10 Cool Things You Can Do with the Samsung Galaxy S4

1. Screen Mirroring

You can mirror whatever is on your phone to your TV Screen. This can be done with a cable or wireless. You can watch the videos you’ve shot, remember the S4 shoots videos in high definition (HD) mode so don’t worry the videos will be clear on the screen. You can even play games on the screen with your phone acting as a controller.

Screen mirroring bia Allshare Cast

Find out how to set up your S4 for mirroring by clicking this link.

2. Remote for Your Devices

You can use your S4 as a remote for most of your home devices. It’s not just a dumb remote though, the WatchON app learns your likes and preferences and suggests to you programmes to watch.

This especially came in handy for our TV whose remote has been missing for a while.

The Samsung S4 as a remote

This is how to set up your S4 as a universal remote.

3. Air View

This lets you preview contents of an email/text or view a larger image/text on the browser. The good thing is, air view can be turned on/off and you can choose the specific items which you can use air view with.

Image from techradar.com

4. Air Gestures

The air gestures let you manipulate the phone without touching the screen. Useful when you don’t want to smudge your screen with dirty fingers, particularly when receiving a call. Very cool when demonstrating it to friends 😀

Image from http://www.3g.co.uk/

5. Smart Stay/Smart Scroll

Smart Stay is a feature that lets the phone watch you as you watch it. As long as your eyes are on the screen it won’t go off, very useful if you’re reading a book and you don’t have to tap the screen each time it goes off to save power. When you look away for long, the screen automatically detects you aren’t looking at it and goes off by itself.

Cool, ey?

Smart Scroll allows you to scroll through the browser with a nod of your head. However, I’d say it’s faster and more accurate to just use your finger.

6. Multi-Window

It’s not just about multi-tasking anymore. You can have more than one active window (app) on the screen at the same time. Makes things like copy pasting from one app to another much easier. Here’s how to set it up.

So now you have a preview into my private apps

7. Drama Shot

Capture an action into one continuous shot. It captures a series of images in one seamless shot. Let me borrow a picture (from a fellow blogger: Nancie Mwai) to demonstrate what I mean

A drama shot captured on S4

8. Dual Shot

Lets the ‘taker’ of a picture be in the picture too. Take one picture with both the front and back cameras.

I think I already talked about the dual shot in a previous post

9. Group Play

Lets you connect up to 7 other Samsung S4’s so you can share pictures, videos, documents or play games/music simultaneously. They connect over NFC. Now it’s a good thing everyone around you seems to have an S4, no?

Booming music with S4’s group play

10. Quick links

The Samsung Galaxy S4 pull-down bar at the top has more shortcuts for switching on/off functionality. Widgets/apps can also be customized on home/lock screens. Android Jellybean offers more flexibility including the option for simplistic (plain) homescreens.

The pulldown bar shortcuts

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