Was thinking of picking up this phone but a lot of ppl at android central say the phone is laggy? Any of you guys experiencing this problem? May just go with the HTC One.
Ok my experience. When I got the phone this morning and was going through the initial setup and a restore from google it began downloading my apps. During this process there was a heck of a lot of lag.
After it finished installing everything it was just the occasional hiccup / stutter.
I looked at the ram / apps running in the background and there was a ton of services running that I most certainly had not initiated.
I also noticed with air gesture / air view / smart stay / smart scroll features enabled the phone would be more susceptible to stuttering.
I turned them all off. Likewise I turned off S-Voice activation through the home button. This made HUGE difference to the home button response.
Finally the thing I found OTT on Touchwiz is the animations. Folder animation in particular is just plain silly. A full folder will take 2-3 seconds for the silly animation to finish. So I went into developer options and turned off animations.
After a power down and power back on the phone has been fast and responsive and my memory usage has dropped from 1.3-1.5 gb of 1.78gb to just 900mb of 1.78gb. That's a huge difference, and the only thing I've changed is turned off some of the Samsung features that you'll use once and never again.
The phone now seems as fast and responsive as the HTC One.
But out of the box the HTC One is a lot better at speed, general UI optimisation and memory management. Samsung has packed the phone full of software features all of which actually are to the detriment of the user experience in my oppinon than enhance it.
With them turned off it's very nippy indeed.
----------
why would u get the phone if you're going to disable the features? The S4 is all about features.
Because those features come at a very high price to the user experience. The benefits of being able to occasionally wipe your hand across the screen in an exaggerated manner to scroll (when if your hand is that near anyway a finger swipe is faster and mire natural) or start scroll where you have to pretty much creak your neck up and down again in a more exaggerated manner than normal, is contrary to the 'natural' UI Samsung are aiming for.
They are features that in all honesty do not add to a user experience, but may serve as 'ooo look what my phone can do' rather than actually serve a genuine purpose of improving user experience.
Likewise because these use up resources / memory and battery they actually cause more harm to the general user experience than benefit it. They are indeed a detriment to it.
Since disabling those features the S4 is blazingly fast and far more able to manage its system memory.
With them enabled i get stuttering, delays in app response / opening, and it feels like the phone just isn't keeping up with me.
The S4 has mighty hardware, but these software features samsung has packed into the phone and I'm not talking about S-Apps as some of those are grand, but the ones baked into system level are hindering it.
HTC decided ok will keep things simple. We'll improve speakers and sound. EVERYONE benefits and it comes at no penalty to the OS.
Samsung decided we'll make you able to wave your hand over the screen two or three times to get it to scroll photos or creak your neck back and forth to get it to scroll a page. Features that are not natural, do not enhance the way we already interact, and are minority features that after initial play I suspect a very small minority will use. The cost of them of performance, then in my eyes further negates them to the land of useless features.