Introduction

The Huawei Ascend G510 sits somewhere in the middle of the Chinese company's Android range, squaring off against the likes of the Sony Xperia U, LG Optimus L5 II and the Windows-toting Nokia Lumia 620.

Huawei, the name everyone knows but no one can pronounce, has established itself as a company no longer tied to the white label, network-branded handsets. Previous offerings in the form of the Huawei Ascend G300, Ascend G330 and Ascend P1 are starting to give way to the Ascend P2 and Huawei's phablet, the Ascend Mate.

The Huawei Ascend G510 has a full price of £130 (around AU$200 / US$200), meaning it is likely to land in the hands of teenagers, students and first time smartphone buyers alike.

The phone itself is a very smart affair, the all-glass front and black bezel taking design cues from, well, just about every smartphone ever designed. This is by no means a bad thing, with the Huawei Ascend G510 looking like a premium phone, rather than aiming at the lower end of the spectrum.

Under the hood, Huawei has chosen to power the Ascend G510 with a dual-core 1.2GHz processor, sat alongside a 5MP rear-facing camera sensor, and a 0.3MP front-facing sensor, and also comes fitted with NFC and DLNA streaming capabilities, and DTS sound.

To make use of this hardware, Huawei has retrofitted the Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean software with its own custom UI, called Emotion.

With the Huawei Ascend G510 measuring in at 134 x 67 x 9.9mm (5.3 x 2.6 x 0.4 inches), it sits nicely in the hand, and the 4.5 inch screen is the right size for one handed use. At 154g (5.4oz), the Huawei Ascend G510 is by no means the lightest of handsets, with it sitting noticeably in the pocket.

The glass face of the Huawei Ascend G510 holds no physical buttons, but there are three soft keys hidden in the bottom of the bezel. The only physical buttons are the volume rocker and power/lock, situated on the top left-hand side of the Huawei Ascend G510, with the uncovered micro USB port in the bottom-left.

We initially found the positioning of the power/lock button awkward, given its usual position on the right-hand side, or top of smartphones. This faded after prolonged use though - it's just a case of getting used to it.

The three soft keys that we mentioned earlier are situated within the lower portion of the black bezel. From left to right are the Back, Home and Menu buttons, with there being no LED light behind them making it a little awkward to find the right button, especially while in the dark.

The top of the Huawei Ascend G510 houses the 3.5mm headphone port.

Huawei has generously made the back cover removable, enabling you to carry extra batteries around, as well as giving you access to the microSD and SIM slots. The back of the phone holds the 5MP rear sensor, as well as the LED flash, speaker, microphone and obligatory branding.

The box holds no surprises, with the Huawei Ascend G510 bringing the separate USB plug and charger/data cable that we have become accustomed to, as well as a set of cheap headphones that doubles up as a hands-free headset.

In all, the Huawei Ascend G510 makes a decent first impression, with the all-glass front alluding to a premium device. After extended use the phone can feel a little heavy, but it's a sturdy device, one that we imagine won't fall to pieces if you drop it (not that we're saying you will).

Interface

Every manufacturer worth its salt is providing even the most basic level of customisation to its Android devices, from HTC's Sense to Samsung's TouchWiz overlays.

For the Ascend G510, Huawei has ditched its HAP (Huawei Android Platform) 5.1 software that graced the likes of the Huawei Ascend G300.

In its place, Huawei has released its Emotion UI overlay.

Unlike some of the minimal changes that HAP5.1 brought, Emotion's customisation is far more aggressive, with the complete removal of Android's app drawer.

This move is intended to make the Android OS a little less confusing, making it a lot more similar to iOS on the iPhone.

While we can see the appeal (iOS is a fantastic operating system) we were disappointed, with Emotion giving the Huawei Ascend G510 more of a 'My First Smartphone' feel that doesn't befit a device of this build quality.

Couple this with the numerous system apps that appear on the Huawei Ascend G510, the home screens (you can have up to nine) soon begin to look a little cluttered.

Thankfully Android, much like iOS, enables you to create folders on the home screens.

This means that you can bundle all the apps that you are never going to use into one small folder, since you're unable to remove them.

Another niggle we found with Emotion UI is the inability to access the Settings menu by using the Menu soft key.

This is a minor inconvenience, given the Settings icon sat on the main home screen, and the Quick Settings found in the notification bar, but it gave Emotion a slightly less intuitive feel.

The Quick Settings, though, are a godsend. Becoming increasingly popular on Android devices, this is a feature we have long been fans of, enabling you to switch different aspects of the phone (such as Mobile Data or GPS) easily, and helping to prolong the battery life.

Like HTC Sense, the Emotion UI is customisable, with there being different themes on offer.

While there's not a whole lot to choose between for each theme, we liked the ability to change. Changing the icons as well as the wallpaper almost gave the phone a new feel.

Widgets-wise, there wasn't a whole lot on offer. Huawei does offer a master widget, that can hold smaller widgets inside.

While this means that you can fit your favourite widgets into one screen, we don't see a major advantage over having them separate.

The transition effect between the home screens is also customisable, showing that Huawei has given Emotion some real thought.

The lock screen comes with the ability to load up one of three different apps quickly; the camera, contacts and dialler apps.

This proved useful when we needed to access the camera quickly, but we were left disheartened because the app choice isn't customisable.

One app that we found particularly useful is the Profiles app.

With an app icon on the home screen, and quick access via the notifications bar, you can set up different profiles for different scenarios. The defaults for these are Normal, Sleep, Meeting and Outdoor, with you being able to add your own.

Within the app, you can control volume and brightness levels, the length of time inactive before the Huawei Ascend G510 goes into sleep mode, and you're able to turn off different modes such as GPS and mobile data. We generally had Normal mode enabled, but it was great to be able to turn off multiple services before bed, or when going into meetings.

This meant we saved data, stopped ourselves from being woken up by 3am phone calls and prevented our boss from screaming at us for receiving a call (ironically during a meeting about not receiving his calls at 3am).

The 1.2GHz processor coped well with what we had to throw at it, the dual-core innards keeping everything running fairly smoothly, although the slightly low 512MB of RAM didn't help. Speeds of transitions are by no means anything to write home about, but equally we weren't left disappointed by long waiting times.

Contacts, calling and messaging

Contacts

Interestingly, after all the levels of customisation that Huawei has put into its Emotion UI, the contacts and calling apps on the Huawei Ascend G510 seem almost devoid of any real attention.

With no pre-bundled social media apps, other than Google+, Huawei appears to have missed a trick by not putting Facebook or Twitter apps on the phone in order to make use of Android's account aggregation. Thankfully, these apps are downloadable from the Google Play store.

We also feel that Huawei was wrong to not have a way of finding the same contacts from across your different accounts, but linking multiple contacts together is a breeze, if a little time consuming, done manually.

The contacts app is an attractive affair, the bright colour scheme being pleasing to the eye, especially when placed against Samsung's much darker contact system. In reality, it's the stock Android offering, so we were a tiny bit disappointed that Huawei hasn't added any level of customisation here.

The brand has kept the groups and favourites tabs for the Huawei Ascend G510, making it easier to message only select contacts. This is a feature that we have commented on in the past, and it is something that we are glad has managed to be included, since it is really useful if you have your contacts managed well.

Calling

The Dialler app is much simpler, continuing in Emotion's design ethos. Presented with only the T9 dial pad, there are no links to the contacts app. Thankfully the buttons are large on the 4.5-inch screen, making them easy to hit.

Smart dialling is also supported. This intuitive feature doesn't appear on nearly enough handsets for our liking, and is very useful to quickly search out a contact if you know the name or part of their number. Dialling 323 calls up both Dad as well as any contacts with 323 in them.

All standard call features are supported, from the contact's photo to accessing the dial pad from within the call. The Huawei Ascend G510's speaker was also loud and clear, with none of our contacts complaining that they couldn't hear us at any point. We also found that signal was maintained very well.

Messaging

Being an Android-based phone, the Huawei Ascend G510 comes with every form of messaging that you would imagine, SMS, IM in the form of Google Talk, and email in the form of Gmail and an email app.

The SMS app is very functional. The conversation screen comes with the now almost standard text bubbles, but the pale green and white, with contact photos, is very pleasing.

The Huawei Ascend G510's Gmail and email apps are also the Android standard. The Gmail app is clean and covers about everything that you get on the desktop version, including multiple accounts.

For non-Google accounts, the standard email app covers POP3/IMAP email standards, also combining multiple accounts, mail checking frequency and mail size limits.

As expected, the Huawei Ascend G510 includes the native Android keyboard, which we have always found to be perfectly functional, if lacking some of the higher end features found on other dedicated keyboard apps.

Fortunately, as part of Huawei's customisation, there is the creatively-named Huawei Input Method. In practice, we found it to be fairly accurate (although when you make a mistake it takes a few button pushes to correct) and able to suggest the next word, much like the superb SwiftKey app. Swype-style input is, unfortunately, not supported.

The keyboard is intuitive, with a swipe down or long-press on the key to select the alternate input (6 instead of Y, for example) working well. The option of also having a T9 keyboard instead of the now traditional Qwerty offering is well received.

Word prediction and autocorrect can be disabled (though we struggle to see why), and the internal dictionaries can be updated.

Overall the messaging capabilities of the Huawei Ascend G510 are not anything special. The keyboard app is better than the stock Android one, and the SMS app is functional and attractive. Alternate messaging capabilities such as Facebook Messenger are available from the Google Play Store.

Huawei also includes both of the native Android input methods, in the form of the Jelly Bean keyboard, and Google's voice typing. We highly doubt that you will need to use either of these, like we did in our Huawei Ascend G300 review, as Huawei's Input Method keyboard is very easy to use.

With the 4.5-inch screen, we did find that we were a little stretched when trying to use the keyboard in portrait mode. The keyboard works a lot better when you use two hands in portrait mode, since the keys are well spaced. The spacing does, however, make it more difficult if you type one-handed.

Internet, maps and apps

Internet

Now a mainstay of any mobile device, decent mobile browsing is a must.

The browsing experience on the Huawei Ascend G510 is thankfully one of its biggest selling points.

The big screen makes viewing web pages easy at all zoom levels, with everything looking clear and crisp.

Unfortunately Huawei didn't spend any time customising the stock browser. That said, Google has spent a long time creating a functional web browser.

Curiously, as with many modern Android handsets, the Huawei Ascend G510 ships with both the stock browser and Google's more famous Chrome browser.

In reality, there isn't a whole lot to choose between on the two browsers. We'd recommend using Chrome, because it loaded pages quicker and it ties in more efficiently with the desktop and other mobile versions.

Neither browser supports automatic text reflow, but both support certain levels of zoom. The native browser requires you to pinch to zoom, and then double-tap the screen, with text reflowing then.

Chrome requires a double-tap, but only zooms to make the text fit the page, without customising the zoom level.

Both browsers plugged along nicely, dual-core processor not seeming to struggle with loading pages, and they loaded fast over both Wi-Fi and 3G connections.

Loading the full desktop TechRadar page over Wi-Fi took around six to seven seconds, so while not blistering pace, we didn't find ourselves wishing it along.

Offline viewing is also available, saving the pages as images. While functional, this means that there is no ability to open links within the page, even when your data connection returns.

Tabbed browsing is also supported on the Huawei Ascend G510 through both browsers.

At the top-right of the screen, by the URL bar, is a little icon/number that can be selected, showing up all the tabs that you have open.

Incognito browsing is also available through both browsers.

In all, we can't fault the browsing experience on the Huawei Ascend G510. As we mentioned before, the screen lets the phone down overall, because it's hard to make out in bright sunlight.

Browsing speeds are fast enough that you're not left wishing that the phone would hurry up, especially when loading dedicated mobile sites.

Apps

Google's Android operating system first launched with the Android market, which it has since rebranded Google Play, and now heavily populated.

Google Play is well organised, divided into categories with general apps and games being split up, and then both being split further still.

Games and Apps are also viewable by Top Free, Top Paid, Top Grossing, Top New Free and Top New Paid. This is useful to help filter out the poorer apps that aren't filtered otherwise.

One of the major bonus points that Android has over other operating systems is its customisability.

For instance, should you not like the messaging app or the keyboard, it is simple to download a new one, such as Handcent SMS or Swype. It is also possible to install custom apps from other sources, including other app stores.

In the way of pre-installed apps, the Huawei Ascend G510 does come with some useful, and some not so useful, apps.

Google apps such as Google+, Talk, Gmail, Google Play, Play Music and YouTube are all present, alongside the Mapping apps such as Maps, Local and Navigation.

We were a little baffled by the lack of a Play Movies or Play Books app, although these are both available from the Google Play store.

Huawei's own apps such as the Profiles app that we mentioned before, and the Flashlight app, are very useful additions, whereas the inclusion of an EA Games app is less so.

We can't work out why it has been included, since it doesn't appear to download new games. If it does, it isn't helped by the fact that (on our review model at least) there are no games in any of the games categories.

Maps

Google Maps is possibly the most well known Google product, after its search function. Thankfully, Google has made its mapping application available on Android since its inception.

It has been said time and time again, the Google Maps application is absolutely superb. We won't go into too much detail, since you've heard it all before, but Google Maps is one of the most comprehensive mapping applications we've used, more than eclipsing Apple's offering.

Google Maps also includes Navigation software. We've always been impressed by Google's effort here, not least because it's free. There are other sat nav apps available from the Google Play store, but when you're in a spot of bother, Google will easily sort you out.

GPS lock-on is fast, finding us in our car and being able to provide us a route around town in next to no time.

Camera and Video

There are no real surprises in the camera department, with Huawei blessing the Ascend G510 with an average-sized 5MP rear sensor, and a mere 0.3MP VGA front-facing sensor. The camera app has also been well thought out, being clean and free of clutter.

Taking around a second to load is by no means the quickest, but having a link on the lock screen does mean it is slightly easier to take a photo, should the unexpected happen.

By unexpected, we obviously mean a cat that has done a thing the internet would enjoy.

Within the app, Huawei offers just about every feature that you can expect from a modern smartphone camera; Single or Panorama shooting modes, different visual effects, white balance control, varying scene modes, ISO levels, exposure levels, a timer, picture size and geo-location.

In all, we don't see a massive need for these settings, since the 5MP sensor is never going to be used for more than a few candid shots, or for taking some holiday photos, so won't replace a decent digital compact camera. Then again, the best camera is often the one that you have to hand, so maybe there is a place for them.

We could point out our disappointment at the lack of a dedicated shutter button, but the exclusion is now a common feature on the modern smartphone. The major bonus that the Huawei Ascend G510 has is that it includes selective focusing, enabling you to touch the screen in the area that you want the camera to focus on.

It seems like a small point, but it really makes a difference. Shutter speeds are also fairly impressive, with photos being taken quickly. There is some noticeable slow down in low light conditions, but the inclusion of a flash is very handy.

Photos taken indoors and in low light conditions appear grainy, with the flash increasing the images contrast. Photos taken outdoors were a different story. While it was difficult to see the screen in direct sunlight, the photos taken were very bright, with decent levels of contrast. Check out the images for yourself below.

Click here to see the full resolution image

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Video

The video recording runs in the same vein as still photography. The app is just as clean, but offers far fewer options. There are no video effects, but there is the ability to change the white balance and add GPS location info to the video.

The major downside to the video recording is the video resolution. VGA 640 x 480 is the maximum resolution for both the front and rear sensor, which is, quite frankly, appalling. There is also the chance to record in 320 x 240 for MMS messages.

In all, we wouldn't recommend using the Huawei Ascend G510 to record baby's first steps or your first dance at a wedding, but it'll suffice to cover your dad dancing later on in the evening, as the drink starts to flow.

Media

While not proving that it has the capabilities to produce high quality media, the Huawei Ascend G510, complete with its 4.5-inch screen and DTS sound, was seemingly designed with media consumption considered very seriously.

Huawei has bolstered the 4GB internal storage (closer to 2GB after the operating system has taken its share of the space) with microSD card support. We're often left wondering why this isn't something that is present in a lot more devices, since it enables you to store a lot more data.

We've mentioned the screen throughout this review, and when talking about media consumption, the screen brightness issue raises its head again. The screen is bright when indoors, and is very clear, but if you plan to watch a lot of videos while sat in the park, we will have to suggest looking elsewhere.

Music

The media experience on the Huawei Ascend G510 is, on the whole, very pleasant. The music app is well thought through, and very attractive. A large angled album cover takes up most of the screen space, with the media controls at the bottom.

Tapping the album artwork brings up a list of songs from that album, and swiping the cover to the side gives you quick access to albums. Other media controls cover the basic play/pause, track skipping, repeat and shuffle buttons.

One advantage that Huawei likes to point out (with the logo adorning the back of the Huawei Ascend G510) is the DTS sound. Much like HTC has Beats Audio, Huawei has added extra software in order to enrich your audio experience.

That's the theory anyway - in practice we found that there was very little effect. Sound was richer, and seemed a little louder, but it was negligible. We doubt we would have noticed if we hadn't been listening for it.

We were a little disappointed that with all the customisation in place throughout Huawei's Emotion UI, there was no way of manipulating media through the notifications pane. It can't be too much to ask to put a play/pause button and a track skipping button alongside the track name. Other manufacturers manage it, after all.

Video

Video-wise, the Huawei Ascend G510 supports MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 playback. Surprisingly, Huawei doesn't have a dedicated video app to access from the home screen like it does with music. In order to watch a video, you must locate it in the pre-loaded File Manager app, then open it there.

Unsurprisingly, the video player is just the stock Android player, offering no functionality other than playing and pausing the video, or skipping to a select point in the video using the slide bar. With a screen of this size, this is something that we were very disheartened about, despite our concerns over the brightness.

FM radio

Until now we would have said that FM radio is becoming an almost standard feature on modern smartphones.

That said, the latest flagship Samsung device, the Samsung Galaxy S4, ships without this capability. We are always thankful for the inclusion of an FM radio, though.

As always, you need some headphones plugged in for this to work, though that doesn't mean to say that you can't play music through the rear speaker.

In terms of functionality, the Huawei Ascend G510 found every radio station we expected it to. The app interface is also well designed, with the ability to auto-tune, or easily manually select using a small scroll wheel.

DLNA streaming

DLNA streaming is handled through a dedicated DLNA app. We are fans of the way that it keeps everything together and tidy, and the ability to stream media from our phone to our TV, or from our PC to our phone.

In practice, we don't see that there will be a massive need for DLNA on a phone of this price, but it is something we could have forgone in pursuit of saving a few pennies.

Photos

Photos are accessed via the Gallery app. The app itself is fairly attractive, with large tiles showing the most recent image from each folder. We were left a little disappointed though, as the Ascend G510 didn't pull in our Picasa or Facebook albums.

The Huawei Ascend G510 does also provide some basic photo editing, accessed by the menu button. These include image rotation, cropping, light levels editing, basic image effects (such as posterise or fish-eye), and colour levels including tinting, black and white and doodles.

These effects are fun to play with, and can make images brighter and more interesting, yet we don't see them being used often.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life is something that is hotly contested from device to device. When buying a smartphone, you will at least expect a whole day's moderate usage from it, which is something that seems very fair.

That said, everybody uses their phones for different things, so it can be a bit more difficult.

If you plan to make the jump up from a feature phone - where batteries can easily last a week on a charge - over to the Huawei Ascend G510, there will be a bit of a shock. There's also a more minor shock for the more experienced smartphone users.

The 1700mAh battery that Huawei has equipped the Ascend G510 with is pretty poor.

Let's put that into some perspective. For all our phone reviews, we use a standardised test in order to ensure we draw fair comparisons.

After running the test on the Samsung Galaxy S3 Mini - a phone with a much brighter 4-inch screen and a smaller 1500mAh battery - we were left with an impressive 80% battery life left. However, the same test yielded 68% battery on the Huawei Ascend G510.

After taking the phone off its charge in the morning, we did manage to squeeze a day's use out of the Huawei Ascend G510.

Unfortunately, when we say a day's use, that involved a constant Wi-Fi connection, checking emails every so often, sending a couple of texts, as well as some Angry Birds and Temple Run action. Heavier usage than that will mean you might want to keep a phone charger in your desk drawer at work, or in your bag.

Connectivity

You would struggle to call the Huawei Ascend G510 lacking in the connectivity department, since the only notable omissions are 4G and an infra-red sensor. These remain the preserve of flagship devices such as the HTC One, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z.

Huawei has provided the Ascend G510 with HSDPA to 7.2Mbps and HSUPA to 5.76Mbps, as well as Wi-Fi 802.11 to b/g/n standard. It also has portable hotspot capabilities, should you need to provide your tablet or laptop with Wi-Fi when out and about.

Bluetooth is supported at 2.1 standard, so it's by no means the latest, but it is perfectly functional. Unsurprisingly, the Huawei Ascend G510 also comes with GPS and A-GPS support, as well as the far more surprising inclusion of NFC.

NFC is becoming increasingly popular among mobile manufacturers, mobile accessories and in retail outlets.

With NFC looking to become very popular over the next few years, seeing it appear on lower end devices such as the Huawei Ascend G510 is very promising, and great if you're tying yourself into a 24-month contract.

Also on offer are the previously mentioned micro USB connectivity, since it doubles up as a charging point, as well as the ability to stream wirelessly over DLNA.

Connection to a PC is done via the supplied micro USB cable. On the Huawei Ascend G510, you are prompted to select what mode you would like to connect with, from a choice of Media Device (MTP), Camera (PTP) or USB mass storage.

On many devices you won't see a real difference between Media Device and USB mass storage modes, since both enable you to drag and drop media freely between your PC and the phone. Huawei provides a decent filing system on the G510, meaning that anything you transfer can be easily accessed via the File Manager.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

Well, now you've read our Huawei Ascend G510 review (or skipped straight to this page), you'll have a pretty good idea of what we are going to say here.

We've had our chance to play with the Huawei Ascend G510, and while we encountered some problems along the way, on the whole the Chinese device held its own. And at its £130 (around AU$200/US$200) price point, Huawei could be on to a winner.

We liked

The design and build quality of the Huawei Ascend G510 is really impressive. The all-glass front and black bezel may look a lot like most smartphones that have ever been designed, but then if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Including a microSD port is also a major bonus, one that we are surprised isn't available on every smartphone going. It's also particularly necessary if you plan to store music and videos on the Huawei Ascend G510, since the internal storage is a bit small.

