One of the best phones in the galaxy, it's a superphone

TECH POWERHOUSE: Samsung’s S4 (middle) isn’t the most glamorous handset out there. It’s basically the same as the S3, but for anyone who values function over form, this is the phone – a crazily fast assortment of hi-tech chips, with a splendid screen, an iPhone-trouncing 13-megapixel camera and a back you can remove to replace the battery

METAL MACHINE: HTC’s One (left) is today’s go-to handset for looks – beating even iPhone for glamour. The aluminium back and near bezel-less 5in screen give it a sleek, powerful feel. On no account buy this for youngsters – powerful speakers mean it’s an incredible tool for annoying people on the bus

WATERPROOF WONDER: Every time someone buys a Sony Xperia Z (right), a tear runs down a mobile-phone-insurance salesman’s face. That alone should ensure we all buy one. Unlike Apple’s fragile handsets it is waterproof – you can run it under a tap – as well as dropproof (within reason)

The mobile phone industry has already given us ‘phablet’, possibly the ugliest word ever invented. Haven’t we all suffered enough?
We can blame Google for the word itself – meaning, roughly, any 5in-ish phone with an HD screen and fast multi-core processors – but Samsung has been its keenest supporter, with executives coming up with various definitions, all designed to exclude the iPhone 5.
Apple’s phone is merely ‘smart’, not ‘super’, the Koreans sneer.
Frankly, though, any of this summer’s ‘superphones’ – Samsung’s new flagship S4, HTC’s One and Sony’s Xperia Z – do outperform Apple’s iPhone.
Not opinion, fact. Saying this tends to make even family members who normally take my tech tips as gospel look at me like I’ve lost my mind.
But the chips inside any of these three are far faster than those in Apple’s phone.

The screens are sharper and better. Phone nerds – a species shunned even by common-or-garden nerds such as myself – went further earlier this year, pronouncing HTC’s aluminium-clad One the best phone of all time, full stop. When I first got the HTC One, I tended to agree.
It’s a gorgeous device – so well designed I was tempted to tell people it was the new iPhone, which I was testing in a hush-hush deal. But having tested it alongside Samsung’s Galaxy S4 and Sony’s Xperia Z, I’m no longer so sure.
Sony’s phone is a footnote (literally), but Samsung’s is a succinct lesson in what you can do with billions of pounds and an unstoppable lust for world domination.
I was rather hoping this would be the year I’d start saying, ‘I preferred their early Galaxy handsets, when they were still cool.’
Nope. The S4 feels like a cheap piece of plastic tat but it’s loaded with so much technology that I frankly wouldn’t care if the back was just a circuit board.

Samsung owns many of the best silicon chip factories on this planet, and presumably has some sort of Korean ‘Man from Del Monte’ picking only the finest, ripest components for its flagship Galaxy S phones.
The S4’s screen alone is just insane. It seems to contain more colours than there are in the universe.
It’s also the most touch-sensitive mobile I’ve ever tried – making using an iPhone feel like prodding at a table.
On 4G especially, the whole phone has a sense of barely controlled speed. It is, it’s safe to say, over-engineered for something I’m mainly going to use for email.
Naturally, Samsung has also loaded it with utterly pointless technologies.
There’s an eye tracker that enables you to scroll through pages with your eyeballs – which is fun for five seconds, before you realise that fingers work better.
There’s a video called (honestly) ‘Samsung Cares’.
Thankfully, you can turn all of these off – and, post-purge, this is comfortably the best phone on the planet.