Pure Android versions of both the Samsung Galaxy S4 and the HTC One smartphones have gone up for sale via the Google Play store in the US. These two top of the range phones are priced at $649 and $599 respectively (including delivery) however the devices won’t ship until 9th July. Meanwhile The Verge has had hands-on time with both these Google Play Edition smartphones in their plain vanilla Android unskinned forms and asks the question “Is every Android phone better with stock software?”
The Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One are regarded as two of the best Android smartphones on the market today. Both companies have made significant changes to the way the Android OS on their devices looks, feels and operates - partly to differentiate their products in the market. A number of people, perhaps call them Android purists, don’t like the customised skinning software and often refer to it as overblown, unnecessary fluff and even bloat. But as The Verge finds out there are some deeper optimisations offered in the “skinned” versions of these phones that are of real benefit to buyers.
Overall hardware
The hardware on offer in these phones is exactly as in the versions you have seen before. Considering their bare hardware it is important to note the 32GB HTC One, comes with double the internal storage of the Galaxy S4 but lacks the expandability option of a microSD card slot. Although built with, what many would consider, better quality components the HTC One is $50 cheaper than Samsung’s Galaxy S4.
Cameras
From looking through the sample shots taken with these two smartphones in their regular and Google editions you can see some differences in how the cameras perform. Both these smartphones have high-end mobile camera units and feature their capabilities heavily in their promotions. Also it seems like both Samsung and HTC have done quite a bit of tweaking of settings to optimise these cameras in their skinned software smartphones. Colour balance settings, sharpness settings and so on look better in the original smartphones.
The Verge thought that even more troubling was the noticeable shutter lag present in the Google Edition Galaxy S4. It concluded that considering camera software “Google has a lot of catching up to do” but this is really the only place where both the skinned smartphones are superior to the stock Android experience.
Battery
Both smartphones perform just as well if not a little faster with the stock Android experience but in benchmarks the differences were negligible “stock vs skinned and GS4 vs HTC One”. It was found that the plain Android version of the HTC One had a noticeably better battery life, it lasted a full hour longer in the battery tests used by The Verge.
Updates
An important thing to consider if choosing one of these Google Edition smartphones over a Nexus device is that the stock Android on them is “built and maintained by Samsung and HTC”. Google says the updates will be timely but they still have to go through these two companies before they get to you. The Verge notes that “there’s no guarantee that the stock GS4 and One will get same-day updates along with the Nexus line”.
For another perspective there are also reviews of the new Google Editions of the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4 available on CNet.