Shipping with Android Jelly Bean is also a major bonus, since it has the buttery smoothness and the added security that comes with the latest software.

The Huawei Ascend G510 is also a well connected device. NFC and DLNA streaming are still relatively new technologies, and until recently they've remained solely on higher end devices. Making its way onto cheaper devices will help NFC's adoption, and helps to future-proof the Huawei Ascend G510.

We disliked

When coming to Android customisation, just about every manufacturer has implemented some sort of overlay to the stock operating system, but Huawei's Emotion UI is one of the poorer ones we've seen. We commend its effort, since in many ways it provides a nice level of customisation, with different themes giving the Huawei Ascend G510 a new feel, should you choose.

On the flip-side, we feel that the omission of the app drawer is just one step too far, making it overly simple, and can make home screens seem cluttered if you don't spend time organising them.

With the inclusion of microSD support, it seems a little odd that we would mention the poor internal storage. That said, not every app can be moved across to the SD card, meaning that over time, the 2GB remaining space from the 4GB storage will become full.

We also have to mention the screen. While playing with the Huawei Ascend G510 inside, we found that it was more than usable. That all changes when you step outside. If you're lucky enough to get some sunshine, the screen becomes very difficult to see, which makes watching movies or taking photos very difficult.

Final verdict

We liked the Huawei Ascend G510. It provides some very nifty features at an attractive price point. The G510 shows that Huawei really does have the ability to compete against the well established smartphone manufacturers.

The Huawei Ascend G510 is definitely a phone that you won't be embarrassed to pull out of your pocket. Looks-wise, it is up there with some of the higher end phones. Not as high as the HTC One or the Sony Xperia Z, but then as their company's flagship phones, we can forgive that.

In everyday use, Huawei's offering managed to hold up under general use, but it started to struggle under heavier use. Watching a movie or playing games for any length of time manages to drain the battery a bit faster than we would like from a modern smartphone.

On the flip side, it packs in NFC and DLNA capabilities, which we expect to become more prevalent in daily life as the technology becomes cheaper and more widespread.

As with every phone, we can't tell you what to buy, since everyone has different needs. Overall, though, we would definitely suggest taking a look at the Huawei Ascend G510. With Android onboard, plus some nifty tech, it provides some stiff competition to the established competitors - the likes of the Sony Xperia U, LG Optimus L5 II and the Windows-toting Nokia Lumia 620.

You probably know Cat or Caterpillar as the guys in yellow and black, makers of construction equipment and those boots the cool kids were wearing for a little while. Now you can add smartphones to that list, thanks to the Cat B15.

Actually, the phone is made by Bullitt Mobile, a licensee of Cat, and this isn't its first smartphone rodeo. Its already made a couple of phones under the Cat name, and it launched the Cat B15 at MWC 2013 in Barcelona. This rugged device has been available in Europe for a little while, and is making its North American debut at a pre-show event for CTIA 2013.

Rubber outside, Jelly Bean inside

The Cat B15 has a rubber and aluminum shell with a sweet Android 4.1: Jelly Bean center. It's built to make calls and survive falls; with just a 5-megapixel camera and dual-core 1GHz processor, it's not designed for much else.

As we mentioned, the Cat B15 has been available in Europe for a while now, and can actually be purchased as an unlocked device directly from Cat for $349/£300. Representatives showing the device couldn't name the U.S. carriers that will carry it.

No 4G here, sadly

However, we'll tell you that the Cat B15 is a GSM phone, so therefore AT&T and T-Mobile are your likely candidates. No dice with GSM carriers Sprint and Verizon. It's also 3G only, so forget about up-to-date data speeds.

Like a lot of rubberized and ruggedized phones, such as the Kyocera Torque, the Cat B15 looks like a phone in a heavy rubber case. Phones like this are bulky by nature, but it does seem like Cat has slimmed down the B15 as much as possible.

Looks like a handsome screwdriver

The B15 is just shy of 5-inches, with a width of 2.7-inches and .58-inches of thickness. It also feels pretty good, and doesn't weigh too much, just 5.9 oz. Its rubber body casing and aluminum sides give it the look of a toolbox or an eye-catching screwdriver.

The display is a 4-inch 480 x 800 screen resolution. But get this: it's designed to detect and stand up to a wet finger, because the Cat B15 is waterproof at a depth of up to 1 meter, for thirty minutes. We actually had the chance to wet our digits and give the phone a swipe, and it did indeed work. Frequent snorkelers, we may have your next phone here.

The manufacturer also claims the B15 is "impervious to dust," which is likely thanks to all the rubber seals fitted in each and every port. The headphone jack seals up, as does the micro-USB charging port.

Treat it like a rented phone

It's also rated for a drop of up to six feet, which should be more than enough to survive a tumble from your hand to the floor. Cat representatives on hand were eager to drop the phone and prove this claim.

Getting back to the build, one of the things we like least about a smartphone case is how it makes the buttons difficult to push. Luckily, the B15's yellow rubber buttons weren't too bad. They didn't press as easy as an iPhone 5's unlock button, but they didn't take too much effort, either.

It opens up, no mallet required

You wouldn't think it, but the B15 actually has an open body design. It takes some doing, but you can unlatch the back and open it up to reveal a 2000 mAh battery and microSD slot. There's only 4GB of on board storage, so it's a good thing you can add an additional 32GB.

Of course, this isn't really a media centric or image snapping phone. The camera is only 5-mp and the processor is low-end, but flipping across menus and diving into the app drawer, the B15 was no slouch. We didn't detect any stuttering, and the browser opened with acceptable speed.

We'd guess that's Jelly Bean at work, as the B15 runs a version that's darn close to stock. We noticed just one toolbar that smacked of manufacturer meddling.

Early Verdict

When a brand like Cat enters the smartphone game, it's tempting to look at it as selling a name, not a phone. Cat has parleyed its black and yellow good looks and blue collar street cred into clothes, boots, watches and more. Its even appeared at London Fashion Week.

We won't know if Cat is a smartphone dilettante until we have the B15 in for a full review, but there's a good chance the phone could prove it's worth, and frankly, phones like this could use a little style. We've all seen far too many hideously shattered iPhones and over-the-top protective cases. If someone could sell a tougher phone to that crowd, not just construction workers, they'd be doing the world a favor.

Ultimately though, the B15 seems like a budget phone in a well-constructed case. It's 3G only, has a weak processor and camera, and the display is none to sharp. The battery is a bit small at 2000 mAh, which is worrying on a phone that should be reliable above all else.

However, the close to stock Android OS intrigues us, and we have to admit, we're charmed by the phone's sturdiness, and the eagerness of Cat reps to beat it up for us. Keep your eye out for our full review, and an update whenever we get some carrier info.

Introduction

Although the Canon EOS 650D was the first DSLR to have a touchscreen, Canon sensibly decided that the touch controls should be in addition to rather than instead of the button and dial controls.

This helped widen the camera's appeal, making it attractive to novices upgrading from a touchscreen smartphone or compact camera, as well as enthusiast photographers. As a result, according to Canon, the camera has sold very well.

Nevertheless after less than year the brand has decided to replace the Canon EOS 650D with the Canon EOS 700D, also known as the Canon EOS Rebel T5i. It sits alongside the Canon EOS 600D at the very top of Canon's "consumer" lineup, just below the Canon EOS 60D that starts its "enthusiast" range.

However, the new camera only makes a few upgrades on the model it replaces.

The vast majority of the Canon 700D's specification is the same as the Canon 650D's. For example, the 18 million pixel APS-C sized sensor and the 14-point Digic 5 processor are the same. It also has the same hybrid autofocus system with nine-point, all-cross type phase detection points.

As before, the sensor has pixels that are used for the phase detection part of the hybrid autofocusing system that is available when using Live View mode or shooting HD videos.

When the Hybrid AF is in action, it uses the central pixels to inform the phase detection part and get the subject close to sharp - from then, the contrast detection steps in to get it into full focus. This means that you can use the camera handheld. Canon claims that the performance of this system when one of the new STM lenses is mounted has been improved.

Like the Canon EOS 650D, the Canon EOS 700D can shoot at 5fps, and the sensitivity can be set in the native range ISO 100-12800, which can be expanded to ISO 25,600 if necessary. This makes it a pretty versatile camera, capable of shooting in a wide range of situations.

One of the biggest changes brought with the new camera is that the impact of the Creative Filters (Grainy Black and White, Soft Focus, Fish-Eye, Art Bold, Water Painting, Toy Camera and Miniature Effect) can be previewed on the screen when shooting in Live View mode - just as you can with the Canon EOS 100D and the Canon EOS M.

However, these are still a JPEG-only option, so you can't have a 'clean' raw file recorded with the JPEG. If you want an unfiltered image as well as one with the effect on, you need to apply the filter post-capture using the Canon EOS 700D's post-processing options.

Alternatively, the Canon EOS 700D has the usual array of Picture Styles (Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful and Monochrome) as well as Auto, in which the camera selects what it calculates to be the appropriate option automatically, plus it can apply three user-defined styles.

All of the preset options can be adjusted to taste and can be used when shooting raw as well as JPEG files.

The Canon EOS 700D has also been designed to have a more expensive feel, with a textured coating and a 360-degree mode dial added. The latter means it can be twisted all the way around, rather than reaching a point where it stops and has to be twisted back again.

The Canon EOS 700D/Canon EOS Rebel T5i has a full asking price of £619.99 / AU$849 / US$749 body only or £749.99 / AU$999 / US$899.99 with the new 18-55 STM lens.

This means that it goes head to head with the 24 million pixel Nikon D5200, which was announced at the end of 2012.

Build and handling

Canon has clearly used the same mould for the EOS 700D as it did for the EOS 650D, since the two camera bodies look almost identical, with the only visible difference being a change to the mode dial.

The icons on the Canon EOS 700D's dial are raised rather than just painted and it's edged with a finer texture. This higher-quality dial can also be rotated through 360 degrees, so you don't have to turn it backwards and forwards to reach the options you want.

Rubbing a finger over the two cameras also reveals that they have a slightly different texture, with the Canon EOS 700D feeling a little coarser - in a good way. The rubberised coatings over the finger and thumb-grips remain the same and give good purchase.

While it lacks the robustness of Canon's professional-level DSLRs, the Canon EOS 700D feels well made, with no movement detectable at any of the joints. The articulating joint that attaches the LCD screen and enables it to be rotated around for viewing from very high or low angles, or from in front of the camera, has a high quality feel.

The Canon EOS 700D has the same control and menu layout as the Canon EOS 650D that it replaces. As before the menu is spread across 11 tabbed screens in stills mode, including a My menu option to which you can assign up to six features for quick access - we find it helpful to use this to reach the Mirror lock-up, Highlight tone priority, Auto Lighting Optimizer and Flash control options.

The menu can be navigated and options selected via the touchscreen or the button and dial controls.

There's also a Quick menu that you can activate either by pressing the physical Q button or by touching the Q icon on the LCD screen. This gives a quick route to the mostly commonly needed camera settings.

If the Feature Guide is activated via Set-up Menu 3, touching an on-screen icon once brings up an explanation of the feature, while a second touch displays its available options. A single touch is all that is required if the Feature Guide is deactivated.

As on the Canon EOS 650D, the power switch has a third option that's used to activate Movie mode. Once this has been done, the button on the back of the camera that starts Live View in stills mode becomes the movie record button.

Although the Canon EOS 700D has all the button and dial controls that we expect from a camera at this level, it is also possible to control the camera via the 3-inch 1,040,000-dot touchscreen. This is very responsive, and once you start using the touch controls you find that you use them more and more because they are so intuitive.

It's great to be able to swipe across the camera's screen to scroll through images and then pinch to zoom in to inspect details. It's just a shame that Canon has buried the rating control in the menu.

We found that the vari-angle screen provides a good, clear view with lots of detail visible even in quite bright light, making it very useful when composing images at ground level or above head-height.

The touch-shutter facility, which enables the AF to be set and the shutter tripped with a touch of a finger on the screen, is particularly helpful in these situations.

However, the screen inevitably gets covered in fingerprints and these obscure the view, so it's a good idea to carry a decent lens cloth with you so you can give it a wipe now and then.

Because it's a DSLR rather than a compact system camera, the Canon EOS 700D has an optical viewfinder. While this only covers 95% of the frame and carries the risk of including a few extra elements along the edges of images, it is bright and pleasant to use.

As usual these days, when given the choice we would opt to compose images in the LCD when focusing manually, because the enlarged view makes it easier to be precise with the focus point.

Performance

Given that they have the same sensor, it's not surprising to discover that the Canon EOS 700D can resolve the same amount of detail as the Canon EOS 650D, and that the two cameras' image quality is very similar.

Noise is well controlled throughout the sensitivity range, although as you'd expect, images taken using the upper ISO values have some coloured speckling visible. It's interesting that our lab tests reveal that the Canon 700D produces slightly noisier images than the Canon 650D at the lower to mid sensitivity settings. Canon has probably made this change to the image processing to bring out a bit more detail.

The Canon 700D can produce high-quality images direct from the camera with plenty of detail and pleasant, natural colours, but as usual the best results are produced from raw files that are carefully processed.

Examining our images at 100% on the screen indicates that the camera's default sharpening is a little on the high side, and more natural images are created by turning the in-camera Sharpness value down.

As is Canon's way, the white balance tends to lean a little towards warm tones, but this isn't dramatic and it usually results in more attractive images.

However, Canon's evaluative metering system continues to give mixed performance. In some situations it is superb, but in high contrast conditions you need to be alert to the brightness of the subject under the active AF point, since this can skew the result.

Bright subjects can trick the camera into under exposure, while dark ones can lead to over exposed images. This is an issue throughout the Canon DSLR range, but it seems especially strange in models that the company is aiming at novice photographers (as well as enthusiasts), such as the Canon EOS 100D and Canon EOS 700D.

While most users want the subject to be correctly exposed, few will be happy with a wildly over exposed landscape because the focus point is in shadow.

With a dynamic range of almost 12EV at ISO 200 and ISO 400, it's clear that the Canon 700D is capable of recording a wide range of tones. However, these are compressed in the JPEG files to create a higher contrast image with more punch. Unlike the results for signal to noise ratio, our dynamic range measurements for the Canon 700D match those from the Canon 650D almost exactly.

Our tests confirm that Canon has improved the performance of the hybrid focusing system that's available in Live View and video mode.

We found that the Canon EOS 700D is appreciably quicker to achieve focus with one of the STM lenses mounted than the Canon EOS 650D. Nevertheless, the focusing still isn't really fast enough to be used with a moving subject.

When you use the viewfinder to compose images, the Canon 700D reverts to the more standard phase detection autofocus system. This works well, with each cross-type point finding its target quickly and accurately even in quite low light and with low contrast subjects.

The only down side is that with 'just' nine AF points it's often necessary to focus the lens and then recompose the image, because there isn't a point directly over the subject.

Canon's STM lenses really come into their own when shooting video, and the new 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS STM kit lens's focusing is very quiet and smooth when Movie Servo AF is enabled.

It's so smooth, in fact, that sometimes it's hard to tell that the focus is slowly being adjusted. The end result, however, is very high quality footage with no sound of the focusing system in action.

While post-processed raw files generally create better monochrome images, it's very helpful to have an idea of how the final images will look. It's also fun trying to get shots just right in-camera. The Canon 700D's Monochrome Picture Style produces some excellent results, with subtle toning being possible. In many cases the images are print-ready.

Image quality and resolution

As part of our image quality testing for the Canon EOS 700D, we've shot our resolution chart.

If you view our crops of the resolution chart's central section at 100% (or Actual Pixels) you will see that, for example, at ISO 100 the Canon EOS 700D is capable of resolving up to around 22 (line widths per picture height x100) in its highest quality JPEG files.

For a full explanation of what our resolution charts mean, and how to read them, check out our full explanation of our camera testing resolution charts.

Examining images of the chart taken at each sensitivity setting reveals the following resolution scores in line widths per picture height x100:

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 16 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200, score: 24 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800, score: 22 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200, score: 20 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800, score: 18 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Noise and dynamic range

We shoot a specially designed chart in carefully controlled conditions and the resulting images are analysed using DXO Analyzer software to generate the data to produce the graphs below.

A high signal to noise ratio (SNR) indicates a cleaner and better quality image.

For more more details on how to interpret our test data, check out our full explanation of our noise and dynamic range tests.

Here we compare the Canon EOS 700D with the Nikon D3200, Canon EOS 650D, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

JPEG signal to noise ratio

At the lower sensitivity settings the Canon 700D has a slightly lower signal to noise ratio (SNR) than the 650D it replaces indicating that it produces JPEGs with a little more noise. This is probably to reveal a little more detail. Beyond ISO 1600 the 700D's SNR is a very close match for the 650D's and both are beaten by the Nikon D3200, Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58.

Raw signal to noise ratio

As with the JPEG files, after conversion to TIFF the raw files from the Canon 700D have a lower SNR than the Canon 650D's files up to around ISO 3200. With the exception of the lower sensitivity settings, the 700D beats the Sony Alpha 58, but it a fairly close match for the Nikon D3200 and Nikon D5200.

JPEG dynamic range

While it doesn't match the Sony Alpha 58, Nikon D5200 or Nikon D3200 for JPEG dynamic range it seems likely that Canon has done this deliberately to produce higher contrast images that look print-ready.

Raw dynamic range

The 700D's raw file (after conversion to TIFF) dynamic range is a very close match for the Canon 650D's - hardly surprising given that they have the same sensor and processing engine. The highest dynamic range is achieved at ISO 200 and ISO 400 (from where it more-or-less matches those of the Nikon D3200 and Sony Alpha 58). The Nikon D5200's raw files (after conversion to TIFF) have the widest dynamic range at any sensitivity setting indicating that it can capture the widest range of tones ina single shot.

Sample images

Click here to see the full resolution image

Using an extension tube has restricted depth of field, but there's lots of detail in the sharp areas of this shot, taken in early morning light. An extra 1/3EV exposure was dialled in to get this accurate result.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The vari-angle screen makes it easy to compose images from awkward angles like this. It's also helpful to be able to set the AF point, and even trip the shutter, with a touch of the finger on the screen.

Click here to see the full resolution image

This toned shot was created in-camera at the capture stage using the Monochrome Picture Style. Helpfully, it's possible to shoot raw images at the same time so there's a clean file to work on as well if you want.

Click here to see the full resolution image

We had to increase the exposure by 2/3EV over that suggested by the evaluative metering to get this image. It could still benefit from a little post-capture brightening, but the skin tones are spot-on.

Click here to see the full resolution image

The camera has got the colour and exposure just right here and there's lots of detail visible, so the end result has plenty of impact.

Click here to see the full resolution image

Colours are nice and vibrant but not excessively saturated when the Standard Picture Style is used.

Sensitivity and noise images

JPEG

Full ISO 100 image, see the cropped (100%) versions below.

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Raw

ISO 100 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 1600 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 3200 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 6400 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

ISO 12800 (Click here to see the full resolution image)

Verdict

The Canon EOS 700D is a superb camera that combines some of the best aspects of modern digital camera technology. It has a good sensor capable of recording lots of detail, a comprehensive feature set and a responsive vari-angle touchscreen that provides a quicker method of controlling the camera than buttons and dials - for those who want to use it.

It is an excellent choice of camera for anyone wanting to take their photography more seriously, shoot from creative angles or start recording videos. However, it is only a minor improvement on the Canon EOS 650D, and owners of this slightly older camera need feel no compulsion to upgrade.

That said, the hybrid focus system is significantly better; it's more sensitive and quicker to respond when the shutter release is depressed. It still isn't fast enough for use with moving subjects, though.

However, when Movie Servo AF is enabled and an STM lens is mounted, the Canon 700D brings subjects smoothly and silently into focus to produce high-quality video footage, with no hunting in good light.

When shooting with the camera held to the eye, the Canon 700D reverts to the more standard phase detection AF system, which is fast, efficient and useful when shooting a range a range of subjects, including sport and action.

We liked

Because the Canon 700D has the full complement of button and dial controls as well as the touchscreen, photographers can choose how they wish to use it.

The vari-angle screen comes into its own when shooting landscape, macro or still life images, and you have time to consider the composition and ensure the point of focus is exactly where you want it. It's also extremely helpful when shooting video clips.

We disliked

The main source of complaint about the Canon EOS 700D is that it's only a very minor upgrade on the Canon EOS 650D, and that it uses the familiar 18MP APS-C format sensor. While this may seem like a strange move for Canon, why should a company wait to make improvements to an existing model?

One downside to controlling the camera via the touchscreen is that the LCD is quickly covered in fingerprints and greasy smears, which make the images hard to see in bright light.

It's a shame that Canon hasn't made the ratings option easier to access when reviewing images, nor included Wi-Fi technology to enable wireless control over the camera for wildlife photography, as well as cable-free image transfer.

Nikon stuck with its 12MP sensors for a long time, but it has now progressed onto 24MP sensors, which have been widely well received. Canon seems to be stuck at 18MP for its APS-C format DSLRs, and although the image quality is very good, some may argue that it is a little behind the times.

Our lab tests also reveal that the Canon 700D lags behind the Nikon D5200 and Sony Alpha 58 for dynamic range and signal to noise ratio.

Final verdict

The Canon EOS 700D is a very capable and versatile camera that produces high quality images. It has a comprehensive feature set and affords all the control expected by enthusiast photographers while providing automatic hand-holding options for less experienced users.

It produces images that are of very similar quality to those from the Canon 650D, although our tests reveal that they are a little noisier.

The 700D once again highlights the benefits of shooting raw images rather than JPEGs as being able to tailor the noise reduction and sharpening to the specific conditions produces higher quality results.

While some may scoff at the vari-angle touchscreen, we say don't knock it until you've tried it. It's extremely responsive and it promotes creativity. We are becoming increasingly used to touchscreen control on a range of other devices, so it seems odd that Nikon hasn't yet employed the technology in a DSLR.

Introduction

Office 2013 gets the Windows 8 treatment, with a touch-friendly interface and a sparser look, as well as new features in every application. So while the main thing you'll notice is the new look, there are some really interesting features under the hood.

