The Galaxy S4 has everything for Mr. Generic - Crave - Mobile ...

(Credit: Samsung)

The Samsung Galaxy S4 shows a different type of engineering--engineering for the masses. This reminds me of someone I work with--he is the world. What I mean is, he is Mr. Generic--his tastes mirror the world. He drinks wine and is sufficiently appreciative of it but he buys all sorts and isn't exactly a wine geek, but will buys wine aerator accessories and a super-expensive hydraulic cork remover. He prefers auto transmission cars, preferably the Direkt-Schalt-Getriebe type which has two clutches, with high-tech wizardry making shifts seamless and smooth. He likes a big turbo engine but never goes to the race track, never totally appreciative of the special skills required in track driving. He is the casual user for everything, so he is the world.

And he sings praises about the Samsung Galaxy S3, but no more, now it's the S4, with all the bells and whistles which geeks have been using all along, includingheart rate monitoring and being able to interface with weighing machines.

Obviously it must wow the world with an octa-core CPU, double the already overkill four cores in today's killer phones. The S4 even has a sensor to track your eye, and when you look away from the screen while watching a video, the video pauses. And if you move and gesture your hand, the page scrolls. It has a replaceable 2600mAh battery which is substantially bigger than the competition--a remarkable feat of engineering. In addition, it has the newest Corning Gorilla Glass 3 for its screen, a 5-inch full-HD display and a 13-megapixel camera which doesn't lose to the competition.

It is a phone which spec-based buyers like Mr. Generic would have no qualms buying. No matter how ugly it is, it would be his top choice. And the world's. It is truly the greatest phone the world has ever known, spec-wise. It has plucked all the fruits of greatest yield--LTE, big replaceable battery, a full-HD display. It has achieved every popular function a phone needs, and now even starts to take on questionably useful functions and markets them like they are the newest things in the world. Interfacing with weighing machines is no more innovative than Apple selling videoconferencing as Facetime.

Look at Mercedes Benz. After having everything destroyed during the war, it worked hard to build cars to sell to the world, especially to the US. The Mercedes Benz Ponton marked its true awakening--the first truly new chassis after the war, the precursor of the E-Class. This was Mercedes' S2. Then it made increasingly superb cars, all of them with well-engineered core car functions, until the Mercedes Benz 600--the behemoth of a car, the pinnacle of automotive achievement, with all the bells and whistles and the choice of all the popes, dictators, warlords, conmen and heads of state.

That Mercedes 600 is the Mercedes' S4.

The rest is history. Mercedes went on to sell stuff with great success, making feature-laden cars full of useless features not really related to the joy of driving, with the A class hamster-like car, C-class for aspirants, E-class for towkays who'd rather not make a choice and the S-Class for captains of industry and the CLS for men undergoing midlife crisis. Overall, a great success.

But the engineering for Mercedes changed from making great cars to great appliances. Appliances are cars made for Mr Generic, people who think themselves enthusiasts who aren't true petrol heads, but pore endlessly over spec sheets for number wars alone without any appreciation of whether it's truly a good car.

Great cars continued to be made by BMW, where Mercedes left off, but even BMW started making appliances, too. The last guy left standing is now Porsche, faithfully churning out light, reliable sports cars with race-proven engines. They are not terribly overpowered with great finesse in feel, weightage of controls, nimbleness and generally a great pleasure to drive. Porsche doesn't care that much for the spec sheet, with one of their best cars, the Cayman, being on the same power level as a Volkswagen Golf R, with a meager spec (there's the story of the Yamaha audio engineer who stepped into a Cayman and commented that the radio sounds like a postwar Sony transistor radio, but later switched off the radio commenting that in a Cayman, the engine is all the soundtrack he needs) but Porsche sell cars to people who really enjoy cars. Of course, Porsche sells automatic cars too, but at least the company sticks to its guns and keeps the manual cars available for the customers they really want.

For the auto guys, yes, there's Honda and Lotus but this is not an auto Web site and I've already written far too much about cars.

Samsung has made its last smartphone for enthusiasts today. The pinnacle of achievement. After this, everything would be an appliance.

I'm not about to buy the S4 because I need the OS from the source--so it's got be a Nexus. Why don't they just make a 8 core 5-inch LTE phone out of carbon fiber, with a big 3,000mAH battery, a 5-megapixel camera with big fat pixels for great low light performance instead of small little ones, with plain vanilla unadorned Android OS with no bloatware from the manufacturer? Is it that difficult? They'd save so much on the engineering and the company which makes it would be the next Porsche. I'd pay a big premium to the brave manufacturer simply because it dares to make something which even the great giant Samsung is afraid to.

So who will step up and make the Porsche of phones?

Source: http://asia.cnet.com/the-galaxy-s4-has-everything-for-mr-generic-62220848.htm

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