Samsung’s Galaxy S IV may not be available for purchase yet, but if you want to sift through the software that comes on the phone, now you can.
SamMobile obtained a system dump which is basically a disk image with everything that comes on the Galaxy S IV — or at least everything that the phone had on it as of March 23rd, 2013.
You can download the dump from SamMobile, or check out Android Police for a few mirrors which may offer faster download speeds.
The file is a whopping 1.5GB, and it takes up even more space when you unzip it.
System dumps for Google Nexus phones, by comparison, are usually just a few hundred megabytes. But those devices basically feature the latest Android operating system and just a handful of additional apps.
The Samsung Galaxy S IV, on the other hand, will feature a number of extras. That includes the Samsung TouchWiz user interface and additional features including Sound & Shot (which lets you append audio to photographs), Air View (for interacting with the phone by waving your hand over the screen), S Translate (for translating between 9 different languages), and Smart Scroll (which scrolls text and web pages as you’re reading them by monitoring your face).
Now that a system dump is available we may see developers attempt to port some of those features to other devices. But a system dump isn’t the same thing as a source code release — it may be tough to get some of those apps to work on anything other than a Galaxy S IV.
The more I see the S4, the more anxious I am to get a Note 3 :-p
It will look the same as the S4, just bigger. Looks just like my Note II, minus the lovely V logo on my home button.