iPhone 5 in T-Mobile’s newly revitalized lineup. All three are excellent, highly recommended phones.

The Galaxy S 4 costs $629.99 at T-Mobile, or $149.99 up-front plus 24 monthly payments of $20 per month. T-Mobile no longer requires service contracts, and you can pay off your phone early and own it outright. The HTC One and iPhone 5 are both slightly less expensive at $579.99, or $99.99 plus $20 per month for 24 months.

The One and iPhone 5 have stronger design points of view with focused, flagship features. The HTC One is about Blinkfeed, Watch, and Zoes. The iPhone is really about the apps. Both other devices have classier, higher-quality bodies, and both have better low-light photography performance than the S 4.

The S 4 is all over the place. It’s American excess in a phone. It’s like Microsoft Office. But you know what? People love Microsoft Office, because everybody finds what they need in it, and they don’t all find or need the same things. The Samsung Galaxy S 4 has a million ideas and needs to share all of them, right now, and it doesn’t matter if five of them are ridiculous because you’re going to think the next five are brilliant. And wow, that call quality is tremendous. All of this makes the Samsung Galaxy S 4 our latest Editors’ Choice on T-Mobile.