Office is also going to the cloud, with subscription pricing, on-demand installation and automatic syncing of settings and documents you save in the cloud – if you want to pay for it that way. Check out our Office 365 review.

As usual, there are multiple versions of Office 2013, but this time around the different editions are not just about whether you're using them at home or in a business or which applications are included.

Buying Office 2013

Even if you decide you want to buy a pay-for-it-once-and-keep-it copy of Office 2013 in a box, you won't find a DVD inside – just a product key to unlock the software you download. (Buyers in "developing countries with limited internet access" can still get a DVD, but that's not an option in the UK or US.)

If you prefer to pay an annual subscription to get extra features, Office 365 editions let you download the Office 2013 applications onto multiple PCs (or share them with your family).

For home users, there are four options. Buy the boxed software and you can put it on one PC. Office Home and Student 2013 with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote costs £109.99/$139.99; Office Home and Business 2013 adds Outlook and costs £219.99/$219.99. Office Professional 2013 has the full set of programs for £389.99/$399.99; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access and Publisher.

Then there's the new subscription version that Microsoft released this week, Office 365 Home Premium, which costs you $99.99 a year for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access and Publisher.

That's good value if you share it with the family; up to five people in the same household can have their own installations of Office on their PC or Mac at the same time (for the Office programs that run on a Mac – and Mac users get the current version of Office for Mac until a new release comes along in the future). And when the next version of Office comes out, you'll get it on the same subscription.

All five people get an extra 20GB of storage on SkyDrive to keep documents on and 60 free Skype world calling minutes a month (which can be calls to a landline or a mobile and from your PC or from a smartphone with Skype installed).

You can download the Office programs temporarily on another PC if you're away from your usual PC (even if it already has another version of Office installed). So if you have a document on a USB drive or on SkyDrive that you need to edit on another PC, and using the Office Web Apps from SkyDrive doesn't provide of the features you need (like seeing revision marks in a tracked document you're collaborating on), you can use Office on Demand to get the full version of Word in just a few minutes.

You manage all this from the revamped Office.com and there's a link to your account there in the ribbon of all the Office applications. (To activate the Skype minutes you have to link your account to the Microsoft account you're using for Office 365, which can be done on the Office.com site.)

You also get a list of your recently edited documents, which helps when using Office on Demand to give it a fresh edit.

If you're at college or university (or you teach at one) it's possible to get Office 365 University on a four-year subscription for $79.99 that you can use on up to two PCs or Macs.

Also, as you might expect, Office 2013 and Office on Demand only run on Windows 7 and 8, not on XP or Vista.

Office for business

Although Office 365 Home Premium might also sound like a great deal for a small business, it's not licensed for commercial use (Like the Windows RT versions of Office 2013) unless you already have an Office business licence. Instead, you need one of the Office 365 business subscriptions, available from February 27.

These will include the new Office 2013 versions of Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online, which are already available to run on your own servers. It's taking some time for Microsoft to upgrade Office 365 to run these new server versions, which explains the later availability (there are a number of issues in SharePoint the Office 365 team is working on). We've tried these out with the Office 2013 applications (and we looked at SharePoint Online 2013 in more detail here.

Office 365 Small Business Premium includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, Publisher and Lync. The annual $149.99 subscription lets you run them on up to five PCs or Macs at once (again, you can use Office on Demand to download Office to any PC you're using temporarily, and you get regular updates and new features).

You can host online meetings with audio and HD video conferencing in Lync and run a public website on SharePoint, plus you get Exchange with a 25GB mailbox for each user and SkyDrive Plus storage on SharePoint.

That gives you 10GB of secure cloud storage with an extra 500MB for each user, but you can choose how the storage is allocated between users and you can control how they use it – like forcing them to encrypt confidential documents.

Office 365 ProPlus (short for Professional Plus), is aimed at midsize businesses (10-250 employees) and includes the same desktop Office software as Small Business Premium. But it also has tools for business intelligence, consistency checking to Excel and automated deployment, as well as more options for the SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services.

Office 365 Enterprise has the full Office 2013 set of features in the desktop software and SharePoint, Lync and Exchange Online services, like archiving, legal hold, Data Loss Prevention and rights management to protect confidential information.

If you're looking for five or more copies of Office 2013 and you don't want the Office 365 services at all, you can buy Office Standard 2013 (with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook with Business Contact Manager, Publisher, the Office Web Apps and limited Lync, SharePoint and rights management services) or Office Professional Plus 2013 (with the full range of desktop Office programs and server features) through volume licensing.

We've already looked at the final (RTM) version of the Office 2013 applications. Now we've been able to try out the Office 365 Home Premium service with the new Office.com site, where you can download some of the new Office apps (although the apps for Outlook won't work until you have Exchange 2013).

Installing Office 2013

With any of the Office 365 subscription version of Office 2013, you don't have to worry about downloading and saving a large installer for Office (or even about uninstalling previous versions of Office, apart from Outlook). Whether you start the download from the Office 365 site or you try to open an Office document on a PC that doesn't have Office, the programs stream from the cloud.

This is a much improved version of the click-to-run virtualisation that Microsoft has used for the Office trial versions for a few years, which enables you to start using the applications just a few minutes after you download them. You don't have to wait for the full download; you can use the first features as soon as they download and if you click on a tool that hasn't yet downloaded, the installer will get that next.

The streaming happens quickly enough that the slideshow of new features you can watch while the other applications install is actually running in PowerPoint (and you don't have to watch it unless you want to).

You do have to pick a few options like the language to use for Office, the design you want to see in the ribbon and whether you want to send Microsoft anonymous telemetry about how you use Office. You can also fill in your Microsoft account details, which Office uses to sync settings like recent documents from SkyDrive, email accounts, custom AutoCorrect entries, the list of your Office Apps and the buttons you add to the Quick Access Toolbars.

It might seem odd to sign in with your Microsoft account on the Office.com site and then get asked for it during installation, but this is how you share the subscription; use the account that's paying for the licence to log in to Office.com, start the download, then sign in with the account of the person who will be using Office on each PC.

It's all very simple and very well thought out. This is your personal version of Office, on any PC, a lot faster. If you've downloaded the Customer Preview of Office 2013 you've tried this already. (The traditional Office desktop installer uses similar technology so the installation is faster there as well.)

Office 365 Home Premium adds several more designs that you can use to decorate the Office ribbon, including doodled circles, lunchbox sandwiches, pens and pencils, cartoon fish and spring leaves. It's a little odd, but there's something for most tastes (including a blank ribbon).

Once the programs are installed you can also choose from three Office themes (click your account picture at the top of the screen and choose Account Settings or open File > Account. The default white gives you the clean look you might have seen in the Customer Preview or in Office RT; pale Ggrey adds a light tint to the ribbon and other panes and dark grey is a high contrast colour scheme that puts a mid grey on the ribbon and panes and replaces most of the accent colours in each application with a very dark grey.

If you're not a fan of the new Windows 8 look, experiment with the themes to see if an alternative changes your mind.

Word 2013

Office 2013 takes the clean, unadorned principles of what used to be called Metro design and applies Office 2013 takes the clean principles of the Microsoft Design Language and applies them to desktop apps. This puts your documents centre stage, with tools such as the ribbon fading slightly into the background. The ribbon looks much more spacious but takes up no more space on screen.

Office 2013 is also designed to showcase Windows 8 and the touch features (the same is true of the Windows RT versions). Even the desktop apps are ready for touch. Press the Touch Mode button that Office automatically puts on the quick address toolbar if your PC has a touchscreen and the layout of the interface changes, with bigger buttons and more space to touch them without pressing the wrong thing.

In the final version of Office 2013 this is a big improvement on the version you may have tried in the Customer Preview. Instead of a fiddly and confusing little round button it's a clear pointing finge. Tapping it brings up a mini menu explaining the differences – on big icons that you can easily press with your finger.

It's not perfect but it makes Office 2013 far more touch friendly but not too big and chunky to be efficient when you use mouse and keyboard.

These are several improvements to the ribbon compared to Office 2010. Word has a new Design tab on the ribbon, which is a more logical place for the formatting and page background tools previously found on the Page Layout tab.

If you've seen the preview of Office 2013, the final version of the ribbon has some other subtle changes, making some of the tool icons clearer and crisper. The icons for the individual programs have also been redesigned to look better on the tiles of the Windows 8 Start screen.

The layout features are far better than in Word 2010; you can now embed videos directly into Word documents, or search your Facebook and Flickr accounts for photos to place in documents without having to save them first. These are both well designed, easy to use tools.

Getting your pictures in the right place is much easier with the new alignment guides that appear as you drag objects around (so you can see when the object is in the centre of the page or lined up with another element), and the layout options tool that appears so you can set text wrap.

The alignment guides make it much easier to tweak Word Art quickly, instead of spending hours adjusting spacing and sizes if the default Word Art layout doesn't fit what you want to show.

The improved layout options may be why the new PDF reflow feature works so well. This opens PDF files as if they're Word files – converting the layout so you get a Word document that looks like the original PDF, complete with fonts, layout, images, tables, charts and page numbers and making it all editable. This is fast (for a two-page file it takes only a few seconds longer than opening the PDF in Acrobat Reader) and remarkably accurate.

One option, Read Mode, removes most of the Word interface, reflowing documents to fit on screen with thumb-friendly buttons either side of the page. You can choose wide or narrow columns and set the page colour to sepia or even white on black. Tap on pictures, videos and charts to pop them out of the page in a larger window, or collapse sections you're not interested in (you can do that in page layout view as well).

But cleaning up the interface also means losing some useful tools; the handle that you can drag in Word to divide the document window into two scrolling panes (so you can see two separate sections of your document on screen at once) disappears, relegated to a button on the View ribbon so it takes twice as many clicks to get the split view.

Maybe you won't need it as often with the handles that enable you to collapse sections of your document under their headings or the vastly improved Navigation pane that turns document headings into a handy outline (you can even drag sections around in the pane). But when you do it shouldn't be more work than it used to be.

Also, the AutoCorrect features have disappeared from the menu when you right-click a spelling mistake; you have to go all the way into Word's huge Options dialogue to add corrections you want to use. Handy tip: if you're one of the handful of people who add their own AutoCorrect entries, pin the AutoCorrect dialogue to the Quick Access Toolbar on the ribbon.

Office 2013 seems to be designed for widescreen tablets: for example, task panes are back. In what feels like a flashback to Windows XP, dialogues such as spell check sit at the side of your screen rather than floating over the document and obscuring a few lines.

Install a dictionary app from the Store on Office.com and you get definitions and synonyms for words below the spelling suggestions. This is useful, but is it worth that much screen space? On a high resolution screen on a 16:9 tablet, these panes at the side work well; on an older notebook your screen starts to feel cramped.

Thankfully, you can undock the Spelling dialogue and drag it around (and Office remembers your preference), but the default is for Office applications to spread out on screen and get comfortable rather than to cram in all the information and functions you're used to in the same small space. The newer your PC, the more you will like this.

The new interface is great on a touch-friendly widescreen tablet with the 1366 resolution you need for Windows 8 and space to spare (and even better at the 1920 resolution of a high end notebook), but it's a step backwards for working on multiple documents on a low resolution notebook or desktop.

Snap two windows open side by side and press F7 to start the spell check. In Word 2013, on a 12-inch 1024 x 768 screen, the 5-inch snapped window sacrifices 1.75 inches of space to the spelling task pane. Add the navigation pane and you see only a thin strip of your document in between. Do the same thing on an 11.6-inch 1920 x 1080 tablet and you won't find much to complain about.

Mostly the space is very well used. If you collaborate on documents with others, using tracked changes and comments, the improvements to these are extremely welcome and can save you hours of frustration. Instead of turning the page into a sea of red strikeouts and blue underlines to show deleted and inserted text, there's a new Simple Markup view that shows you the final version of the document with a line in the margin to show where there are edits.

Click it to see the details of those changes (which turns on the old All Markup view); click it again to hide the changes and keep reading. A speech bubble shows where there are comments to read; click to open a floating comment view that you can drag around the page, or switch to All Markup and see the comments in a wide margin at the edge of the document.

You can finally leave a reply to a comment rather than just leaving a comment nearby, and you can mark a comment as dealt with. This greys out the comment so it's not distracting, but it's still there if you need to refer back to it later.

If you're collaborating on a large document, Word 2013 (on a high resolution screen) is hands down the best way to do it, especially as having your document on SkyDrive or SharePoint means multiple people can edit it at the same time (they can't change the paragraph you're working on and you don't see their changes until you save when they're highlighted in green, so the page won't ever change without you knowing about it.)

Excel 2013

Excel gets the same interface changes as the rest of Office and some of the same features (the dialogue for inserting images from the web that's also in Word and PowerPoint and the apps for Office gallery, but not Word's new comment interface). And like Word, Excel offers more help for using existing features as well as some very powerful new ones.

Select a range of cells with numbers and the Quick Analysis tool pops up next to the selection with a gallery of conditional formatting, the charts that show the most information from that specific data, formulas, table formats and in-cell sparklines. Hover over an option and you see it either in your data (for formulas such as average or heat map formatting that highlights the highest and lowest figures) or in a pop-up for charts.

The categories are always the same, but the suggested charts change to match the information you're showing – with your live data previewed in the chart and an explanation of why a Clustered Column and Line chart or a Stacked view fits your data best. If the data is complex enough to analyse with a PivotTable, it can build a PivotTable model automatically.

This Chart Advisor comes from Microsoft Research and a prototype appeared on the Office Labs, but it's much more useful to have it integrated with the other analysis tools in Excel.

It's a baby version of the intelligence built into analysis tools such as Tableau – it doesn't go as far as suggesting colour palettes for example – but it makes complex tools such as Pivot Tables (possibly the most powerful and least used feature in Excel) far more accessible, and helps to get the chart right first time.

If you do need to edit a chart, the contextual tools that pop up make it faster and easier; you can preview different designs and checkboxes add and remove chart elements or sections of data interactively. This takes something you've always been able to do in Excel - if you had unlimited patience and unerring accuracy at right-clicking on just the right spot in the chart – and makes it easy and engaging.

Change the data that a chart is based on and the chart doesn't just update, it animates to show the change happening. If the new figures are significantly bigger, first the rest of the chart shrinks, then the new bars grow on screen. Update a single figure and the line moves up or down to its new position, so you can't miss the impact.

Even as you move between cells or add a figure that changes a formula, there are subtle animations to draw your eye to what's changed or to where the cursor has moved.

It's not enough to be annoying, because the animation is less animated close to the change. Click a cell and the highlight appears to fly into place, leading your eye there; change or delete a figure that changes a calculation and the result rolls over to show the new figure.

This makes it much harder to change or delete information that changes your results without noticing that it makes a difference. It's simple but makes Office feel alive and responsive, and conveys useful information.

Even error messages are more useful; drag a cell across the worksheet when you only meant to click somewhere else and Excel gives you a truly informative warning that there's already data in that cell. It shouldn't be a breakthrough, but in the past Excel has been more prone to bald refusals to save or confusingly cryptic errors – this is, mostly, a new and friendlier Excel.

If you want to dig further into your data, there are several new tools, including a Timeline slicer that organises data by date so you can filter down to a specific period or jump through figures month by month to see the differences.

There's a new add-in to look for errors and inconsistencies between worksheets and Power View – which used to be a Silverlight-based web tool for exploring and visualising data that you could use with SharePoint or save as PowerPoints – is now in Excel where it belongs. It's not relegated to a separate window; when you insert a Power View you get a new tab and the tools for pivoting and filtering data, plus simple layout options.

Of course the first problem is getting data into Excel. If you're trying to paste it in from a badly formatted report or an online credit card statement, the new Flash Fill feature is vastly easier than trying to work out how to split data into columns in just the right place.

Paste in the messy data, then start typing the piece of information you want to extract, such as the date or the name of the company you made the payment to (without the unwanted details such as the business number or foreign currency). It feels very good.

After you type a couple of examples, Flash Fill uses them as a template and works out the right pattern – and fills in all the other entries for you. You can extract multiple patterns from the data, so you can get the date, the business name and the amount, all by typing a couple of examples.

Again, this is a feature from Microsoft Research using machine learning. It's the kind of artificial intelligence that websites such as Tripit use to scrape information out of emails and web pages. It's enormously powerful, and it's blissfully simple to use. And it's not often you can say that about Excel.

PowerPoint 2013

The uncluttered new interface works very well in PowerPoint; again the tools fade into the background so you can concentrate on your document.

Like all the Office 2013 applications, when you open PowerPoint you don't go straight to a blank document; instead you get what's almost a welcome page with a list of recent documents and thumbnails for templates and themes (and a blank document if that's what you want).

You can search the library of free templates on the Office site from here. The results come up in what Microsoft used to call the 'backstage' view – the full-screen File menu – and you can preview the layout, filter the results by various categories and keyboards, or even look at the templates for other Office applications.

Many of the templates have multiple colour themes to choose from; whichever one you pick to start with you can switch to the other variants later. As with the rest of Office 2013, a lot of the new templates are optimised for widescreen aspect ratios, like the 16:9 tablets Microsoft hopes you'll buy to use Windows 8.

If you're going back to a document you've worked on, before both PowerPoint and Word make it faster to pick up where you left off; just click the pop-up window to jump to the last slide or page you were working on. This really works when you use Office (or SkyDrive and the Office Web Apps) on multiple PCs (or on your PC and your Surface) and you can start from where you were working on a different machine.

For layout, PowerPoint has the same tools as Word for inserting online images and videos. These are much easier to use than the PowerPoint 2010 video options; a single friendly dialogue enables you to search YouTube or Bing for videos, browse your SkyDrive and local system for video files or paste in the embed code from a video's web page.

It's as simple as searching, previewing and selecting the video you want and it's easy to add frames, effects and corrections – even to online videos.

This is one place where putting controls into task panes works much better than having an on-screen dialogue box, even on an older, low resolution PC. It's much easier to work with the border styles, layout effects, positioning options and video correction tools in a task pane than in a dialogue with 12 tabs that sits right on top of the video you're trying to edit.

There are also 'quick' formatting tools that appear next to selected objects, much like the Quick Analysis tool in Excel, putting the tools you need the most next to the object you're working on.

For positioning, PowerPoint not only has the new green alignment guides that show when you have an object at the edge or centre of a slide. It also has extra 'smart guides' that show when you're aligned with other graphics, and when objects are evenly spaced across the page – these are in addition to the alignment guides on smart art shapes, which now show both horizontal and vertical alignment instead of just one at a time.

You can set your own guidelines on master slides; for example if you have an image in the background of certain slides that you want to line up with.

There are new transitions, like Crush, Fracture and Origami, for a total of 48 different ways to get from one slide to another. There are no new shapes to place in presentations, but you can combine two shapes into one – cutting one out of the other, breaking them up into pieces, turning the space between them into a shape or just gluing them together. That enables you to create new shapes far more precisely than trying to draw them out.

Finally, there's an eyedropper tool for selecting colours from existing objects (although only within the same presentation, not in other applications or even other PowerPoint windows).

PowerPoint gets Word's friendly comments as well, complete with replies; again, this makes good use of a widescreen resolution. That's especially useful now the PowerPoint web app lets you have two people working on a presentation, in the web app and the desktop version of PowerPoint at the same time.

When it's time to give your presentation, the presenter tools have some great new features, such as a thumbnail grid for reviewing all your slides that only you can see. You can pinch to zoom in and out of this, and it's handy for jumping ahead to a later slide without clicking through one at a time.

You can also zoom in on a specific slide in the presentation if the audience needs to see fine detail.

It's possible to see a preview of the next slide, and your presenter notes, which might stop people cramming pages of text onto a single slide and then reading it all out loud very slowly (we can only hope).

You also get a counter for elapsed time for the current slide and the whole presentation, plus the current time, and tools for drawing on the slides or showing a fake laser pointer to highlight things. And you don't have to have a second monitor or projector connected to see the presenter tools, so you can practice running through the presentation complete with your tools.

Again, these are designed to work well on a tablet so you could hold it in your hand and drive your presentation by touch instead of crouching over the keyboard.

Outlook 2013

Outlook uses the clean Windows 8 look to make your inbox look less cluttered without putting much less information on screen. That makes room for tools that let you work right where you are.

Reply to an email using the button at the top of the message and you're typing in the main Outlook window, above the message you were reading. You can pop it out into a separate window if you need to, but this is a clean way of working.

If you click away from your reply it's automatically saved into the draft folder and the mail you were replying to gets an orange Draft label on it (making that stand out against the rest of the interface is one reason for the signature colour of Outlook changing from orange to blue). We also like the option to change the zoom for the message you're reading to fit more of it on screen.

Touch mode in Outlook 2013 gets the same mini-menu as in the other apps but the touch option also puts a bar of five frequent commands (reply, delete, move to folder, flag and mark as unread)about where your thumb will be if you're holding a tablet in both hands in landscape. There are some attractive 'touches', such as using pinch-to-zoom in the Outlook calendar to zoom between day, week and month views.

In all the desktop Office 2013 apps finger right-click works better than anywhere else in the Windows 8 desktop.

If you're writing an email or editing an appointment, press and hold and instead of a context menu you get a finger-sized bar of handy commands. This includes the useful options from the mini Office bar such as bold and bullet points and adds Cut, Copy and Paste right where your finger already is.

In Outlook 2013 you also get a finger-friendly menu of commands for dealing with your inbox when you press and hold on the list of messages: tap in a field where you can type and the keyboard opens automatically so you don't have to press the little keyboard button on the taskbar.

Even more helpfully, when you have a keyboard attached to your tablet you can use your finger to put the cursor in the right pale without having the screen covered by a touch keyboard you don't need.

Fans of Windows Phone will be pleased to see the All and Unread buttons in the inbox; you can quickly jump between all your messages and just the ones you need to deal with.

This makes it much faster to get through email messages because every time you reply to, delete or just finish reading one, you're where you need to be to handle the next message without scrolling and selecting.

With all these handy tools you can probably keep the ribbon in Outlook minimised a lot of the time, making room for even more messages on screen. If so, you get one extra button that's always visible; click it to write email, make a new appointment, create a new contact or set up a new task depending on whether you're in mail, calendar, people or task views.

The new look is also a great design for the address book. Iimages from social networks are automatically used for a thumbnail view and you can see and edit contact details without having to open a separate window.

