Samsung Galaxy S5 Gets Official

The newest Samsung phone is here. The Samsung Galaxy S5 is, of course, an upgraded version of its predecessor the Galaxy S4. The Galaxy S5 has a 5.1-inch, 1920×1080 display, and it comes with a fingerprint reader on the home button, as well as a heart rate monitor around back near the camera flash. One of the newest smartphones of 2014, it uses the Android 4.4 Kitkat. It is also dust and water resistant, which may be the most useful new feature to ship on the phone. It is still has a plastic case, rounded corners and a pill-shaped home button, but the fingerprint scanner and heart-rate sensor are significant hardware additions.

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Heart Rate Monitor

On the new Samsung phone, the heart rate monitor is found at the back beside the camera flash. An optical heart rate monitor that will track your pulse and provide that info in S Health 3.0, Samsung’s fitness monitoring app, which already tracks steps taken and calories burnt.

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Finger Swipe Sensor

A big new hardware feature here is the fingerprint sensor. Many will no doubt accuse Samsung of copying Apple once again, but the fingerprint sensor here is quite different from Apple’s on the iPhone 5s. It can register three separate fingerprints, and registration takes eight swipes (it’s swipe-based, rather than asking you to hold your fingerprint down as with Apple’s). You can unlock the phone using fingerprint recognition, but also use it to authorize PayPal to make payments online – for anything. The finger swipe can also unlock Private Mode on the Galaxy S5, which provides access to content that a user would rather keep hidden from anyone else who might gain access to their phone, like kids and strangers. It’s a handy and much-needed addition to mobile, which so far hasn’t had any really easy way to limit access to on-device media and content selectively.

From http://www.slashgear.com/

4K Video And Adjustable Focus

The Galaxy S5 has a new camera, which is 16 megpixels on the rear – with a video capture of 4k esolution(even though the screen on the device itself can only manage 1080p, or one quarter of that). The new camera also has a slow motion function like in the iPhone 5s, as well as post-capture refocus selection, like in the expensive and cumbersome Lytro light field camera. This is another feature that should make its way to many mobiles this year, but it should definitely help Samsung sell some smartphones to shutter-happy mobile photogs. There’s also hybrid autofocus, which includes both contrast detection and phase detection, which is the same kind of system used in advanced DSLRs and mirrorless digital cameras. Samsung promises this autofocus will be able to lock on in as few as 0.3 seconds, making it the fastest ever for a smartphone.

Other Specs and Release Date

Samsung Galaxy S5 packs a 2.5GHz Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, NFC, LTE, Bluetooth 4.0, and either 16GB or 32GB of storage. It includes a microSD slot for expanding storage (which could work with the newly announced 128GB capacity for iPhone-beating storage) and a Download Booster software feature that combines LTE and Wi-Fi data connection for superfast downloading of larger files, though at the expense of your mobile data bandwidth. The rugged design means you can take it anywhere, but you’ll have to deal with a flap for the Micro USB 3.0 charging/power port on the bottom. It does offer a black and white mode for power saving (and promises up to 10 hours of LTE web browsing or 12 hours of video playback), which is interesting. The Samsung Galaxy S5 release date will be on April 11, 2014 in a first crop of almost 150 countries according to Samsung. Colours available are charcoal Black, shimmery White, electric Blue and copper Gold.

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