Where is part 2 of Galaxy S4 review ?

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

If they don't want to go back to it then they should have just call it "xxx review" and be done with rather than adding "part 1" at the end making everyone else expectant.
Gary Key promised us a motherboard roundup for Lynnfield. That never arrived because I believe he left Anandtech to work for either ASUS or ASRock.

Good lord...Tell me about it.
I remember the days when Anandtech used to do Motherboard roundups from ALL the manufacturers like ASUS, ASRock, Abit, Gigabyte, DFI, MSI, Biostar, eVGA, Foxconn, Sapphire, ECS, etc...All in one super big review with description of features of each, pictures, FPS, other benchmarks(like WinRAR, USB, SATA, LAN, etc...), temperature, maximum stable overclock settings reached, etc...

I remember the days when Anandtech used to do GPU roundups from ALL the manufacturers of a particular AMD GPU or Nvidia GPU from ASUS, eVGA, MSI, Sapphire, Gigabyte, PowerColor, ChainTech, Sparkle, Leadtek, Galaxy, HIS, XFX, VisionTek, etc...All in one super big review with description of features of each, pictures, FPS, temperature, fan noise, maximum stable overclock settings reached, etc...

I remember the days when Anandtech used to do DDR memory roundups from ALL the manufacturers like OCZ, Crucial, Mushkin, Corsair, G.Skill, Patroit, Geil, Samsung, Team, etc...All in one super big review with features/settings of each, pictures, FPS and other benchmarks, temperature, maximum stable overclock settings reached, maximum performance settings that balances CAS rating with overclock bandwidth, etc...

Sadly, I think those days of "roundups" from Anandtech reviews are long gone.

Besides Anand himself, I'd say Gary Key is by far one of the best reviewers Anandtech ever had.

Yeah. Gary Key is amazing. Brian does well too, but his reviews are more in depth than old AT reviews. I think that if they just had 2 or 3 Brians, we'd have a pretty good review archive.

You can't have both quality and quantity, so you gotta pick. You're basically either having to pick between Gary's roundups or Brian's in depth coverage. While I like Brian's analysis, battery life just has to go based on GSMArena's testing. They go through a huge # of phones and it's nice to have a nice database of benchmarks.

One other complaint I have about AT Cell phone reviews is the GS4 was done on Sprint. There are other reviews on AT&T and Verizon. This makes it VERY hard to do comparisons. GSMArena is an international site, so they do every review practically on GSM. No variations going phone to phone. I feel like there's some danger in quoting AT's battery becnhmarks (esp the 3G tests).

At least with AT we're not getting low quality reviews like TheVerge. Those reviews are just absolutely atrocious. Even Engadget has numbers for battery testing.

 

[lothar]

Yeah. Gary Key is amazing. Brian does well too, but his reviews are more in depth than old AT reviews. I think that if they just had 2 or 3 Brians, we'd have a pretty good review archive.

You can't have both quality and quantity, so you gotta pick. You're basically either having to pick between Gary's roundups or Brian's in depth coverage. While I like Brian's analysis, battery life just has to go based on GSMArena's testing. They go through a huge # of phones and it's nice to have a nice database of benchmarks.

One other complaint I have about AT Cell phone reviews is the GS4 was done on Sprint. There are other reviews on AT&T and Verizon. This makes it VERY hard to do comparisons. GSMArena is an international site, so they do every review practically on GSM. No variations going phone to phone. I feel like there's some danger in quoting AT's battery becnhmarks (esp the 3G tests).

At least with AT we're not getting low quality reviews like TheVerge. Those reviews are just absolutely atrocious. Even Engadget has numbers for battery testing.

I never saw any of Gary Key's motherboard reviews as lacking in depth coverage.
I never saw any of Anand's SSD or Intel CPU reviews as lacking in depth coverage.
What more do you think Anand should have covered in his SSD or Intel CPU reviews that he didn't?
There's no reason to sacrifice one for the other.

Whatever the case, we're in complete agreement that Mobile needs more than 1 person. No one person(including Brian) can do all the work because the field of mobile moves at a near infinite pace, unlike desktop CPU which jumps once when Intel introduces a new CPU like Nehalem, Lynnfield, SandyBridge, IvyBridge, Haswell, etc... or nVidia introducing a top of the line GPU then becomes stagnant for the next 8-12 months.
The difference here is that instead of a duopoly like Intel/AMD or nVidia/AMD, you have Apple/Samsung/HTC/LG/Motorola/Sony/ASUS/Google Nexus devices to deal with in mobile. There is always a new phone from a major manufacturer non-stop, and no one phone will be on top for a whole year. With CPU's, once the noise from Intel's new CPU filters out over a month or two, that's pretty much it and we wait another 10-14 month for Intel's next tick-tock cycle. The same with AMD CPU's, nVidia GPU's, and AMD GPU's.

AT's battery tests are horrible. They need some sort of standard of comparing phones on the same network, at the same location areas, and also include more competitive phones like the Droid RAZR Maxx, rather than just selecting phones "randomly"(In quotes because I'm still not sure how someone can randomly select 18 major phones released within the past 3 years and only 2 of them are from 2012, with the other 16 phones being from 2010-2011).
Also, compare the same exact phones through out WiFi, 3G, Cellular talk time, and hotspot tests. No comparing "cellular talk time" of the phone you're reviewing to a Droid RAZR Maxx or a Galaxy S3, then removing both of those phones and comparing the phone you're reviewing to a pidgely Thunderbolt or Nexus One released 3-4 years ago in hotspot tests.
That's as ridiculous as not including the performance chart of a Radeon 5870, Radeon 4870, and Radeon 4890 in a Radeon 5850 review.

 

[lopri]

Gary is an exception. You will not see his like again, I'm afraid.

 

[Crono]

Vivek posted the OPPO Find 5 review, which I was waiting for since he mentioned it on one of the podcasts. I already have a HTC One, but I'm very academically interested in the smaller players in the Android market. There's still hope for the part 2 of the S4 review.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6920/oppo-find-5-review/9