Like Windows Phone, Outlook automatically links together any contacts it believes are the same person, and adds their details from LinkedIn, Facebook, Windows Live Messenger and any other social networks you connect to Outlook.

You can make links yourself, once you find the Link Contacts button on the menu that appears when you click the three dots at the side of the popup contact pane. Windows Store apps in Windows 8 have made this Windows Phone convention more familiar, but if you've not used either you might not realise it's a menu.

Once you do find the menu, this is a great way of getting Outlook to clean up all the duplicates that accumulate in your address book over the years, as well as seeing social network updates next to all the other details you have about people.

If colleagues are sharing their calendars with you, you can also see whether they're currently free (and for how long) and Lync is integrated so you can start a video or IM conversation anywhere you see someone's name.

You can swap between the mail, calendar, people and task windows (and the seldom used notes, folders and shortcuts) using text labels rather than the space-wasting buttons in Outlook 2010, but the new Peeks mean that often you won't need to do so.

Hover your mouse over the word 'Calendar' and you get a pop-up preview of today's appointments and tasks; click a day to see what you'll be doing. Hover over People to see frequent and favourite contacts and over Tasks for your to-do list and flagged emails.

This is just as convenient as having the details in the calendar bar on the right of the window all the time but less distracting. You can pin them back there if you want, but it's not as useful as it was in Outlook 2010 because you can no longer drag mails onto the calendar to create appointments on specific days. This is frustrating because it was a very useful feature.

The Suggest Replacement is a free Outlook app that will add a button to create an appointment automatically from the details in an email, but it only works if you have Exchange 2013.

If you do make it all the way into the Calendar you'll see a three-day weather forecast at the top of the screen (as long as you're online – it's not cached for later in case it gets out of date).

In many places the new interface is a big improvement. but Outlook is where the chunky Windows 8 notifications are the most intrusive. You get one for every new mail and they stack from the top-right of the screen down, rather than staying in the same place.

If you open Outlook after a long flight e, your screen fills up with multiple notifications. And while they fade away on their own, we didn't find a way to dismiss all of them at once, so you have the choice of waiting, playing whack-a-mole or remembering to tell Windows 8 to turn off notifications for an hour before you re-open Outlook.

Even more annoyingly, you can no longer delete a message or accept an invitation directly from the pop-up notification. This is another place where Office 2013 values clarity over productivity.

You can at least dismiss multiple alarms at once; these pop up in the familiar alarm window even on Windows 8, rather than as notifications.

Something that you'll welcome on tablets is the way the defaults when you set up an Exchange account are slightly different. You still get cached mode (so Outlook keeps copies of your mail from the server in a .OST file) but the default is to only download the last 12 months' worth of mail.

There's a slider in account settings to control that, and you can still have all your mail. If you don't, then you see another Windows Phone feature; when you do a search there's a link to search on the server if you haven't found what you're looking for.

On Windows 8, if you use your tethered phone or a mobile broadband dongle to get online, Outlook recognises you're using a metered connection and it doesn't send and receive email automatically to save your bandwidth. Click the notification at the top of the screen if you do want to connect and get your messages.

Outlook metred.png

Outlook 2013 warns you when you're on an expensive connection

It's a shame that Outlook 2013 loses a couple of useful features for the sake of the new interface because otherwise it's a great blend of the principles of Windows 8 design and the power of the desktop.

OneNote 2013, Access 2013 and Publisher 2013

OneNote 2013

OneNote 2013 is the best hidden secret in Office, a note taking application that's easy to use, organised like a paper notebook and crammed with features.

You can link notes to the original document, or a meeting from your Outlook calendar (handy to get the agenda or job titles and the correct spelling for everyone's names), or send information from any file or web page into OneNote. Insert an image and optical character recognition picks up any text in it automatically.

You can take audio and video recordings of meetings and have your written or typed notes time synced to them (a feature that's sadly missing in the Windows RT version).

OneNote now enables you to embed even more information – embed Excel and Visio files and you can see the live content in your notebook. The table tools are much better than in previous versions, and you can turn a table into an embedded Excel spreadsheet to get more formula options.

All the Office 2013 applications have the Touch Mode button; the core apps (but not Publisher or Access) also have a Full Screen Mode button next to the minimise and maximise buttons.

Instead of just hiding the ribbon, status bar and most of the rest of the interface to enable you to concentrate on your document (as it did in the Customer Preview), this now brings up another mini-menu letting you choose between hiding the ribbon, only showing the ribbon tabs or showing the full ribbon. This duplicates the little arrow on the ribbon that collapses the commands, but it's easier to find if you don't already know how the ribbon works.

OneNote has an even more extreme view that hides everything but the notebook picker (and the button to get the rest of the interface back), leaving you the full page to take notes on - ideal on a tablet. Click the arrow at the top of the page and your note expands to fill the screen or see the normal interface.

There are some new ways of presenting tools that can get irritating. OneNote's handy screen clipping, Send to OneNote and quick note features are combined into an odd pop-up window that showcases these useful options but proves intrusive once you know what they are and how to get to them, and the pop-up doesn't even close properly.

It also commandeers the Windows-N shortcut for making a new quick note (renamed from side note because it's not really at the side of the screen and hasn't been for several versions), so you have to press Windows-N N. Thankfully Windows-S still works for clipping information from anywhere on screen into your notes.

It's hard to show new users an important feature without irritating experienced users by getting in their way, and you can turn off the popup. But the detailed options for choosing where different types of information go when you send them to OneNote are very welcome; you can set default folders and other options for email, web pages and other sources individually.

OneNote was the first application to sync between PCs, onto SkyDrive and the OneNote web app and to a wide range of smartphones. That now includes Windows RT; what's rather confusingly called OneNote for Windows 8 is a free WinRT version of OneNote.

This has a large proportion of the OneNote tools, and even more touch features, although it only opens notebooks you keep on SkyDrive.

Select text in the OneNote WinRT app with your finger and you get the new radial menu - the finger equivalent of the mini Office bar that fades into view when you select text with a mouse, and even easier to use than the finger-sized version you get in the Office 2103 desktop apps.

You can tap to choose a pen colour, then swipe round to pick the shade you want. Tap to change text size and swipe round to pick how large you make it.

There's an undo button and a button to apply tags. This puts the most useful OneNote features quite literally at your fingertips, with the radial menu appearing on the right of the screen, where your thumb is if you're holding a widescreen tablet in both hands (as you might notice, Microsoft has definite views about how most people will hold tablets).

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like Windows RT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

You might have seen something in the Microsoft Research Inkseine prototype app, which takes those ideas and makes them so easy to use it will give you a reason to like WinRT. This should help OneNote come out of the shadows and get the recognition it deserves.

Access 2013

Access continues its journey to being less a database and more a database app development tool. It has the same clean new interface as the rest of Office and that carries through to the applications you can build and the controls you put in them.

You can still create both desktop and web apps as well as SharePoint lists, but web apps now run on SharePoint or Office 365 and now look like WinRT applications, complete with an app bar and other navigation options.

Publisher 2013

Publisher gets the same tool for inserting pictures from online services as Word and PowerPoint (but not videos, even if you're creating a web publication), and the same task panes and formatting tools, as well as the rest of the new interface.

It even has Touch Mode, which is probably more useful for checking publications than laying them out. Oddly for a DTP package, it's one of the last applications to keep the small floating spell check dialogue.

Replacing and switching images is far easier than in previous versions. Publisher now puts new images you insert in a column in the scratch area rather than dumping them all on the page. Drag an image from the scratch area or elsewhere in the layout until it's over an existing image and a pink highlight appears around the existing image; let go and the new image appears there instead.

If you want to use an image as a full page background you can just right-click and choose Apply To Background (as a fill or a tile). There are also lots of new formatting options for images and text.

We like the new 'photo printing' option that saves each page of your document as a JPEG; ideal if you want to use a photo book printing service to create an album as a keepsake using your own layout.

Publisher already had features ranging from a full set of alignment guides to support for OpenType stylistic alternates to 'building blocks' for creating common objects such as pull quotes, banners, calendars, adverts and more. These new features may not be major but they're certainly welcome and this is a powerful DTP package that's easy to use.

Verdict

With a new version of Office, the first question that always springs to mind is whether there is anything new that Microsoft can add to a mature and powerful productivity package.

Word is a product with 20 years of features and being able to insert videos and online images is more a matter of catching up with the times than a major new feature. But PDF Flow and the massive improvements in tracking changes and comments in documents are hugely useful and if you have a touchscreen PC, this is by far the best version of Office to use on it.

All of the key Office applications get new features that are well implemented and equally well worth having.

Also, with the switch to subscription pricing, the days of asking 'is it worth upgrading for this feature, no matter how useful?' are over. When new features come along, you'll just get them for the same price. But you won't be able to skip a year if you're happy with what you have, so do the sums on what Office costs you long term.

We liked

Office 2013 is about more than a new interface. From little touches such as animating calculations as they change to new tools that help you get the Excel chart that shows what's important in your data, from in-place replies in Outlook to change tracking and commenting in Word that doesn't make your document look like a battlefield, the desktop apps get worthy new features.

We like the new tools for designing presentations in PowerPoint. We like the new presenter tools even more. Whether you create presentations or just sit through them, PowerPoint 2013 should make your life better.

If you switch PCs often, you'll love the fast streaming install and seeing your recent documents on every PC. And we're looking forward to getting more new features through Office 365 instead of waiting three years for neat new features that you might want without paying for an upgrade (or spend the time updating every PC in the office).

We disliked

Sometimes cleaning up for the Windows 8 look means dumbing down. Advanced features such as Split View and Autocorrect are now harder to use, which is a step backwards not forwards, and strangely at odds with the clear and simple way other powerful features such as Pivot Charts are exposed.

The newer your PC and the higher your screen resolution the more you will like the new interface. If you have an older PC with a low resolution screen, you'll have to minimise more of the interface to see the same amount of your document.

Final verdict

If you look at a list of the new features in Office 2013, you might not see any one feature you can't live without, but after even a few days of using the new applications there are plenty that you'll miss. This is another big advance in usability, combined with some extremely clever new tools.

Performance is excellent and the Office 2013 programs are slick and smooth in use.

There are features for power users, especially in Excel and PowerPoint, and there are others that either make it easier to use the power of existing tools or give you whole new ways to complete tasks without being an expert.

While this isn't a perfect touch version of Office, the improved Touch Mode is extremely usable on any decent touchscreen PC. What's missing is a version of Outlook for Windows RT users (and there's nothing for iPad users).

Mostly Office 2013 gets the right balance between streamlining and oversimplifying; there are some places where we miss specific power user options, but the sheer usability and ease of use will give the vast majority of uses a much better experience.

The great thing about a subscription service is that you won't have to wait as long to get updates and improvements; they won't change the fundamentals but you will keep getting more options the longer you pay for Office 2013.

Introduction

Full form factor laptops have died a death in the last few months as the new focus of Windows 8 has put the emphasis on portability and hybrids. If it doesn't turn into a tablet, manufacturers don't really want to know, but that's not much use for people who want power, performance and comfort - and that's where the Samsung Ativ Book 8 comes in. It was previously known as the Series 7 Chronos

This model is an update to Samsung's premium 15.6-inch performance laptop, which adds a touchscreen to the existing sleek, brushed metal body. It's for anyone who needs true computing power, for running multiple programs and being creative, but who still wants to take advantage of all Windows 8's super new touchscreen features.

It's truly a laptop first, unlike other touchscreen alternatives such as the HP Envy x2 or Samsung Ativ Smart PC, which have the innards of a laptop but the form of a tablet. If you're looking for a full-sized QWERTY keyboard and a large screen, the Samsung Ativ Book 8 (model number NP780Z5E) is for you.

The expansive display is great for Windows 8, offering a generous portion of your apps at the Start screen, with any press of the Windows key. Having such a big screen means you're able to use more of Windows 8's features, such as the window snapping, so you can use two apps side-by-side.

However, the setup highlights the interesting decision made by Acer to switch the trackpad and keyboard on its Aspire R7. The result is that the Samsung asks you to use its keyboard and mouse by placing the device in front of you, and it's awkward to raise your hands across the screen 'zombie-style' to use the touchscreen. The traditional clamshell design of the laptop means it's hard to use in a touchscreen format, and the immobility of the screen is a drawback of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

A top-of-the-range machine with stunning performance and a super-thin chassis isn't likely to come cheap, and you'll need fairly deep pockets to afford the Samsung Series 7 Chronos. At £1,199/US$1,299 this is a serious outlay, and you're paying for the blistering performance.

The irony is that you actually pay twice - firstly with the price tag and then with the added weight, and this means you need to ask yourself a serious question - do you need this power, or would you rather have something to slip into your bag more easily?

To help you make this decision, let's review the Samsung Series 7 Chronos in depth.

Specifications

So what's under the hood of this Korean-made beast? Well, the specs are impressive indeed. Firstly, there's an Intel Core i7 3635QM processor chip, which is one of the fastest you'll find out there, clocked at an impressive 2.4GHz. This will handle pretty much anything you throw at it, and is perfect for power-hungry users who want to edit video, images and run rich websites all at the same time.

Back that up with the 8GB of RAM that comes as standard and you have one nifty laptop.

Intel Core processors are so powerful they can take care of most tasks all on their own, but Samsung has added an AMD Radeon HD 8800M dedicated graphics chip inside too, which does its fair share of work.

With dedicated graphics - something you'd never find on a laptop-tablet hybrid - you can run games and HD movies much faster, but the chip can take some of the load off the processor too. You'll find the whole system more responsive, and that's immediately evident on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos.

Samsung has added a Full HD 1920 x 1080 panel to the Chronos, which on full brightness is eye-searingly bright. It's got a glossy coating that aids swiping with your finger, but it's incredibly shiny, which could be problematic in bright conditions when working outside or near big office windows.

Overall, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos's build quality is superb, especially considering there's so much power harnessed into such a sleek design. The brushed metal oozes class and the laptop opens to reveal an equally metallic chassis, complete with a spacious keyboard and expansive colour-coded trackpad. It's an Aston Martin that's vintage in its design yet fearsome in its execution.

Like a classic sports car, it's also heavy, and at 2.5kg (5.4lbs), it's not that portable. You wouldn't want it in your bag all day, and its weight harks back to laptops of old, which were bulky and cumbersome. The sleek lines and thin design makes the weight surprising, and this will be the main turn-off for prospective buyers.

By combining great multi-touch features and brilliant accuracy, the trackpad is a triumph, and while we often criticise laptops for low travel keys, the sheer spaciousness of the keyboard makes typing a pleasure.

Because this machine evidently isn't designed to be mobile, the connections on offer are more generous than its tablet companions. You get Ethernet, which is music to the ears of regular hotel room hoppers, plus HDMI and four USB ports. There's also VGA and an SD card slot to finish off a sublime port performance.

Performance

Benchmarks
Cinebench: 16259
3D Mark: Ice: 44064, Cloud Gate: 5679, Fire: 661
Battery score: 327 minutes

We ran our usual benchmark tests on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos and found double the power of the top Windows 8 laptop-tablet hybrid here, along with processor performance that rivals the latest gaming laptops.

Combine that with a fantastic performance in our graphics tests and one can see that Samsung has created a formidable machine.

Some of the latest laptop devices such as the HP Spectre XT, which is similarly priced and pitched, were blown out of the water by the Samsung Series 7 Chronos, and the score of over 16,000 in Cinebench is a reflection of its sheer power.

The only machines we've seen managing this level of score are gaming behemoths and slabs of thick plastic from Medion. To have this kind of power in a machine that looks this good is a pleasant surprise.

Graphics power was also impressive, and it delivered roughly double the power of laptops that use Intel's graphics chip, the 4000 HD. This is essential for users who have designs on heavy video editing or gaming, and you'll see the latest titles handed with aplomb on this mature and grown up device.

While we wouldn't class this as an out and out gaming laptop, for those who consider impeccable frame rates on the highest settings a benchmark for greatness, those who'd like to play games such as the new Sim City, or even BioShock Infinite, should be able to manage a decent experience with the settings turned down.

However, this only really applies to the top-of-the-range Samsung Series 7 Chronos model, and if you're looking to save a couple of hundred pounds or dollars by plumping for the Core i5 model, you would need to revise these expectations.

Despite its weight, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is cunningly disguised as a hipster's stylish companion, and we certainly wouldn't be ashamed to pull this machine out in our local Starbucks.

However, as well as requiring a strong back it will also need plenty of battery to last the day - something not usually associated with gaming level laptops.

With all that power, battery life was shorter than average, but we still managed a decent five hours of movie watching in our real-life tests, which involve looping a high-definition video until it dies.

It's a good result from a laptop that's designed for the desk rather than the road, and it opens up the possibility of working in cafe, watching movies while traveling or just enjoying using your laptop in the garden.

Verdict

While the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is a beautiful laptop, the PC is dying. Unless you're regularly pushing your device to its limits, most users will be happy with the performance offered by Microsoft Surface Pro or the HP Envy x2. They still have Intel Core power, and when compared with this hefty price tag, you could still afford to have a big screen and a full-sized wireless keyboard set up on your desk.

The days of the full-form clamshell laptop being the only choice for people who want a marriage of work and play have passed, and unless you need every ounce of processing power, more versatile Windows 8 machines are available in your price range, and are worthy alternatives.

We liked

The immense power of the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is genuinely impressive, and it offers near gaming-level performance in a machine that you could carry in a bag and use day to day. With the top of the range processor and dedicated graphics card considered, the slim lines and sleek brushed metal finish are to be applauded.

The upgraded screen is another highlight, and the expansive panel works brilliantly in Windows 8. The deep colours and detailed, pin-sharp visuals make this a truly premium laptop, and add to that the responsive and accurate touchscreen capability and you have a stunning high-end laptop.

This is one of the stand-out laptops you'll see this year, marrying top-notch design with fantastic usability.

We disliked

As a laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best you'll find, but our gripes come from a general view of where computing is going, and how you should spend your £1,200/US$1,300. There's stacks of power here, but portability is limited, and this is an issue for many buyers. Most people will happily get by on half the amount of power here, and that means Ultrabooks such as the Dell XPS 13 or Asus Zenbook could be better options, financially speaking.

Next, there's design. The Samsung Series 7 Chronos makes few allowances for the touchscreen user, and while form factors are starting to change across the computing world, this is very much stuck in 2011. Hybrid devices and tablets are making in-roads, especially backed by Windows 8, but aside from touch - which we believe most users will shun in favour of the familiar trackpad - the Samsung Series 7 Chronos does little to embrace the new computing experience.

If you're looking for a home laptop, the Samsung Series 7 Chronos is as good as it gets, but in a year's time the traditional desk-bound clamshell will seem very old fashioned.

Final verdict

The Samsung Series 7 Chronos is one of the best Windows laptops money can buy, but in this changing world of computing, we urge you as a buyer to consider whether your needs would be served better with a lighter, more mobile machine with less emphasis on huge power.

If you're looking for a fantastic laptop today, however, this superb machine comes highly recommended.

The huge roar the Titanosaurus Rex makes when it boots up was probably not a deliberate play on the name of this latest DinoPC, but it will make you think some beast has inhabited your new machine and will probably scare off any mammal in earshot. Yes, we've got another big, pricey rig here with Nvidia's ultra-desirable GTX Titan taking care of the pixel-pushing duties.

Last month we saw the excellent Scan 3XS Z77 Vengeance Titan become the benchmark PC for every other Titan-based machine that was to follow it. The Computer Planet machine it was up against simply couldn't compete with the smart choice of components, the aggressive pricing or the top warranty Scan offers.

So, how can this DinoPC compete against something like that? Well, the simple fact is, it can't. The Titanosaurus Rex does tick all the necessary component boxes, and has a fantastically ridiculous name, too: it's got a hefty overclock on its i7 3770K, a decent mobo, quick memory, a mid-sized SSD, lots of data storage space, water-cooling and a very sexy chassis.

The component choice isn't flawless though: DinoPC has opted to go for RAM rated at 2,400MHz, but has halved the amount that either the other Titan machines from last month offered or, indeed, the Wired2Fire Titanosaurus Rex.

It's also opted to add in some relatively pointless extras, including a Blu-ray drive and a pricey motherboard, too.

A hefty price tag

All those definitely add in to the luxury, high-end rig aesthetic, but are practically irrelevant for a machine whose main reason for being is to throw polygons around at high-resolutions and high speeds.

Where the Scan machine did so well was to choose a price-point and stick to it. The Titanosaurus Rex is another £300 (about AU$460, US$455) more expensive than the 3XS rig, and none of that cash has gone in to making this machine perform better where it counts. And since Scan took the choice to make a slight overclock to the Titan card, this DinoPC actually performs worse in-game.

Benchmarks

CPU rendering performance
Cinebench R11.5: Index score: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 9.37
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 9.43
DIABLO PHANTOM: 9.22

DirectX 11 gaming performance
DIRT Showdown: FPS: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 64
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 74
DIABLO PHANTOM: 46

DirectX 11 gaming performance
Max Payne 3: FPS: Higher is better
TITANOSAURUS REX: 43
3XS Z77 VENGEANCE TITAN: 47
DIABLO PHANTOM: 30

That beefy price tag also means its £700 (about AU$1,080, US$1,065) dearer than the Wired2Fire Diablo Phantom. And while it is faster, there's nothing about it beyond the build quality that makes it worth that price premium. The GTX 680 in the Diablo Phantom is a great GPU, and at £1,600 (about AU$2,460, $US2,430), it's a quality PC at a decent price.

Verdict

There are a few concerns over the setup of the DinoPC Titanosaurus Rex. Remember that roar we mentioned? When you buy a rig of this price - especially one that promises a premium experience - you don't want it to sound like a Harrier jumpjet.

DinoPC has plumbed in the Corsair CPU cooler but minus the controlling software, so the twin fans sit at 100 per cent all the time. It's simply not an experience that suits the high price tag.

Up to the £1,000 (AU$1,530, US$1,500) mark, there's are a huge variety of different specs you can throw into a PC and still come out with a decent gaming rig. Just look at the Daw Computers machine and the Vibox Power FX.

