Samsung Galaxy S4 tipped for 5

How big is the Galaxy S4 going to be? It might seem silly, but it’s one of the gadget world’s most important questions for 2013. Will Samsung keep making bigger and bigger phones? Will the S series merge with the Note, or will the Note get even more ludicrously enormous again?

With Samsung such a massive force in the industry, the answers will affect what all the other phone makers do, so it’s no surprise to see the gadget rumour mill addressing this key question.

DigiTimes, the Taiwan-based purveyor of tech gossip, reckons the Korean giant is plumping for a 5-inch display with a Full HD resolution of 1,080×1,920 pixels — the same as most flatscreen TVs. It’ll follow HTC’s 5-inch Full HD Butterfly and the Sharp’s 5-inch Full HD Aquos SH930W. Are you spotting a pattern yet?

Next year’s Android superphones are set to boast astonishingly high pixel density — the number of dots in every inch of screen space. Not only will they be mahoosive, they’ll be staggeringly detailed too. The Butterfly and Aquos’ 440 and 443ppi panels far exceed Apple’s ‘retina’ standard of 326ppi, and you really have to squint to discern individual pixels on the iPhone 5.

Other screen rumours whirling around Samsung’s fourth-gen flagship phone reckon it’ll have a flexible display — not so the whole phone can bend and fold, but so it’s practically unbreakable.

The S4’s innards are unlikely to add more cores, with this year’s standard of quad-core chips set to continue. Samsung will show off an eight-core phone chip with ARM next year, but we’ll probably have to wait a generation before it’s grunting away in our blowers. There’s hardly any rush: not many apps take advantage of four cores yet. 4G is a given though, and the latest version of Android too.

Are you hankering after a TV in your pocket? Or would you rather phone makers focused on another element of mobilecraft next year? Give me your dream specs down in the comments, or over on our cutting-edge Facebook page.

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Samsung Galaxy S4 tipped for 5

Supermarkets have already started putting out their Christmas chocolates. If that annoys you, just wait until you hear the first rumours of the follow-up to the Samsung Galaxy S3 — the Samsung Galaxy S4.

The first reports have emerged from Korea that Samsung is planning to unveil the S4 in February 2013.

Sources say the S4 will make its debut at Mobile World Congress, the annual phone-focused trade show in Barcelona.

And the early word on the street is that the S4 will pack a mammoth 5-inch screen, a quad-core Exynos processor and 4G LTE data. Samsung is also reportedly considering whether the S4 will sport a flexible display. Maybe it will have a selection of new colours too.

All very interesting, but I’m sceptical. For a start, the S3 didn’t appear at this year’s MWC for the same reason Apple’s iPhone has never appeared there: the S3 and iPhone on their own are bigger than any trade show. So I’d be surprised if Samsung waded back into the scrum with the S4.

Plus a 5-inch screen is heading into Galaxy Note territory, which is a stretch when the S3 is already plenty big enough.

No doubt the rumours will continue, but if the S4 is as closely guarded as the S3, we won’t know for certain for a good while yet.

Previous rumours have suggested we could be treated to a Windows Phone version of the S3. Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 software launches with a range of new phones in November, so by next year’s MWC will be in several phones.

A new version of the S3 is expected this year with 4G. The Samsung Galaxy S3 LTE is one of the batch of LTE phones that will work on EE’s 4G network, the next-generation data infrastructure from Orange and T-Mobile’s parent company Everything Everywhere. 

Can Samsung improve on the S3? Are you annoyed another new version is coming out so soon? What would you like to see in the S4? Tell me your thoughts in the comments or on our Facebook page.

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