Above that price point though, things stagnate very quickly. From here until the crazy-priced machines with their hex-core Sandy Bridge Extreme and octo-core Xeons, it's all about the Core i7 3770K and whatever overclock the SI can squeeze out of it - and, of course, the Z77 motherboard.

This Wired2Fire machine comes slap-bang in between the lower-end machines, like the Daw and Vibox rigs, and the top-tier Titan machines that are starting to pop up everywhere. But when you compare it with those £2,000+ (about AU$3,000+, US$3,000+) rigs, the only real difference you'll see is in the choice of graphics card that's been used.

At the £1,600 (about AU$2,460, US$2,430) Wired2Fire is targeting with the Diablo Phantom, you're moving away from the cheaper machines that will usually sacrifice some general niceties for top CPU and GPU combos and are getting a full gaming PC with all the benefits you'd expect from a premium rig.

That means that as well as the ubiquitously overclocked 3770K, you've got a quality Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, a huge amount of quick Corsair Vengeance system memory and lots of data storage, as well as two Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB SSDs.

The Diablo Phantom has taken the odd step of using a RAID array to give the SandForce-powered Kingston HyperX 3K drives a bit of a speed boost. But the extra boost from RAID is negligible when you start to include the problems of incompressible data handling you get with SandForce.

Rough edges

The NZXT Phantom chassis that Wired2Fire has used in this build is visually striking but somewhat disappointing. It looks pretty funky from a distance, but when you get up close you can see the plastic of the orange detailing hasn't been finished that well. However, it does run much quieter than the DinoPC Titanosaurus Rex.

Benchmarks

CPU encoding performance
X264 v4.0: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 51.44
TITANSAURUS REX: 51.61

DirectX 11 tessellation performance
Heaven 4.0: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 23.7
TITANSAURUS REX: 35.2

DirectX 11 1080p gaming performance
Crysis 3: Frames per second: Higher is better
DIABLO PHANTOM: 50
TITANSAURUS REX: 66

Unfortunately, the active cooling doesn't seem to be sufficient for the chip to run stably at the 4.7GHz it came clocked at out of the box. We managed an initial successful run of Cinebench, but further runs fell over and even once we'd taken it down a notch to 4.6GHz (which is what all our benchmarks were run at afterwards), the X264 test struggled to complete.

Verdict

Once it's running, this is a decent rig, and although it's not quite in the same league as the Titans, it's not far off - especially when you consider it's substantially cheaper than the DinoPC and can still happily knock around 2,560 x 1,600 gaming.

Only at Google IO in techy-savvy San Francisco could a Google Glass wearer walk the streets relatively unnoticed. A limited number of these new wearable computing devices have been among the public for months now, and they generally elicit double takes and curious stares.

There were plenty of those lucky Glass owners among the IO crowd, as well as Google reps standing by to demonstrate the technology. At the conference, we had the opportunity to try on Glass, and unbox one of the kits passed out to select developers.

The fitting

Just like a normal pair of glasses, Google Glass needs just a bit of adjustment to be worn properly. It mainly comes down to the nose pads, which make sure that Glass' titanium band runs slightly above the eye line, like a sunshade or visor.

That way, the rectangular screen, which looks something like a prism, sits just above the eye. Using the screen requires you to look up slightly, which helps to keep your field of vision unobstructed.

The striking thing about this new tech is that even though you're wearing it, it does a good job of getting out of the way when not in use. Glass' display quickly goes dim, like an idle smartphone. Still, even when it is in use, it's easy to see the world around you.

Wearing Glass for the first time, we were struck by how light and unobtrusive it was. Lighter than a pair of normal spectacles, we imagine it would be easy to forget you were wearing them, if not for all the stares.

Turning on Glass

Glass is initially activated with a power button found on the inside portion. When you wear it, this switch is not easily accessible, so turning it fully on or off is done only when they are removed.

Glass goes to sleep when not in use, and you can wake it by simply nodding up. This isn't just to save power, but to keep your field of vision clear when you don't need any info. Google reps said that Glass' battery would last all day with "average use." Just like a smartphone, it has micro-USB for charging, and lots of video recording will wear it down before the day is out.

'Ok, Glass'

The Google Glass interface is a lot like Google Now, which is found on any Android Jelly Bean smartphone. From the main screen, saying "Ok, Glass," gets the device's attention, so to speak, and prompts Glass to show you available commands.

There are also Google Now cards - screens of information related to recent searches. They're pretty minimalist, white text on a black background, sometimes with a single image. We swiped through nearby restaurants, email chains and recently captured pictures and videos. This is done using a touchpad built into the right side of the headset. You can also tap to make selections.

An extension of your smartphone

While Glass has its own hard drive (ours had 12GB available), Wi-Fi connection, GPS, and processor (no specifics on the core), all working from Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, it works best as an extension of your smartphone.

It can pair with an Android phone using Bluetooth, which allows it to make calls as well as send and receive text messages. In that way it felt more like the ultimate hands-free device than a wearable computer.

It also suffers a similar stigma to the Bluetooth earpiece, in that it's distracting, and a bit goofy looking. Basically, you're like something out of Star Trek. Whether that's Geordi La Forge or a Borg drone is in the eye of the beholder. The irony is that it's technology designed for subtly that ends up speaking volumes.

It talks back

Speaking of speaking, Google Glass can actually talk to you. There's a little speaker that sits over your right ear. Google reps described it as a bone-vibrating speaker, like something Snake would use behind enemy lines in Metal Gear Solid. Really though, it struck us just your average speaker, and was completely audible to someone standing within earshot, providing the room wasn't too loud.

We asked Glass who the president of the United States was, and it responded with a snippet of Barack Obama's biography. We had trouble hearing it over the din of the show floor, but moving to a back room, it was perfectly audible, and spoke in the sort of lady robot voice of Google Now.

Not Mission: Impossible material

The Google rep guiding our demo joked that Glass would make terrible surveillance technology, and that's by design. Google is actively trying to reduce the voyeur factor by making it rather obvious when Glass is engaged. The screen emits a glow when in use, and spoken commands like "take a picture" make sure those around you are clued in to what you're doing.

You also have to look up to read the screen, so broken eye contact will be a dead giveaway. Your friends will know when you're checking football scores instead of listening to them.

It was also far less like augmented reality than we'd imagined. Putting it on, we thought we see an HUD of some sort, like in a first-person shooter video game. Really though, we felt more like a multitasking administrator than Robocop on patrol for creeps. Even the GPS function just gives you a top down view, with a blue arrow representing your location, just like Google Maps on your phone.

Relatively app-less

The version of Google Glass on demo at IO was a prototype, an early developer or "explorer" version, as Google likes to call them. Given that, there wasn't a whole lot of functionality available to it.

Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times and a few more have apps on the way, but until then, Glass feels more like raw potential than an actual tool.

• Read more: 7 Google Glass apps we can't wait to use.

The interface is also pretty unintuitive, especially the touchpad part. Since only one "card" is visible at a time, you're stuck swiping through them all until you find what you want. We found it easier to just ask Glass to find something again, rather than swipe around for previously accessed information.

Early verdict

Is Glass cool and entirely novel? Yes, it certainly is. Is it a device that will change the life of, or even just prove useful to, the average consumer? That's doubtful.

Glass as we tried it felt like something that would be useful to folks in specialized roles. A surgeon, an engineer, a warehouse foremen or a certain type of viral video filmmaker will likely find a lot of compelling things to do with Glass.

As for the average person, it's a bit of a paradox. We can think of a dozen times where we've been cooking, cleaning or driving and would've loved to have had hands-free, subtle access to Google's wealth of information. But to do so, we've got to wear a piece of headgear that's distracting to those around us.

We also wondered how Google plans to curate the apps that become avaialable for Glass. We've heard about plans for apps that will allow wearers to snap pictures with a wink, which seems to go against Google's plan to keep Glass behavior obvious to those around you.

Google Glass is expected to arrive for public consumption in 2014. When it does arrive, it may change lives, but most likely not your life, or the lives of those around you.

Introduction

Updated: Our iOS 6 review has been overhauled to include the iOS 6.1 software updates.

On the surface, it might not look like much has changed with iOS 6 and the subsequent minor iOS 6.1 updates. However, Apple has added a number of new features over iOS 5, along with continuing in its mission to eradicate Google from the system by default. Apple's YouTube app has gone (Google has since released its own on to the App Store) and Maps now runs with Apple power rather than Google juice.

Elsewhere, the OS is more social (Facebook now joining Twitter in being baked in), Siri's been improved, and countless tweaks (some fairly major from a usability standpoint) are in evidence in the likes of Mail, Safari, Phone and the iOS stores.

Oh, and Apple finally added a clock app to the iPad, which resulted in a legal spat with the Swiss railway network service. It seems not only Samsung is in the photocopying business.

iOS 6 ditches support entirely for the original iPad, but is nonetheless compatible with a surprisingly wide range of devices; iPhones back to the 3GS are supported, as are both the fourth- and fifth-generation iPod touch.

However, the older the kit, the less of iOS 6 you actually get. Some of the big features - Siri, turn-by-turn navigation, panoramic photos and FaceTime over 3G - aren't available for the iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4.

The iPhone 3GS doesn't even get Safari's offline Reading List feature, and Siri's not available for the iPad 2.

So is it worth the upgrade? We've installed iOS 6 (and iOS 6.1) across multiple iOS devices to find out. Our test kit is an iPhone 4, an iPhone 4S, an iPod touch (fourth-generation), an iPhone 5, an iPad 2, and a new iPad (courtesy of Vodafone).

There are more new features than you'd think, even when you don't get all the new features.

The iOS 6 interface

A common criticism of iOS is that Apple never radically updates it. Tech pundits in particular often use words like 'tired' and 'dated' to describe the operating system, suggesting it would be better if you could weld Android-like widgets to it, or if every home screen icon was more akin to a hyperactive child begging for attention, as per Live Tiles on Windows 8.

iOS 6 is typically Apple in being purely iterative. You get the familiar grid of icons on each home screen, and the screens can be swiped between.

Double-clicking the Home button reveals the multitasking tray, which also houses media controls, the rotation lock and an AirPlay button. Swipe left from the first home screen and you access Spotlight, Apple's system-wide search.

So far, so iOS 5, and that level of familiarity will either be warming or maddening, depending on your persuasion. Regardless, it's definitely very usable, even if configuration options on offer are few in number and rapid-sorting settings are non-existent.

However, there have been some small adjustments. The status bar now changes colour on a per-app basis, in an attempt to blend in. This is more visually appealing but muddies the water when it comes to alerts that were once made in part through a change in colour of said status bar.

Better amendments are the new audio controls on the Lock screen and Spotlight search results now displaying the name of an app's containing folder. Apple's penchant for cropping text labels remains frustrating, though, and is increasingly common throughout the OS.

iOS 6 Maps

We feared the worst: with Apple giving Google Maps data the boot in favour of its own, we half expected an app that was just great in America and utterly useless in the UK. We were wrong, but that's not to say Maps is without its issues - and people have since its launch taken to the web to express their displeasure at the new app.

The app uses data from TomTom, including free live traffic information - something you have to pay extra for in TomTom's own iPhone app. The UK maps are generally very good, offering turn-by-turn navigation that Siri can read aloud if you wish.

Most of the app's problems appear to stem from a lack of maturity compared to Google's offering, combined with some missing features. Results based on imprecise locations are frequently poor.

'Stansted' in Google Maps gave us London Stansted Airport during testing; in Maps, a village in Kent. 'Luton' in Maps gave us a village in Devon whereas Google Maps more sensibly defaulted to the large town near London. These problems are endemic, although locations are generally found correctly when you enter more information, such as a post code.

Local search is also extremely variable. Restaurant reviews from Yelp are integrated but are typically sparse or unavailable entirely if you live in a rural area.

Business locations are peppered with errors, such as occasional American spellings (for example, "Exhibition Center") and mapping glitches, such as the one that identified our local Italian restaurant as a Sainsbury's supermarket 15 miles away.

The experience smacks of a lack of testing, and it's not good enough for a feature Apple boasted was best-in-class rather than a beta that required a ton of crowdsourcing for errors.

There were other aspects of Google Maps we missed. Apple's offering fails to distinguish between road types. In Google Maps, you enjoy blue motorways, green major routes, orange A roads, and yellow B roads; in Apple's world, major routes are orange and everything else is white. For visual route planning and at-a-glance sanity checks regarding your current location, this can be a blow.

The Maps app also doesn't have Street View, but the iPhone 4S/iPhone 5 and recent iPads get Flyover View's 3D models of cities. When they're available they're often superb, but they're not widely available yet: for example, London's there, but most other major UK cities aren't.

Also, although Apple makes a good effort to display cities in 3D, some buildings and monuments occasionally look like they've been left in the sun too long and have melted. From a purely navigational standpoint, they're also less generally useful than Street View.

Another missing aspect is public transport, for which you now need an app - Apple offers no replacement whatsoever.

Where Maps does work nicely is as an affordable alternative to expensive turn-by-turn car navigation apps or hardware. With an iPhone securely mounted on the dashboard, you get a very nice experience, with clear directions and fast rerouting if you miss a turn.

It's not perfect - tiny interface elements mean you'll need to take the phone out of any cradle to adjust anything - but we found the accuracy fine on a number of car journeys. These included ones where we specifically tried to get lost, in areas with many recent road changes, some including obscure Scottish roundabout systems. We also reckon the in-car experience pips that of Google Maps, although Google's app is superior as a navigation aid when on foot.

It's worth noting that Maps isn't a standalone app but an underlying system for iOS, and so it also affects apps such as Find My Friends. However, despite our grumbles about the visual display of the maps, we're not so fussed when we're checking whether someone's on time for a meeting as opposed to travelling to such a meeting ourselves.

Siri, Phone, FaceTime and Do Not Disturb

iOS Siri

It's still in beta, but Siri has been massively improved in iOS 6, especially for UK customers: at last Siri can do local searches, so you're not just limited to a subset of the US version's features.

If you liked Siri but found its limitations infuriating in iOS 5, you'll nonetheless perhaps find yourself increasingly using the feature in iOS 6.

Siri can now give you driving directions, tell you what time films are on and whether they're any good, find your friends, provide football scores and launch apps, and it integrates with services including Wolfram Alpha, Facebook and Twitter.

There's also Eyes Free for integration with in-car audio and voice control systems, something Apple is liaising with car manufacturers about.

Apple is rather keen on Siri, not just for answering questions but also for dictating text. We've found computer dictation patchy over the years, but it's genuinely impressive in iOS 6 - especially on the new iPad, where thankfully you don't need to hold the tablet next to your face for it to hear you.

iOS 6 Phone app and FaceTime

iOS 6's Phone app has some welcome improvements. Previously, you were restricted to answering or declining the call, sending the device to voicemail. Now, you can swipe upwards when a call comes in, enabling you to set a reminder to call the person back, or to send a text response.

Reminders can be time-based or location-based, so for example you can set a reminder that kicks in when you get home. The pre-defined text messages are pretty basic but they do the job, and it's also possible to send a custom message instead. Depending on your setup and connectivity, the response will be sent via SMS or iMessage.

FaceTime's also been given a boost: you can finally use it over 3G, provided you have the right hardware (iPhone 5 or iPhone 4S) and the right calling plan. For the most part, UK carriers do not differentiate between FaceTime and Facebook, but check your plan carefully before using or relying on the feature.

iOS 6 Do Not Disturb

The Do Not Disturb feature is one of the best additions to iOS 6. The basic idea is providing a block of time during which the device when locked silences all calls and alerts.

Additional options enable you to allow calls from your 'Favorites' in the Contacts app, or some other user-defined group; additionally, you can allow a call through should someone phone more than once.

Bar yet another date-oriented Apple screw-up at the dawn of 2013, where Do Not Disturb refused to disengage automatically for a week, the feature has worked flawlessly during the time we've been running iOS 6.

Our one complaint is that the schedule needs more granular options. Right now, you can merely set a time period during which you don't want to be disturbed, but it would be useful to have the option to set alternative hours for, at the very least, weekends and public holidays.

Safari and Mail

iOS 6 Safari

Aside from the speed boosts you'd expect from a refreshed browser, Safari for iOS 6 brings with it a number of updates, two of which centre around iCloud.

The rather poor and half-hearted Reading List feature, which saves web pages for you to read later, now works offline. This is a major improvement, although because Safari pulls down the entire document, saving it takes longer than sending a web page to the likes of Instapaper or Pocket. However, Reading List content syncing across iCloud now makes it a potential alternative to a bespoke read-it-later app or service.

Another great new feature is iCloud tabs. Once activated, this enables you to see open tabs on other devices using the same iCloud ID, including Macs running the latest version of Safari.

There are also a couple of interface changes: tap-holding the back button now brings up the history list, and the iPhone and iPod touch now have a full-screen mode, although it's only available in landscape orientation.

iOS 6 Mail

Mail's updates in iOS 6 are relatively small but are nonetheless very welcome. First and foremost, Apple brings its VIP feature to iOS. This enables you to define certain people you communicate with as VIPs and have their emails arrive in the VIP inbox. Ultimately, it's a pre-defined smart mailbox, but it's handy if you're drowning in email and don't want to miss crucial messages from specific people.

Elsewhere, Apple now enables you to insert photos into emails and has included pull-to-refresh with a cute gloopy refresh icon. Additionally, you can now set signatures on a per-account basis, rather than being forced to use the same one for all of them.

Camera and PhotoStream

iOS 6 Camera

We suspect the strength of the iOS app ecosystem is what propelled the iPhone to become the most popular camera on many photography social networks (including Flickr), but the default Camera app has always been a decent option, especially when it gained an optional grid.

In iOS 6, Apple's added a Panorama mode. You hold your device in portrait orientation and slowly sweep horizontally across the scene you wish to capture (if you're going too quickly for the device, you'll be told to slow down). This being an Apple feature, it doesn't provide you with any further options whatsoever.

Fortunately, the automated panorama stitching the Camera app does is generally excellent, to the point we happily ditched third-party apps of this type from our devices.

iOS 6 Photo Stream

Photo Stream was one of those typically Apple technologies: great when it worked, maddeningly frustrating when it didn't, and with almost no options to fine-tune it.

Previously, Photo Stream provided access to your most recent 1,000 photos and/or screen grabs, and that was it. These would be synchronised across devices and computers using the same Apple ID.

With iOS 6, it's now possible to remove images from Photo Stream, and you can now also share custom Photo Streams with other people, or with the public at large via a website on iCloud.com. Any custom Photo Stream can be left as it was when first set up or later updated whenever you like, and those you invite to it can leave comments.

Disappointingly, this is only a shared service in the sense of you sharing your images with others, not you all sharing together. If Apple adds some kind of group Photo Stream, this could be a killer feature; right now, it's certainly a nice-to-have for an ad-hoc share of a few holiday snaps, but hardly something that will worry Flickr or Facebook.

New and updated apps: Passbook, Clock and more

In iOS 6, there are also new apps and a few overhauled ones:

iOS 6 Passbook

We like the idea behind Passbook. Apple describes it as a place that can house boarding passes, store coupons and loyalty cards, tickets, and more.

It's also location-aware, meaning that if the iPhone knows you're in a store, Passbook should root out the relevant card (assuming Apple Maps doesn't think you're oddly lurking in a fire station, say, rather than your local coffee house).

The big problem, though, is the current poor support for the system. Only a handful of UK apps exist, such as Starbucks, a few airlines and iHotel.

Passbook could be a killer feature, but we wonder whether it'll ultimately become another Ping and be quietly killed.

iOS 6 iPad clock

There's always been a strange disparity between Apple devices when it comes to default apps, with the iPad having fewer of them. Bizarrely, even a calculator and clock weren't included with Apple's tablet, presumably because someone somewhere decided nobody would need to calculate things or set alarms and timers on the larger device.

With iOS 6, Apple includes a clock that makes reasonable use of the extra space available over an iPhone display. You get the usual Timer and Stopwatch tabs, an Alarm tab with a nicely designed grid, and a World Clock tab with a map. The map shows the locations of your defined cities along with current weather conditions. Bar Apple's swiping of the Swiss railway network service's clock design, there's nothing to grumble about here.

iOS 6 App Store, iTunes and iBooks

All of Apple's stores on iOS have had a major overhaul, which has sped them up and also showcased Apple's obsession with horizontal bands of content that you can swipe.

There are also some usability boosts, such as iTunes enabling you to access recent previews, and you being able to install multiple apps rather than being punted to the home screen after each one. New apps are pleasingly also given a 'New' badge, so you can easily spot them.

But Apple's often the kind of company to punch itself in the head shortly after delivering a knock-out blow, and these store redesigns are no exception. Too often, item names are truncated to the point where you have to tap into each item to differentiate it from another.

Worse, search results now come in the form of cards that make browsing large lists a horrible chore. With these stores, discoverability on iOS has taken a step backwards, particularly for apps and games.

Updated privacy and settings

iOS 6 privacy and Guided Access

Privacy settings get an overhaul in iOS 6. The Privacy section of Settings gives you a list of items that apps request permission to use: location services, contacts, calendars, and so on. For each, you can revoke access using a slider.

This is also the case with the now fairly deeply integrated social networks, Twitter and Facebook. It's perhaps arguable that the typical user still won't find these options, but Privacy appearing at the top level in Settings and being so straightforwardly designed is a decision that should be applauded.

Also in the realm of permissions and privacy (but also with education ramifications) is Guided Access. Buried in the Accessibility section of General within Settings, the feature when toggled enables you to disable touch, motion and portions of the screen.

A triple-click on the Home button brings up the straightforward interface for defining these features, and Guided Access can also be secured by a four-digit passcode.

iOS 6 Lost Mode

Another somewhat privacy-oriented change in iOS 6 is Lost Mode. This is an extension of Find My iPhone, and once triggered via iCloud.com or the Find My iPhone app it locks down a device in a more useful manner than before.

Rather than just playing an alert and sending a message, it enables you to send a phone number that whoever's got your device can use to call you back on. It's only a subtle change, but one that will perhaps increase the likelihood of you getting a lost iPhone back, assuming your message is a touch more polite than "I'm coming for you, thief!"

iOS 6 useful tweaks

Elsewhere, Apple's made a number of smaller tweaks that make the system more customisable or usable. In the Music app (which has also had an interface overhaul), you can now delete individual tracks and download single items from iTunes Match.

The Share sheet is now a clear and usable grid of icons, and in Notification Center you can add Share widgets for Twitter and/or Facebook. In Settings, the Bluetooth toggle is now on the top level - we'd like it on a home screen somehow, but this is a start.

And in the General > Cellular section within Settings, you can toggle whether cellular data is used for iCloud documents, iTunes, FaceTime, Passbook updates and Reading List. These might all be small things, but each makes a difference and they combine to improve the OS and justify Apple's belief in iteration rather than regular and unnecessary overhauls.

Verdict

The big question about any OS upgrade is, will installing it make you glad you did?

The answer for iOS 6 is yes, but some users answer yes more emphatically than others.

For example, if you've got an iPhone 3GS the upgrade is really just a collection of minor improvements, whereas if you've got an iPhone 4S you're invited to the whole iOS party.

We liked

The two biggest changes to iOS 6 are Maps and Siri. It's easy to jeer at the former, and Maps certainly has its problems, but it is an excellent choice for in-car turn-by-turn. Siri continues to improve and is now heading towards becoming an essential component of iOS rather than a gimmick.

Do Not Disturb, despite its lack of scheduling granularity, is a triumph. Apple certainly didn't get there first with this feature, but we're sure glad the company got there eventually.

Elsewhere, we liked that Apple's continuing to work with strong foundations and, generally, improving things. Relatively minor updates to Mail, Safari, Camera, Photo Stream, Phone, Share sheets, Find My iPhone and privacy all add up to a big improvement overall.

We disliked

There's no getting away from iOS 6's differences across devices. In some cases, hardware limitations must be to blame, but some feature cuts appear arbitrary and driven by Apple wanting users to upgrade. For example, the iPhone 4's inability to make FaceTime calls over 3G is baffling, considering it works with Wi-Fi.

Elsewhere, Maps isn't good enough in all use cases, and it really should have been, while Passbook is a nice app that has poor support, and some of Apple's design decisions have been questionable. We can put up with the status bar changing colour, but the awkward search and cropped names in all iOS stores are bad to the point of putting you off searching for and buying things.

Final verdict

We could say the same about iOS 6 as we did about iOS 5: it "has been trailed for so long that the element of surprise went ages ago, but there's enough here to make your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch feel shiny and new all over again."

iOS 6 is rather like the iPhone 5 or OS X Mountain Lion - the refinement of something that already works extremely well. Apple isn't overhauling things for the sake of it but, in the main, making the iOS experience gradually better. That in itself is something other companies would do well to emulate.

Introduction

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is the most hotly anticipated smartphone ever from the Korean brand, and with a glut of top end features, it's the most powerful and desirable device Samsung has created yet.

One of the most impressive things about the phone is the fact the size hasn't changed from its predecessor - the Galaxy S4 comes in at 136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9mm (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 inches), meaning there's no extra heft to try to work with in your palm.

However, despite this fact, the screen on the S4 has been increased once more, to a whopping 5-inch display with Full HD resolution. This means the same amount of pixels you'd have seen on a TV that cost well over £1,000 four years ago is now riding around in your pocket.

Let's not pretend that Samsung is a pioneer in this area though: like a great many features of the Galaxy S4, the phone borrows a lot from the other top smartphones of the moment. Both the Sony Xperia Z and the HTC One have screens that rock the same resolution, but neither of them have the jaw-dropping clout of the Super AMOLED HD screen on offer here.

On top of that, there's a much faster processor packed under the hood, ample storage space for media thanks to an expandable memory card slot, and the likes of 4G, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC and pretty much any other connection you care to mention on board.

Samsung has tried to supplement this with a tranche of software upgrades too, meaning a more powerful camera, a better way to communicate with your friends and consume media, and interestingly a big push into health through dedicated apps too.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 costs the same as the HTC One, give or take a pound or two, on contract. This will still put it around £35 per month, which isn't too bad for such a high design.

But before we dissect all the possibilities the phone has to offer, let's look at the design. As we mentioned, it's impressive in its form factor, thanks to the sub-8mm thickness, and at 130g it manages to still be light without shaving off so much heft that you feel like you've got a flimsy piece of plastic.

That's probably the biggest compliment we can pay the Samsung Galaxy S4 - where its predecessor felt a little bit cheap in the hand, the S4 manages to bring a much more solid build and better construction to boot.

So while the "faux metal" band makes a comeback on this model, it looks a lot more premium. And there's very little flex in the chassis when you hold it tightly, which was another problem with the Galaxy S3 at times.

That doesn't mean that the phone is completely remodelled from the S3 - it's very similar in appearance, so much so that a number of people asking to see it during our review thought we were palming them off with our old S3. The polycarbonate chassis remains, but that brings with it the faithful battery cover, which conceals a removable battery and microSD slot.

We're not so fussed about the battery being able to drop out of the phone - so few people carry around a spare battery, and nowadays portable charging blocks are becoming so cheap and light that they make much more sense too.

We'd almost prefer something like the Sony Xperia Z, which has a refined and packaged chassis but doesn't need a removable battery: it makes use of a slot instead for the memory card. This integrated nature would make for a slightly more premium feel to the phone.

However, it's a small gripe with the S4, as while the cover feels flimsy, it's better than it was on the S2 and the S3, and they both sold like hot cakes.

In the hand, the Samsung Galaxy S4 feels much better than any other Samsung phone we've held (apart from the gargantuan smartphones the brand used to make - the i8910 Omnia HD might have been built like a brick, but it felt wonderful to hold). The screen's spread towards the sides of the phone means a much narrower bezel, and the effect is certainly impressive.

It might look very similar to the S3, but when you take the Samsung Galaxy S4 up close, you really start to appreciate the nuances.

We'd say it feels a lot more like the LG Optimus G range now - when we first picked it up, we were struck with how similar it felt in terms of sturdiness and the polycarbonate construction to the LG Optimus G Pro.

That's no criticism, as the device was well built too, but it has a similar rounded feel. This is intriguing given the history of the two companies, and shows more of a leaning towards the plastic shell from the Asian brands in general.

Buttonry has barely changed from before - the power button has been shifted slightly on the right-hand side, and is now much easier to hit. Samsung has clearly taken some lessons from the Galaxy Note 2, which has a really well positioned power/lock button.

The volume key is less easy to hit, and could be lower down in our eyes, but the travel on both of these buttons is satisfying, and you'll always know when you've hit them.

The plastic used on the home key has been upgraded too, with a more solid feel under the thumb when you press down to get back to the main home screen. The two buttons flanking it give you access to menus or take you back from whence you came, and while both are easily hidden, they light up nicely with an even glow when called into action.

There are loads of sensors on the front of the phone above the screen, including cameras to track your eyes, a 2MP camera for HD video calling and a proximity sensor for knowing where the phone is in relation to your ear. On the white review unit we had, their presence looks rather ugly either side of the generous earpiece, but on the darker models this is less of an issue.

The other notable addition to the design of the Galaxy S4 is the infra red blaster on the top of the phone. This enables you to control your TV, satellite box, DVD player, amp and even air conditioner. Again, this isn't a new feature, but it works well in practice, and despite being small is powerful enough indeed.

Other than that, there's not a lot more to say about the design of the phone, as it's just a little underwhelming. We know it's unfair to lambast a brand for not overhauling the design every year, but in the One X and the One, HTC has proven that it is possible to offer up a new design each time around and still keep things attractive.

Looking so similar to the Galaxy S3, you can't help but feel Samsung has gone a little too Apple and created something more in keeping with the Samsung Galaxy S3S - a minor update to a great phone to keep those coming out of contract happy that they have a premium phone to upgrade to.

We do implore you to get the phone in your hand before making a judgement though - while it's not got the best design on the market when it comes to materials, it's a big step forward compared to the Galaxy S3 and allows for a grippy and easy-to-hold phone, with a whopping screen inside.

To just dismiss it for being plastic would be doing the S4 a disservice as it has so much more going for it than that, but it's worth remembering that to a lot of people, the way a phone looks is as important as how much RAM it's got on board and how fast the CPU is - if not more so.

Screen

The Samsung Galaxy S4 has an all-new screen, and we'll state it now: the Samsung Galaxy S4 has the best display you can find on a smartphone.

It's the same Super AMOLED technology used in other Galaxy smartphones, but this time it's been cranked up to Full HD resolution, which is 1920 x 1080 pixels, if you're asking.

This uses the same PenTile matrix that's drawn so much criticism for Samsung over the years, as some state that Samsung is using too many of one colour of pixel, or sub-pixel (the colours within each pixel) is too basic – all of this has meant that older Galaxy smartphones have had something of a blue or green tint, or been a little low-resolution when viewed (admittedly really) close up.

Well, and you'll forgive us for saying the same thing that we did last year with the Galaxy S3, close up now there's no way you can see any jagged edges or elements within the icons. It's simply superb, and makes everything from web pages to video look brilliant.

And there's no worry about the tints of old, nor the criticisms levied at Samsung for making over-saturated screens, as often people have claimed that the colours look too strong on these devices thanks to the OLED technology used.

It is a feature of the technology, and not just because of the high contrast ratios on offer, but with the Galaxy S4 Samsung has added in a mode to make the colours look more natural, should the user so with to have it that way.

This method does drop the brightness somewhat, and that's already lower than you might find on the HTC One but that extra brightness isn't needed thanks to the contrast ratio we mentioned earlier. One of the strengths of OLED technology is that when a pixel is displaying a black image, it's completely off, and therefore draws less power and looks darker. Compared to LCD screens, which have a backlight to light the colours in front, this means that the blacks will never be as black as found on an OLED.

So, as we said, there's nothing to want for with the Super AMOLED Full HD screen found on the Samsung Galaxy S4. It might not be as high resolution as the HTC One, simply because it's larger with the same amount of pixels, but viewed up close you'll struggle to find a flaw with it.

You can change the brightness from the notification bar by sliding your finger up and down the screen - but if you want to make things easier you can just tag the Auto button and have the Galaxy S4 working away at deciding the optimum brightness for you.

What's new here is the ability to customise the auto level - so if you like things a little lighter or darker, then you can choose such a thing. It's a good way to manage your battery even easier.

Another feature, which is both good and bad, is the improved capacitive technology used in the screen. This is designed to ape a feature brought by Nokia on the Lumia 920, which enables you to wear gloves and still use the phone - which will be a key feature to those in colder climes, or like to wear gloves for sport or similar.

However, while this works well for gloves, it does over-power the screen somewhat, in that when you're holding your finger over the screen looking to scroll up and down when you're read a certain paragraph, it will sometimes register a press when you've no intention of doing so. It's irritating to say the least, and something that we hope Samsung irons out with future software updates.

Aside from that, there's not a thing that we can criticise the Samsung Galaxy S4 screen for in any way, as it's as close to perfect as you can get on a smartphone - making it a great device for so many more functions as a result.

Interface

The interface on the Samsung Galaxy S4 isn't an officially new release of TouchWiz, the Korean brand's name for its Android overlay, but it does bring a whole host of new features to the Galaxy range, working best on the S4.

It's built on top of Android Jelly Bean 4.2, which means there are several significant upgrades from the previous version, found on most of the other top-end Galaxy devices and, crucially, ahead of the likes of the HTC One and the Sony Xperia Z.

One gets the feeling Samsung has delayed Android 4.2 for the Galaxy S3 simply so it can offer differentiation with the new model – things like split menus mean you feel like you're greeted with a different phone, despite both the S3 and S4 doing roughly the same thing.

So, for instance, in the drag down notification bar, you're now greeted with two icons in the top right-hand corner; one takes you to the internal settings from anywhere in the phone, and the other gives you quick shortcuts to turn elements within the S4 off and on.

This is an idea Google pushed with the new iteration of Android, and works well. However, it's a little redundant here, as the phone already has these in a long line in the notification bar. You can also edit these quick toggles too, so it means that you'll rarely push the other button to get the full list.

Android 4.2 promises further smoothness upgrades too, and while this works on the likes of the Nexus 4, we're not sure what it's really added with the Samsung Galaxy S4.

Considering that this phone is running the quad-core Qualcomm 600 chip, clocked at 1.9GHz and combined with 2GB of RAM, we would have expected this phone to run faster than anything we'd ever seen before.

While that is true for the most part, it's only a touch more than we've seen on the Galaxy S3. Apps will open and close faster, but elements like the time taken to open the multi-taking menu (triggered by holding down the home key from anywhere in the phone) still take a beat to activate.

It makes us hanker for the octa-core processor that other parts of the world are getting - the reason being that 4G can't apparently be added to that chip very easily, so we have to make do with a quad core option. It's not as simple as saying that other version is twice as fast, as it's essentially two quad core chips doing different tasks when needed, but there's no doubt that the other version is faster.

In case you're wondering, there are two versions of the Galaxy S4: one with the Exynos 5 octa-core, and this one (model number GT-1905) that has the Qualcomm Snapdragon quad core. This version is clocked at 1.9GHz, which means it runs faster in general - however, the octa core has two sets of four cores, with one for day to day stuff and the other for heavy lifting, such as photo processing and such.

While we're miffed we don't have the option of this other version (it's smashed the benchmarks in many tests) there are questions about whether the battery will hold up as well as the device flicks between the two quad core processors inside - it could improve efficiency or deplete it, depending on the implementation, so perhaps bigger isn't always better.

The general Android / TouchWiz interface is still the same as ever: this means that you can throw as many widgets and apps all over the seven home screens that you like. It's still a great way of doing things, and since Android Jelly Bean has been used you can now flick items out of the way just by dragging them onto the screen and holding them in the place you want.

What is interesting is that Samsung still hasn't added the functionality to drag and drop app icons on top of one another to create a folder. We're pretty sure Apple is trying to patent such an idea, but given rivals have managed to use this method (such as HTC with the One) we'd have expected Samsung to do the same.

It's not a big deal, but having to drag an app to the top of the screen, create a folder, name it, then drag other apps in is a bit of a hassle.

One area that has been changed massively from S3 to S4 is the lock screen. Firstly, there's a new way to mess around with this UI: where once you could only touch the screen and watch the water ripple around, now you can choose to have your finger trigger a little light that hovers under your finger.

Combined with the S4's improved screen technology that's been super-boosted, in terms of sensitivity, to enable you to use gloves with it, you can now hold your finger a centimetre or so above the display and watch the light flicker along under your digit. It's not a big thing, but one that we found ourselves constantly playing with like tiny children.

The lock screen, thanks to the Android 4.2 update, now enables you to have widgets on there before you open the phone, enabling music control, remotes to display and messages to preview.

While there are some useful implementations of these (the music player is really handy to have, and can be resized by dragging the track list up and down) others, like favourite apps, really don't help as much. You can still thankfully have all the lockscreen shortcuts, which means you can interact in the same way as before. To open the phone into a widget you just tap it then swipe below. We initially wanted to criticise the phone for this, but after a few days it really becomes second nature.

We would say the blocky nature of the UI really isn't attractive. It basically adds a load of features into a previously simple experience, which may or may not please some people. Thankfully, all this is switched off by default - and you can even have your own message saying hello every time you open the phone.

It's clear that Samsung has toed the Google line in using Android 4.2 on the Galaxy S4, as this lock screen functionality is straight from the search giant's design board (with a few Samsung design ideals placed on top).

It's also present in the menu system, which, rather than one long list of all your options, is divided into four screens: Connectivity, My Device, Accounts, and More. It's a neat way of packaging things all up, but it can be hard to hit the categories on the top given the size of the screen.

The interface on the Samsung Galaxy S4, to the uninitiated or the Galaxy S2 user looking for their next upgrade, is great. It has loads of innovative ideas and works blazingly fast. We can see why some people find TouchWiz a little cartoony and convoluted at times, but in our eyes this is a great combination of power and simplicity in a smartphone.

Calling and contacts

Contacts are very similar to before on the Samsung Galaxy S4, but this is no bad thing. Laid out in an easy to read format and manageable ways of connecting the right people together, this is a perfectly passable way of looking for the people that matter to you.

The main thing that we like is the ability to smart dial. This means that when you open the number pad you can enter the name as you would have done on predictive text all those years ago - so 3-2-3 would be the command to bring up 'Dad', for instance.

It's a slick way of getting around the contact list. It's hardly new - most phones pack it as an option now, and those that don't (iPhone) sorely miss it - but it saves you monkeying around in the main contacts list.

That said, the experience there is very good. If you've got the likes of Exchange, Facebook and Google accounts set up on your phone then chances are you'll be able to see a host of names here to play with. We're sad that Twitter was taken out of the experience, as it was helpful to have on the Galaxy S2 by enabling you to see friends' Tweets in their contact profile.

However, if you're not savvy enough to work out how to stop every person you're following on Twitter displaying in your contacts' list, then you would have hundreds floating around there.

(By the way, it's a simple tap of the menu button and selecting 'Contacts to display' where you can choose which service will supply the people to chat to. You can customise this too, meaning you only have certain services coming through, which means you can choose to just have the likes of Facebook and Google, where most people will store contacts.

Pro tip: hit 'Settings' and then tag 'Only contacts with phone numbers', which will clean up your phone book no end).

Beyond that, there's not a lot more to the Samsung Galaxy S4 contacts interface that really makes it stand out - it doesn't have the ability to parse through albums on social networks or update you with people's musings through statuses, but to many that's more of a hindrance. And to those where it's not, you can head on over to the HTC One to see how all that works.

The interface is simple, it's damned easy to navigate to the people you want (using the alphabetised list on the right-hand side and then using the slider to get more exact) and the result is instant when opening a contact.

You can link contacts together easily by going into the name and hitting joined contacts, then selecting other profiles from social networks to bring everything into one place. Samsung still hasn't mastered the art of suggesting these links in one big batch, so expect a lengthy time spend doing so when you turn the phone on.

One big change we're not sure we're in love with: every contact that doesn't have a picture drawn in (from the likes of Facebook or Google+) will have a stock smiling male cartoon face - it's meant to be cutesy, but it can come across a little creepy when it flashes up onscreen from an unknown number.

Another oddity with the Samsung Galaxy S4 is the ability to use high res pictures to populate contact images - other handsets enable you to define that any social network, Facebook in particular, will always display HD pictures when you connect a person in your phone book to the social network profile.

It might sound like a minor thing, but when high-res pictures flash up during a phone call, it makes the phone feel a lot more premium, which is rarely the case with the Galaxy S4, which will only do so if you've linked Google+ or tagged them in your own photo.

Calling

Calling on the Samsung Galaxy S4 carries on from its predecessor - namely in being excellent. It's got a slightly narrow earpiece range, which means that you have to be careful where you position it in relation to your ear, but that's a really minor quibble as the overall effect is impressive and works well thanks to some clever volume management.

The S4 has noise reduction built in, and many people commented how clear the the sound was over the airwaves. The S4 supports HD voice as well, which is carried over the 3G/4G networks (depending on your provider) so you'll always get the best clarity on offer.

In short, this phone worked well no matter where we were. Dropped calls should be a thing of the past on all handsets, but that's not always the case; however, with high end handsets there's no reason to think it should happen, and the power of the S4 to keep hold of signal is impressive.

In fact, the signal strength was regularly impressive, making very few trips down to the dreaded 'no bar' icon that means you might have a connection but, hey, you might not. Nobody enjoys that smartphone lottery, right?

There are a number of extra bells and whistles to play with here too which offer varying success. You can set something called 'Adapt Sound' which asks you to pop in a pair of headphones and listen to a range of sounds at different frequencies, thus tailoring the output to your ears.

You can also choose to have 'Clear Sound' or 'Soft Sound' during the calls, but when we tried these modes all we got was a slight variation in volume. There are other tricks that are more useful in call, like being able to turn noise reduction on and off and being able to boost the volume when needed.

Otherwise, it's the same great calling experience we've come to expect from the Samsung Galaxy range, even down to the three options that come up when you end a call (Message, Call or Video Call) so you can get in touch with the person if you've forgotten pertinent information. Although video call never works, let's be honest. Even Apple is starting to wonder...

In short, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is one of the best phones for actually, you know, phoning, out there. It's size isn't horrendous next to the ear and people can hear you - and vice versa. Job done.

Messaging

The messaging experience on Samsung smartphones has never been the strongest, and thankfully it's getting better and better with each iteration. We'd go as far as saying that it's actually GOOD on the Samsung Galaxy S4, and that's coming from a place of wanting to throw the Galaxy S3 out a window once or twice when the email client doesn't connect properly.

Let's start with one of the most important points: the keyboard. The previous Samsung versions have been woeful, with bouncy word prediction, inaccurate typing and cramped conditions.

Thankfully with the S4 Samsung appears to have realised this and made a larger option, and thanks to the larger screen you've even got a row of numbers on the top so you don't constantly have to keep pressing 'Shift' to get them up each time. We did a lot, though. Just to let you know.

There's also a Swype-a-like option on board, and while the jury is still out on whether this is more efficient that tapping away, we found it to be more accurate thanks to the larger amount of space afforded by the 5-inch screen.

We still instantly downloaded another option (SwiftKey might be underpinning a lot of what this keyboard is about, but the native option is still preferable in our eyes, as it takes less customisation at the start.)

Text messaging is still a key part of the Samsung Galaxy S4, and has been slightly upgraded; where there was just a conversation view with bubbles before, you now get little contact pictures next to each person, which adds a touch of personality to an SMS conversation. Yes, again it's not a new experience, but it works well on the phone.

You've also got a larger capacity for text messaging than before - where you could only write a missive that was 480 characters or less before converting to a (costly) MMS in previous versions, now you can have over 5 messages' worth before such a function kicks in.

Email

The email client on the Galaxy S2 and Galaxy S3 was rubbish, and we've mentioned that already. However Samsung has taken something of a mallet to that functionality and interface with the S4 and significantly upgraded it. While the S3 came close to working as it was supposed to after nearly a year on the market, the S4 comes out of the gate swinging, if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor.

This means a much cleaner UI that makes it much easier to quickly glance and see who sent each message, a slide-across bar that takes you to your inboxes (should you have multiple accounts on the phone) and even the chance to have priority senders and a combined inbox.

So far, so very similar to the recent iOS update (which was similar to the HTC option before it, it should be noted).

But the key thing is here that the client, which was built to be powerful but ended up flawed, now works as it should.

We can easily set out of office messages, set priority accounts that we need to panic about (although the process there is a little convoluted and won't let you search an Exchange server to get the addresses you need - nobody should have their CEO's email saved as a contact, but if they email you then you would listen).

ChatON

There are other options for messaging of course: for instance, ChatON is present once more (Samsung's attempt to bring a WhatsApp/BBM/iMessage rival) and brings functionality like being able to send walkie-talkie voice messages to one another as well as pictures and messages, but there are so few people using it regularly that it won't be long before you hide it from the menu screen unless you happen to have a lot of chatty Samsung friends.

This is something of a shame actually, as it's a decent platform. You can add a profile pic, send files and the like over a data connection without having to faff with email, and the range of customisation options and UI both work very well for the most part.

Once again, Samsung has shown that it has seen a problem in its older phones and corrected it accordingly - it might not be market leading but there wasn't a point where we felt that communication was harder with the Galaxy S 4, and that's all we're looking for in this scenario.

Internet

Internet on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is covered by two applications: the inbuilt browser and Google Chrome. This might lead to some confusion as, for the most part, the two applications do precisely the same thing.

However, the default browser (Samsung's own) still comes with a few tricks of its own, and has been upgraded since the Galaxy S3. It's not any quicker, which is odd given the uprated processor, but that's likely because the Galaxy S3 was already running at the top end of the speed the connection would let it.

In speed tests with the HTC One it managed to match it in most cases - interestingly, the HTC would load pages the fastest, but navigating through pages on a site would see the Galaxy S4 come out a shade quicker. We had hoped for slightly faster, but it wasn't a slouch by any stretch.

Zooming in and out of text is a little bit tricky at times though, as it would sometimes zoom in incorrectly and not enable the full text to stretch across the screen. A couple of taps in and out on another part of the text saw this sorted, but it still pales in comparison to the auto-reflow on offer from the HTC One.

To be honest, that may be the hundredth time we've written that statement - ever since the HTC Hero we've been impressed with this functionality, so we've no idea why Samsung won't implement it when others will. There's an option to have the text fit the zoom level you're after in the menu settings, and it's so useful that we've no idea why it's not enabled by default.

However, once you've got past the niggly elements, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a phone that's right up there with the best when it comes to internet browsing. We found that a little tweak in the Accessibilty menu (found in Settings within the browser) enabled us to make text a little larger than normal, which led to a really easy to use page no matter what we looked at or at which zoom level.

As you can imagine, everything is razor sharp here, with the HD screen offering levels of detail we could barely comprehend at times. Those upgrading to the S4 will be blown away by the difference between this and a WVGA screen, so get ready to be able to browse the internet in a way you'd want.

The bookmarking system is a little odd though: where before you could have bookmarks brought across from your Gmail account, this functionality has been stripped out here. Those that don't want to use Google Chrome will be annoyed as it means they'll have to re-find all their favourite pages rather than having them drawn in from the cloud now.

The UI of the internet browser has changed somewhat, with those changes being positive and... less so in some cases. For instance, if you tap on a link that's next to another when zoomed out, a small magnifying box will appear and you can more easily select the link you're after - wicked.

Also, the tabbed view (where you can see all the web pages you've got open) has been changed to work vertically now (taking more cues from Google Chrome) so it's easier to swish through all the pages you've got open.

The look of the default browser is a bit low-key now though, and feels like it could do with a bit of a visual overhaul. We're all for simplicity here, as content should always be king in the browser, but the overall feel is very blocky and doesn't have the clout of other versions visually.

That said, all the pertinent functionality (namely moving forward and back through sites, bookmarks and tabs) is all present and correct and we weren't cursing the inventors of the browser for hiding the things we use loads (we're looking at you, Microsoft with Windows Phone 8).

Flash is still absent, but now HTC has offered it as an optional plug in when you need it, we're missing it more than ever. There was a point last year, when Adobe ceased the updates to the mobile Flash browser, that we thought it would become irrelevant on mobiles, but it seems that this isn't the case still.

The BBC website still throws loads of 'You don't have the correct version of Flash' errors at us when browsing through, and while you can still sideload it, we're still rather missing it on mobiles (in general, not just the Galaxy S4).

Google Chrome, which we touched on earlier, is another good browser on the phone, but one that offers very similar functionality to the main browser, which leads to the confusion we mentioned. However it's got those cloud bookmarks, the ability to sync with a desktop browser (so you can see which tabs you've got open across both devices and is therefore a little bit more well endowed when it comes to internet browsing.

We found it to be a little faster when chugging through the internet as well, meaning we're surprisingly leaning towards recommending you go Chrome when firing up your Galaxy S4 - something that seems to have Google's intent all along written all over it.

Media

We always enjoy talking about the media functionality of the Samsung Galaxy range as it's so good - and we're happy to do the same here. It's a media marvel in every sense of the phrase, from music to video to even the FM radio, and if you're after a spot of entertainment on the go, then there's very little better out there, with the iPhone 5 the only possible rival.

The Galaxy S4 has done away with the FM Radio for some reason though – it's a shame as the Samsung app was one of the best out there for listening to some tunes over the airwaves. Sure, there are dozens of excellent internet radio apps, but for free music that you could record when needed, we loved that ability on the Galaxy S3 and Note 2.

It's also worth noting that Samsung has upgraded the rear speaker as well, which is now a little more rich in the bass tones and makes watching videos or YouTube clips without earphones that little bit better. It's nowhere near as good as BoomSound from HTC, but it's definitely a big step forward.

Music

Sonically, the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a great device for music consumption. You can lob in as many tracks as you like through the microSD slot, the interface is fluid and easy to navigate, and comes with so much control that if you've got quality headphones and high bit-rate tracks, it should be impossible not to get an excellent experience out of the phone.

One of the real winners here is the music player itself - there's just so much to do.

We're talking about the main player here - there are other options in the shape of Google's Play Music, and of course you can check things out using the Music portion of the Samsung Hub (the South Korean brand's version of iTunes, helpfully now packaged all up in one place) but the main way to transport tunes to your ears is through the main Music app.

It's easy to get to the tracks you want here too, as when you open it up you're presented with either a big long list of all the albums or songs you own - although if you have missing album artwork the phone won't be able to find it for you.

That said, there are so many apps on the Google Play Store that you shouldn't have an issue with it - we'd recommend you look at something like Player Pro to help you out with this.

Once you've selected the track, you can continue building the playlist or press the album artwork icon at the bottom of the screen where a little music player has started. From here there's all manner of things you can do: from searching through a song using a visual representation of the volume to setting the sound to mimic your ears perfectly, it's all here if you open up the menu.

The latter functionality is really nice - AdaptSound (which we've covered in the Contacts and Calling section of this review) takes you through a wizard that asks you to listen to a variety of frequencies and determines which ones you can hear. It will then boost the sound to make sure it fits into the range you can actually hear, which will diminish as you get older.

Music View, which is the name for the functionality where you can search through a song visually, is a nice touch but really doesn't work - you see peaks and troughs on the screen, but it doesn't correspond at all to what you're hearing.

Another feature (hidden away, annoyingly - you'll need to swipe to the left on the top row of icons in the main view, and there's no obvious indication that you can do this) will lead to Music Square.

This analyses your music library and gives it a rating based on Joy, Passion, Excitement and Calmness. Quite why these are the main types of track in Samsung's eyes, we don't know. You can then trace a line through the different emotions to get a playlist based on the emotions you really want. While the result is a bit hit and miss, we did find that when we wanted a more chilled out track listing it worked well.

Music also supports voice control here as well, which in theory would be really useful. The ability to Play, Pause, Skip and Volume Up/Down is a really nice thing to have - except it doesn't really work.

Volume up and down get easily interchanged and go up very slowly, and if the phone is in sleep mode (which it will be most of the time) then the commands don't work.

We loved it when we forced the screen to stay on and could just command the phone to change tracks by asking, and without having to press any buttons, but that kills the battery; when it doesn't pick up your voice properly it's a frustrating experience.

We would say it was more of a niche feature, but if you've got voice control turned on in the settings, the music player will constantly tell you that you can change things using the voice, with no way to permanently disable the notification.

Video

Video on the Samsung Galaxy range, like music is excellent. However, unlike music, it is head and shoulders above the rest of the competition, in no small part thanks to that Full HD Super AMOLED screen.

When we review phones, we usually always gravitate towards downloading our favourite apps to improve the experience - SwiftKey, PlayerPro and MX Player (for music) are the first three on our list. However, with the Galaxy S4, we had no need for a new video player app as everything we wanted was serviced by the inbuilt experience.

The interface is clean, with a white background enabling the thumbnails of the videos you want to watch really bringing the content to the fore. Then you've got the neat functionality of videos auto-playing as thumbnails, which is possible thanks to the power of the processor. It's not critical functionality, but it's really fun to watch.

You've also got a side link to the videos you've downloaded from Samsung's Video Hub, which makes it a complete and integrated video experience within one app. Many won't use this option that often, but it really works if you've got a couple of titles in the cloud that you want to bring down and means you don't have to mess around in the main Video Hub.

The phone can detect chapters within the video file, which makes it really easy to navigate through your content when you need to - this is an oft-overlooked piece of functionality that we're glad to see pervades through the Galaxy S4 from previous smartphone iterations.

But enough about what you can do and more about the experience itself - and it's glorious. The colour reproduction, the clarity of the screen - it's all there in spades and makes us just want to gorge ourselves on movies for hours, rather than having to wait until we can find a tablet or a PC to do it with.

Five years ago, when video watching on the smartphone started to trickle into the mainstream, we used to consider that a phone that enabled you to watch a music video without having to squint too hard was a pretty decent device. We're now at the other end of the scale with the Samsung Galaxy S4, with there being no better phone to watch an episode of Supernatural, a host of music videos from your favourite band and the latest downloaded blockbuster on.

The only slight issue we had with the Galaxy S4 when using the handset for video was with the Smart Pause functionality, which is designed to make it so you don't miss your video when someone comes to ask you a question or you need to look up to make sure you haven't missed your stop.

When detecting that your eyes are on the screen, the S4 will keep the action playing. When they stray from the action it's designed to pause, and for the most part it works. However, there's a slight second's delay to confirm your eye movements, which does negate the effect somewhat.

But more annoyingly, if you're holding the phone too far away from your face then the action won't kick in either. And with the higher resolution screen you can hold the S4 in a more comfortable way that's further away from the face, which ruins the effect somewhat.

In terms of clarity, the only rival we've seen so far is the Sony Xperia Z, which does have some lovely scenes thanks to the upscaling performed by the Bravia 2 engine within. However, while that does have the edge when it comes to making fuzzy standard-def footage look good, the screen pales (literally) in comparison to the Full HD Super AMOLED offering we're seeing on the Galaxy S4.

Streaming video

We tested the Samsung Galaxy S4 using EE's 4G service, and we were more than pleasantly surprised with the result. Having constantly used Netflix on the Three network for a while, we've always been impressed with the quality of stream that's been offered when using HSPDA+.

However, it's a whole new world with 4G – and one that instantly makes us recommend that you think about how you're going to get the service on your phone. It's blisteringly quick and brings a whole new dimension to the way you'll use your Galaxy S4, as suddenly you can get a whole world of content on the go.

You can even download movies on the go in an extraordinarily fast time, but therein lies the rub: EE has some pretty tight data limits unless you're willing to fork out a fair whack each month.

They're not that low if you're just doing the same general 3G business you always have, but we were so impressed with the speed of things like the internet and, in particular, movie streaming, that we'd recommend waiting until all the networks come out their pricing to see what's going to be the fastest and cheapest available.

Storage

Storage on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is limited if you opt for the 16GB version of the phone, as over 6GB of it is taken up by pre-installed apps and the OS itself. That might not sound like a problem when you consider that you can whack in up to 64GB of microSD storage thanks to the expansion slot, but this is the zone where apps download.

And with the prevalence of the HD app now coming along (for instance, Need For Speed: Most Wanted takes up nearly 2GB of space on the internal memory) you can see how quickly that could get filled up. You start with only 9.15GB of the 16GB of space you've paid for from the outset, which is over 2GB less than offered by the same capacity Galaxy S3.

Samsung has updated the phone since launch to help this issue, as where previously some cloud services like Dropbox would sync all the photos it has to the phone automatically (easily taking over 1GB for any existing user) this has now been disabled, making it a user option.

There are also things you can do to mitigate this, but you have to know where to look. For instance, videos you buy from the Samsung Video Hub can run to well over 1GB, but if you head into Settings from within that app you can tell the phone to put the film on your SD card instead to make it a little less of a strain on the internal memory.

This isn't a problem that only Samsung has to deal with, but the fact that the internal storage is so limited thanks to the pre-installed elements means this becomes even more of an issue than we saw on the iPad, which at least had over 2GB more to start with.

The memory card slot really does help though by giving you a safe haven for your media - our advice is to get your hands on the 32GB version of this phone unless you want to be really careful with your use.

However, with the update we found things to be a lot better - we downloaded 20 games of varying sizes to the phone, way more than most will use regularly, and still had 3GB of space remaining. So while that 2GB drop is unwanted, it's not unmanageable in any way and far less of an issue now.

It's also worth mentioning that you've got two years of Dropbox storage on the phone too – and not just a paltry amount, but 50GB to lump all manner of home movies and photos up into the cloud.

With clever connection to your gallery, this is a feature that is swept under the carpet marketing-wise, but really is rather useful.

Camera

The Samsung Galaxy S4 camera is a big upgrade over other sensors it has put into phones, and with a 13MP sensor you can see why. It is capable of taking some stunning photos and comes with a decent auto mode, which enables you to get really great shots no matter what the framing.

This means you can be taking a picture of a landscape one minute, then trying to get an extreme close up of a daffodil the next, and the Galaxy S4 camera will handle both with aplomb. There are also a number of clever modes available on the handset that take their UI cues from the Samsung Galaxy Camera, meaning that a quick tap of the 'Mode' button below the on screen shutter will give you a scrollable wheel of options to choose from.

These options include Drama Shot, Eraser mode and Beauty Shot, as well as cueing up the likes of HDR mode to improve the quality and light levels of your snaps. For the most part they have a good role to play in your photography, and we're glad Samsung hasn't over-burdened the user with too many modes.

There are some issues with this method however, and we're not sure how you'd solve them: Eraser mode enables you to take five pictures and if someone walks into the shot the phone will recognise the intruder and ask if you want to remove it.

This is a brilliant idea in theory, but the fact you have to enable it as a setting before taking the shot means that unless you leave the camera in this mode all the time, you'll only get the full benefit when you know you're likely to get people walking behind.

The other problem we have is the settings side of the user interface. We applaud Samsung for going with simplicity first - and by that we mean that users aren't presented with a settings menu as long as their arm when trying to take a quick picture of a cat or child doing something funny.

However, as you'll see in a moment, the Galaxy S4 camera does struggle in some conditions, and as such the only way to mitigate these problems is to do things like increase the exposure or enable night mode. If you want to do this then you'll have to acquaint yourself with the settings menu in the top left-hand corner of the camera app, which has a number of icons to toggle on and off.

That said, what is on offer does really work. Night mode is a good way of increasing the brightness of your photos when things are getting a little dark - although you'll have to make sure that you're able to hold the camera steady if you don't want blur. We've tried a number of smartphones with this mode though, and the Galaxy S4 was one of the better ones, plus being able to enable it automatically is brilliant.

Other tricks, like being able to take a Drama Shot, are pretty close to the innovation spawned from other manufacturers. In this case, the functionality is almost identical to that seen on the Nokia Lumia 920, although we're glad to see it again as it does enable you to make some pretty funny GIFs.

The other new ideas, such as being able to take a picture using the front and back camera simultaneosly, are niche at best. Samsung made a big deal about this new function at the launch of the Galaxy S4, but in reality we can't ever see a scenario where you want your face to be in the picture too. We do like that you can have loads of frames for your face though, so there are scenarios to use it - it's just not a USP of the phone.

But enough about what it can do; how good is the Samsung Galaxy S4 camera in day to day use? In honesty,brilliant in many ways. We mentioned that it's possible to take some stunning shots, but then we'd expect it from a 13MP camera with Samsung's burgeoning photography heritage.

When stacked against the HTC One, the S4 is a superior device in one way, but less useful in another. For one, the focal length is much poorer, meaning you have to stand further away from the subject to get the same shot you would on the One.

In theory this sounds great, but as you can see from our comparison shots, the HTC is much better at pulling out the object of the photograph. Then again, the Galaxy S4 has a more balance composition, meaning the chance to get a brilliant photo is stronger. It doesn't over expose for the sake of it, so while photos might look better on the One's phone screen, the jaw dropping effect of the S4 is higher.

In low light, the HTC One with its UltraPixel technology is streets ahead of the S4, unless you place the latter into Night Mode after which it's more even. However, the One manages low light shots almost instantly, while the S4 needs a lot of processing.

In short, as you'll see below, the Galaxy S4 is a good phone to take a load of pictures on - one of the best if you're taking your time to get it right.

If you're looking for a more even picture with the ability to zoom in on certain parts of the shot, it's a decent option, but for point and shoot ability we would recommend the HTC One (or even giving the Sony Xperia Z a run out).

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This is a GIF taken from the Galaxy S4 - it's a really easy mode to use, does offer some nice results.

This cat is not dancing - but with Animated Photo IT LOOKS LIKE IT IS!

Maps

On any Android phone the mapping experience is superb these days, and the Galaxy S4 is no exception thanks to the awesome power of Google Maps. We've been evangelising this service for years, but when you're getting a powerful sat-nav in your phone, then you can see why we're such fans.

On top of that, it's one that keeps getting upgraded, and combined with the Galaxy S4's large, high-res and expansive screen we had no issues at all using it as our navigation device in car.

We're not going to go into the full detail of what Google Maps can do, but there are some highlights worth mentioning. For instance you can cache certain parts of the globe to the phone, so if you're wondering if you'll be forced to use loads of data when abroad and lost, you can safeguard your bank balance.

There's 3D mapping of the big cities, so when in the traditional map view you can see skyscraper models popping up on your screen. This is both cool and makes it very easy to navigate by sight if you can't see a road name anywhere nearby.

And then you have the StreetView option, which lets you see what the roads look like from a pedestrians point of view. Or indoor maps for major attractions, making it easier to navigate big buildings. It's an excellent app and one you should spend a lot of time getting to know.

The Google Maps experience has also been upgraded for Full HD phones, with the UI looking so pin sharp (thanks to vector graphics) that you'll be able to see things you're looking for instantly on the Galaxy S4.

The screen is bright and clear, and like its predecessor, the GPS and GLONASS combination gives one of the most accurate location experiences we've ever seen. In case you're wondering, GLONASS is the Russian equivalent of the GPS system, with loads of satellites up there beaming down signals.

If you want to sell a smartphone in Russia then you have to offer this compatibility, so it means that any phone that has GPS and GLONASS ability has so many more satellites to choose from - ergo, a much more accurate location experience.

We even found it to be accurate when a metre or so away from the window when inside the house - and we love the fact you can get a lock in under a second, even in built up areas.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is one of the best navigation devices on the market, so if you've never experienced the 'thrill' of using your phone to get to B from A, then this will blow your mind.

Apps

There are a number of apps available on the Samsung Galaxy S4, and for the most part we're glad to see that pre-installed bloatware is at a lower level than usual. The usual suspects are there: Calculator, S Memo, S Planner and the gang, and these are all really great tools that we urge you to try out.

They do perhaps err on the side of complexity, which is a theme prevalent throughout the Galaxy S4 when diving into the apps themselves. This will attract a lot of people that consider themselves to be more of a power user, but put off others looking for an alternative to the simplicity of the iPhone.

For instance the S Planner app is visually very busy, but comes with rich functionality. You can set a location with a new meeting appointment, or pinch to zoom through the time view, be it day, week, month or year.

But we like that Samsung favours power over simplicity, and it does a really great job of making that power usable.

There are a number of other new apps on the Galaxy S4, so take a look below to see how they stack up:

Optical Reader

This application apes the likes of Google Goggles by enabling you to translate words on the screen in front of you (using augmented reality), nab details from business cards and get information from QR codes when asked. It's a simple interface that really only asks to be pointed at the object you're looking at, and works well.

In reality we can only see it being any good for getting business card details or understanding what the odd words means in a foreign language. The business card element is hit and miss, so if you're trying to get everything from the name of the person to their job title to their phone number handily stored in the phone, the accuracy is generally around 70%.

That's still 70% less effort than manually putting all the info in yourself, so we consider that to be a real time saver.

S Translate

Building on the ability to take one word and put it in another language, the S Translate app is a powerful tool that will let you speak or type words into the phone and have them translated into another language - or vice versa.

It's a simple system to actually use - we found very little that went wrong with it. More intriguingly, the app could even understand what were were saying more often than not when trying to speak in a foreign tongue.

We've tried this on a number of apps, and this is the first time it's worked so well, so big thumbs up to Samsung for that.

The only issue we can see is that it relies on a connection to the internet to work properly - if you're out and about in a land where you don't understand the language chances are you won't have data, thus rendering the app moot.

It's only a slight quibble though, and as such shouldn't put you off buying the Galaxy S4 if you're someone looking for a really handy travel companion.

Story Album

In response to HTC's Zoe functionality, and BlackBerry bringing the same sort of functionality on the BB10 software, Samsung has added in the ability to make photo albums of your memories and even enabling you to send the pics across to a real life printers to have a glossy book made.

But in practice it's a really low-power app that seems to be just ticking boxes rather than bringing innovation. We were initially impressed as the phone could work out when we had been taking photos of an event and then asked us to create an album based on the snaps.

When we went to do such a thing though, we were really disappointed. Despite tagging our friends in pictures, the wrong faces were in focus, the themes poor and the speed of rendering for a device that has such a strong core is saddening.

Story album could be so much better if Samsung put some effort here, but it feels really cobbled together - and pales massively when compared to the memory-making HTC One Zoe functionality.

Gaming

Gaming on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is handled by the Adreno 320 GPU, which obviously can not only handle a much larger number of pixels, but can also work its magic when it comes to giving smooth, real to life gaming on the go.

We tried the phone on a number of games, from Super Hexagon to Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, and as expected the Galaxy S4 handled them all with aplomb, with not even a hint of judder or slow down when in heavy use.

More impressively was the lack of battery juice-down when using the handset, as it managed to only consume a few percent of the power even when getting a little warmer in the hand.

Android doesn't have a lot of stand out games at the moment, but in our tests of the largest (Grand Theft Auto, Need for Speed, NOVA 3 plus myriad benchmarking apps) we found there was nothing the Galaxy S4 couldn't handle. Good-o.

Smart Stay, Smart Scroll, Air View, Air Gestures

Smart Stay

Smart Stay isn't a new feature for the Galaxy S4, but it's a better implementation than we saw on the Galaxy S3 last year. Back then the result was a little patchy, and also contributed to some dodgy auto-brightness levels.

In case you don't know, Smart Stay is another of Samsung's eye-tracking technologies, one that can tell when you're looking at the screen and won't dim or put it into sleep mode as a result.

This time around it's nearly flawless at checking out when your eyes are looking at the screen, although when it does get it wrong and things begin to dim there's no way to save it (despite us blinking and flashing our eyes at the display in the vain hope the S4 might recognise the effort.

Of course, you could just tap the screen with your finger - but come on, this isn't 2011.

Smart Scroll

For all the brilliance of Smart Stay, the world's eyes are on Smart Scroll (sorry). This technology was designed to also monitor your eyes, but when it notes you're looking at the phone the Galaxy S4 will enable you to tilt the handset back and forth to move the text or email you're trying to read up and down the screen.

Well, this is what Samsung said at the Galaxy S4 launch, but it turns out that there's another, more cool, trick at work here: you can hold the phone steady and tilt your head up and down to achieve the same thing.

You have to make a pretty strong movement with your head to make this function work, but when it does it's pretty cool indeed and one of the 'down the pub' moments that will make people sit up and take notice.

However, and this is a big one: because the feature isn't perfect, we can't say it's a useful way to navigate around the screen. It's cool that you can choose to either make the screen scroll using your head or tilting the screen, and then you can select the speed of the scrolling too.

You can also decide whether to have the annoying eye icon pop up on the screen to alert you that the Smart Scroll function is working. So while it doesn't really work every time and sometimes messes up, it's cool to have - although we still have the issue of using your finger being a more useful way of scrolling around a screen.

With something like Smart Scroll it has to be flawless to be considered a useful part of life, and would have mitigated the issues we found with the actual need for it. But as it's slightly buggy and dependent on a number of factors (such as lighting conditions) we just found that after a few days it got turned off - and we fear that's the way it would stay for most for the next two years.

Air View

One of the new features of the Samsung Galaxy S4 is Air View - well, it's not new per se as we've seen it on the Galaxy Note 2 already. But where that device needed the S Pen to work, the S4 only needs a finger, which you hover over certain items to see inside without opening.

Samsung has imbued a number of applications with this functionality, but in truth only a few really need it. For instance, being able to see which speed dials are assigned to which number is really useful, as otherwise you'd just have to press and find out.

Less useful are things like video scrolling, where you can flick through the video using the timeline bar without having to disturb the main action. While this is a useful feature, there's not a lot of point to having to hover the finger over the screen to achieve it when you can just slide your finger on the screen, which is a much easier way of doing things.

What's nice is that in the Setting menu you can choose what Air View is used for, so that means you can turn it on for emails and messages, but off for video previews and magnifying the web.

The only problem is that you'll have to get used to holding your finger further from the screen, as the screen is a sensitive little monkey. You'll be scrolling through an email and suddenly you'll see items flashing up all over the place, meaning you'll want to turn off the function. We'd say it's worth putting in the effort to get better with it, but we'd rather Samsung got even more granular here to let us turn off Air View in email, where it's easier to trigger and less useful, but keep it in calendar, where it's a blooming godsend.

That said, it's still probably one of the best innovations used on the Galaxy S4, and we're glad it's been added in.

Air gestures

Where Air View was useful, here we come to one of the things we thought was the least practical things on the phone in our hands on preview: Air gestures. It's designed to let you simply wipe your hand over the front of the phone without touching it and means you can skip tracks, move between photos and answer calls without touching the phone.

We'll say that the latter functionality is good, but only when you're in a hands free situation, such as the car. There you don't want to be having to root around for the 'Call accept' function when you're supposed to have two hands on the wheel, where a simple wipe to answer is really cool.

We've got nothing against the option of doing things this way, and it's not a lot more accurate with the new software update. This means that there's no more (well, nearly) missed gestures, and it won't activate when we don't want it to, which is another real bugbear we found at the start.

Other uses, such as moving between tabs in the internet browser and moving app icons around, are cool and could be useful in very niche situations... but it's still not really better than just touching the screen and doing it without worry.

There are some more instances where it's really, really useful – you can wipe over the screen and flick through PDF pages, scroll through web pages a large jump at a time or flip between tabs.

It's a clever system, but like we said, it's not useful enough – it's cool to do, but takes a little more effort than it should to be a natural flowing part of your phone use.

Like so many new features on the Galaxy S4, a little annoyance means you'll turn them off, and it's unlikely you'll ever turn them on again, which makes us feel bad for all those engineers that were asked to come up with all this innovation.

WatchON and S Health

WatchON

WatchON is Samsung's attempt to make the Galaxy S4 into the remote that controls your whole home, and given the power of the infrared (IR) blaster on the top of the phone, it makes a decent fist of it for the most part.

The application comes with a number of other elements too, but let's focus on the remote part first, as it's still a novelty to those that haven't got a modern tablet or tried the likes of the HTC One or LG Optimus G Pro.

You can set rooms up, enabling you to take the phone with you and still have it as a remote. When first setting the device up, you can tell WatchON how you get your channels (through the TV, set top box or cable) and it can then set up the controller to work in the correct way by asking a few channel-based questions.

It works well, and we found it was really swift at getting the right codes for our devices so we could start controlling the volume etc without having to reach for the main remote. However, it wasn't as strong as the HTC One here, as some of our gadgets passed the set-up test, but then not all the functions worked, so we needed to reset the codes, which was annoying.

There are also fewer buttons on the Galaxy S4 interface, which was irritating when even swiping down to the lower level, which is supposed to give more complex functions, didn't yield the options we needed. It's a good app, just not the best out there.

One thing we did miss on the HTC One, and enjoyed on the Optimus G Pro, was the ability to have the remote control pervade in the notifications menu or on the lock screen, and it's great that the Galaxy S4 could do both of these things easily.

It's a good remote control, if a little unwieldy, and it's a real upgrade to have the option on there.

The other element of the WatchON app is the ability to have programmes chosen for you, with a simple tap on the thumbnail keying in the right sequence to open the channel on your set top box and have it working simply. We noted that although the genres were all over the place (not looking for content coming up, just suggesting basketball when asking for sports etc) when you keyed in your favourite channels and shows the WatchON app was good at suggesting the right content.

It's a step forward from the HTC One option, and we liked the open and easy to use interface from the Galaxy S4. Also, unlike the One, there's a lot more to choose from when it comes to On Demand video, with the Video Hub getting its own zone within the app rather than feeling tacked on with the HTC offering.

We're can't see a time when you'd use it as such, as the really annoying thing about the Galaxy S4 is you can't stream bought movies wirelessly - only to a TV with a wired connection and screen mirroring enabled. Come on Samsung, don't make a big deal about such a function then not let us watch things we bought from you.

S Health

Samsung made a big deal about S Health with the launch of the Galaxy S4, and it's clear to see the intent: it wanted to get a slice of the lucrative fitness market, and wanted to leverage the technology contained within the smartphone already.

It's a novel idea to have it so entrenched within the phone itself, but it does have some good ideas on how to use your phone to improve one's fitness. For instance, once you've entered all your weight, height and exercise details, the phone can tell you an idea weight to aim for, and how many calories per day you should ingest to achieve it.

On top of that, you get a guide to exercise levels each day, in a way that mimics the likes of Nike's FuelBand, which uses points to tell you how to get more active.

Samsung is clearly aware of this, as it's even got an S Band accessory to achieve the same thing if you don't have the phone with you - although we can see a scenario that when you use the phone and S Band together you'll be getting twice the exercise for the same activity, which renders the whole process a little moot.

While we like the sentiment behind the S Health app, and the fact it works so much better than other similar apps, there's still a lot to wonder about in there.

You'll be set a 'steps per day' goal, and these are divided into Running, Walking and Up/Down (whatever that last one is). While on the days we did take the Galaxy S4 running it did have a larger uptick in the percentage of running steps, it was far from accurate.

Even on sedentary days, the S4 was congratulating on running for a portion of it. Seems a bit unfair to all those people that were out sweating and pounding the streets, but we took the kudos.

Perhaps we're being a little hard on this app, as it works well - just too simplistically. You can track your weight here nicely (and even more effectively if you purchase Samsung's Bluetooth scales) enter the food you've eaten to keep an eye on calories, and if you're organised enough, track all your exercise in one place.

But there's so much more to be done; what if you had running app capabilities within S Health, so it can monitor your runs in a similar way to Nike+, Adidas MiCoach or Endomondo? Samsung is missing a trick here - plus it needs to make the pedometer more accurate.

Group Play and Samsung Hub

Another big sell from Samsung, is Group Play - and again we can't really see the point for certain elements. Yes, we know this is getting to be a theme with the phone, but bear with us here.

One of the most popular functions Samsung was keen to talk about was the music sharing - the idea being that if you've got more than one Galaxy S4 kicking around (presumably not by yourself) you can set up a Group Play group by making a Wi-Fi hotspot and stream the music to all phones at once.

The clever idea is that multiple phones can connect, and each can have their own speaker setting in a surround sound setup. The downside is that you'll never have that many Galaxy S4s in one place, and even if you did, a single small speaker at the back is hardly going to be enough to wipe out your home speaker system.

We can see this being useful going forward though, as if you have other devices with Group Play functionality - such as wireless speakers - you can easily create a virtual surround speaker system using just the Galaxy S4.

One other thing that REALLY annoyed us was the fact that Group Play on the likes of the Galaxy S3 or Note 8.0 is a completely different app, despite having the same name and icon. You can't do anything we mentioned above with these devices - you can barely connect the two together.

It seems an oversight from Samsung to remove this function, as many people will already have bought heavily into the Samsung ecosystem.

Samsung Hub

Building neatly on from the WatchON app, we've got the all new Samsung Hub ready and waiting to be played with. This is a much better idea than before, where all the disparate entertainment sections were scattered around the phone.

With this attractive hub, Samsung is looking to take a real crack at iTunes by making a holistic experience, whether it's games, music or video you're after. The UI, as we mentioned, is really nice, with swipes enabling you to get through all the content, and a home screen that throws up all the different kind of content it thinks you might like.

It's not got a universal appeal, as even though you're paying a high dollarpound price for the latest blockbuster, you can't watch move that content onto your larger screen without a HomeSync device. Connecting to a TV or streaming using AllShare won't let you play video you've purchased from the Samsung Hub, which feels like a massive trick missed here, although Samsung tells us it's due to a licensing issue.

HTC Watch can do it, and the prices are often cheaper. What gives, Samsung?

It's not really a great place to get all your content thanks to the really high price, and it would be excellent to see a wider remit by including third party apps to supplement the lack of functionality in places.

For instance, and we're sure there's a licensing reason for this, how great would it be to see Netflix in the Video Hub to enable instant streaming, rather than having to pay £10 or so just to get a video in SD that you can only really watch on the phone?

Accessories

When it comes to 'things you can put on the Samsung Galaxy S4' the Korean brand has gone all out with some ideas.

We've got covers, holders, things and stuff all over the shop - and we've got our hands on the Flip Cover to start with.

While we were given the delightful pea green colour, there are white, black, yellow and blue options as well, to give you that touch of class when protecting your new handset.

The cover is made from a fairly strong material, and adds rather a large amount of depth to your Galaxy S4. For some reason it is thicker than the main cover plate, which means when you fold the front around it makes a much larger phone than you'd have expected.

One of the main problems some people would see is the cover closing properly - it's unfortunate that it doesn't have a magnet to hold it closed, but it doesn't ever stay open when flat on its back, as the soft material will always relax.

In terms of the 'mini mode' of the S4 when the cover is closed, it's a mixed bag. The small clock mode is cool, and being able to answer and end calls with the front closed is nice, but the speed with which the S4 reverts to mini mode is poor, which takes away from the effect.

In short: the Flip Cover is much better than the standard option, as the little window is genuinely useful while keeping your screen safe. But it does add heft to your ultra-slim Galaxy S4, and doesn't always work as quickly as it should.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery life

Ah, the old battery life test. One of the world's most difficult things to rate, thanks to the sheer range of things you can do with the phone to keep it from throwing out all its juice in a heartbeat.

If you can't be bothered to read why, just understand that Galaxy S4 = good battery life.

For one person the Galaxy S4 is a treasured beast, only brought out into the dappled light to check emails manually once an hour for most of the day. For the next it's an all-powerful media beast, one that will be streaming movies over a 4G connection while auto-updating every app under the sun.

Whatever you use your phone for, in our eyes it should be able to handle what the handset's main USPs are.

But the good news is that the Samsung Galaxy S4 is able to handle all the things you can throw at it and still keep the 2600mAh battery chugging along at the end of the day. We found that in general use it was very well received, as nothing we found could hurt it.

Our usual test is performed on the commute to work, the time where we're at our most 'phone-use-y'. For this test, like all other phones, we streamed the audio over Bluetooth headphones (Rockaway Novero, if you're asking).

A 10 minute cycle ride with music playing dropped things by 1%. Streaming video over 4G for 10 minutes with full brightness on the screen pulled down another 3%. Then it was more music for 30 minutes, which ate another 2%, and then downloading a 86MB game file over 4G, which munched 3%.

A little more music playing, combined with general email checking and testing out the air gestures, air view and smart scroll saw a battery drain of just over 10% for the hour we were trundling to work. That's really impressive, as we reckon high drain capability of 10% per hour will lead to more than enough juice come the end of the day.

We never found ourselves in that situation, which is great. You can always pop in another battery, thanks to this being removable, but in truth, it wasn't needed.

We will say that those that like gaming, movie watching and internet browsing will struggle to make the battery last on this phone, as the screen is the biggest drain. That sounds obvious, but we're actually happy that the Galaxy S4 isn't one of those devices that will see your battery juicing down from an overly-enthusiastic background syncing process.

Connectivity

Connectivity on the Samsung Galaxy S4 is well catered for, thanks to simply packing every kind of sensor under the sun in there. For instance, you've got low power Bluetooth (Bluetooth 4.0) which means you can connect to a wide range of sensors - like trainers - and have them send back up data without taking up loads of power and sucking the battery dry.

As you can imagine, S Beam and NFC are both present and correct on the Samsung Galaxy S4, with both working well in tandem to nab stuff off other phones which you've tapped the back of.

It uses a Wi-Fi Direct connection to make it easier to send items from A to B, and does do very speedily indeed. It might look odd, but we still believe massively in the power of NFC thanks to the plethora of speaker docks and headphones that now use it for easier Bluetooth pairing.

GPS and GLONASS are on board, as we mentioned above in the Maps section of the review, and combined offer a startlingly quick location time when firing up the mapping services. Seriously quick – we urge you to try it.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 supports all manner of Wi-Fi connections, and can hang on to the signal even when weak thanks to dual-channel bonding to preserve the data transfer.

We can't say that we noticed much of an upgrade over other models, but then again that's not bad thing as most of the top end smartphones will now manage to offer decent Wi-Fi connections given they're so crucial to the running of the phone.

When downloading large files we did notice some dropouts and speed losses, but that was more to do with the server connection it seemed. A 700MB video file from Samsung's Video Hub took a lot less time to download than a 590MB file from Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.

4G

We were testing the Samsung Galaxy S4 on the EE network, and if you're new to the 4G game then we urge you to make sure you're going to get the superfast service on your new S4, should you have got this far and decided to rush out and buy it.

From app downloads to streaming video, it was just so fast. Web pages load in a heartbeat, updates occur almost instantly and everything you could hope for is serviced by upping the speeds to 4G levels.

If you've got fibre optic broadband then the effect is similar – we're loving the fact you can download things on the go at lightning speeds. The S4 is well set up too – we moved between two tube stops (overground, obviously) and managed to nab a massive 87MB of data in just a few minutes.

The data levels need to be watched though. It's very easy to get over excited with 4G on the Galaxy S4 as so much of it is enhanced by the faster speeds – from video to music to game downloads, we found ourselves wanting to do everything superfast, and as such were heading between 500MB and 1GB of data per day.

So make sure you've got enough data to manage – if you want the full force of 4G, you'll probably be wanting at least 8GB of data, if not more.

One more thing...

Oh, and a big shout out for USB on the go. It's a massively underloved feature that enables you to connect a USB dongle to your Galaxy S4 and transfer files without having to fanny about with microSD card and taking off the back of the phone.

Yes, you need a separate cable, and yes, finding one is harder than extracting teeth from a chicken, but we still like to see it added as a feature.

Benchmarks

We're testing the quad-core version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 here - which means that when it comes to benchmarking it's not as strong as it could be, as the octa-core version, which we've yet to test, looks to be smashing up the speed charts.

As you can see, with all three tests the S4 is shown to be an incredibly strong device, although it's matched in many ways with the HTC One, which shows that both brands have got their act together when it comes to bringing out an industry-leading smartphone.

Antutu

Peacekeeper

SunSpider

Hands on pictures

Official photography

Verdict

Many people will have jumped straight here to see what we think of the phone, so we'll get the salient points out of the way first.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is a phone that we really, really like. The combination of powerful innards, the market's best screen and a clever design ethos all combine to make a really strong contender for the handset you should be buying when you wander into your local phone emporium.

It's slick, it's fast and it wipes the floor with the competition in so many ways. The 13MP camera is one of the best we've seen on a phone for getting that picture, with rich colours and texture the way forward.

We're getting really fed up with the design criticisms thrown at any phone manufacturer that deigns to not make its flagship out of metal. Yes, it doesn't feel as premium, but what you're giving up in feel you're getting back in weight, removable battery and general hardiness - the combination of Gorilla Glass 3 and a plastic shell mean this is one tough cookie.

The trend for cases is such that users aren't even getting the full force of the design either - we don't think that they should be necessary, but a lot of people are protecting their high investment. We spoke to a chap that went for the HTC One for design reasons, then showed us the huge case he carried it around in.

That's not to say Samsung couldn't do better with design on the S4 - there's a lot more to wish for here - but it's a much more solid version of the S3.

We liked

The Galaxy S4 seemed to be a boring iteration of the S3, and we were ready to be fully nonplussed by it. But you then realise that deep in the Samsung labs they took apart the older version and then upgraded it in nearly every way, so this really is very, very good Galaxy S3 here.

The screen is out of this world. Even at a lower PPI the 5-inch display dominates the competition. We love how Samsung has evened out the colour by default, so the usual 'OHMYGERD, the colours are too over the top!!!1!' argument is mostly moot.

It's clear, bright and vivid, and there's very little it isn't great for.

The camera upgrade is impressive too - we liked the top end features and the sheer snapping power enabled for some simply divine pictures. The whole user interface was improved as well, which was a nice touch forward, although it still over-complicates things.

TouchWiz is an Android skin (Android 4.2, don't forget) that rewards you for playing with it - and in today's over-sanitised smartphone world, being able to discover features is a real treat to a lot of users.

Battery life is strong, 4G is a real step forward in speed and the addition of a microSD card slot is what we're looking for in a phone still. Hear that, HTC and Google?

We disliked

While the Samsung Galaxy S4 is a much better phone than the S3 and most of the competition, there are still some niggles that we can see being problematic.

For a phone that's so quick to run through nearly every task we were a little upset to see how long it takes to load a gallery up. This problem is compounded with a microSD card, and the more stuff on there, the more the phone has to parse.

It got to the point where we were embarrassed to show off the photos we had taken as it just took too long to get them up.

We were initially worried about the 9GB of internal space - Samsung tells us that the Galaxy S4 needs to eat up over 6GB of your 16GB allocation (on the base model) for a more 'feature rich' OS - but a software update has freed some more of that for use, which helps a lot.

One of the worst messages you can get on an Android phone is telling you there's no space for new apps, as many will simply not know what to do. Thankfully, that message is less likely to happen now, even if you're someone who downloads loads and loads of games.

But the biggest problem we have is with the supposed 'innovation' Samsung has brought to proceedings. Air View, Air Gestures, Smart Scroll - these are all cool in their own way, but all are flawed or overly complex, marring the overall simplicity of the device.

Compare that to the HTC One or stock Android on the Google Nexus 4 and you feel that Samsung is coming up with ideas for the sake of something new. We really do laud the sentiment, and you can just turn it all off - but then you've basically got a faster Galaxy S3 with a better screen and camera.

Final verdict

Make no mistake - the Samsung Galaxy S4 is far, far more than a Galaxy S3 'S' - Samsung may be copying Apple according to some people, but it's not as brazen as the Cupertino brand in flogging the exact same design with a slightly uprated processor and calling it a new phone.

The Galaxy S4 is a great, great device in its own right, re-inventing what it means to own a brilliant smartphone in a number of ways. The gestures are cool, the touch-less experience amazing at times - in short, it's a wonderful phone you want to pull out of your pocket again and again and again.

The design issue is overblown, but pertinent. Yes, it's plastic, and yes, compared to the competition you wouldn't choose to spend £500 on it for the chassis. But it's a very solid device that belies that exterior and shouldn't be discounted for it, although it still feels like the cheapest of all the top end phones on the market - we're slightly amazed that Samsung hasn't gone a few steps further with the design after the S3's criticism.

TouchWiz is getting a little complex now, though. The simplicity of HTC Sense shines through, and the HTC One is a superior device in many ways because the innovation is based on things users want. Where Samsung brought the ability to wave to move photos, the HTC One made the speaker better.

Where the S4 lets you scroll with your head, the One lets you take photos in low light. The latter feature is slightly offset by the S4's auto Night Mode, but you get the picture.

But screw all the 'which phone is better than the other' notion for now (we'll get to that in our best mobile phones piece) the Galaxy S4 is a stunning smartphone that won't let you down for a variety of tasks. There's no doubt Samsung will have to make a big step forward to keep users interested with the Galaxy S5, but for now we love the S4 and would be proud to have it in our pocket.