Samsung J4+ Review... A Mid Range Offering With A Big Screen

My daughter was in need of a new phone and she insisted on a Samsung and preferred a gold one. So after looking around saw the Samsung J4+. This is a mid-range handset with a premium look, that retails, SIM-free, at around £160 on launch.

Featuring a 6” screen, 2GB RAM, 32GB internal storage and 3300 mAh battery it packs a punch for its price.

As well as that it comes with Android Oreo - and is due to be updated to Pie - a 13 megapixel camera and 5 megapixel front camera which even has a front flash. It has a MicroSD slot and 3.5mm headphone socket, but uses microUSB instead of the newer USB-C.

This phone isn’t going to be up to heavy gaming - but it isn’t marketed for that. The quad-core processor and Adreno 308 GPU is more than enough for everyday use and average games. This is aimed at the social media generation, the communicators, the picture takers and Snapchat fans.

Its large screen obviously makes it a large phone at 161.4mm x 76.9mm, but it doesn’t feel chunky and is only 7.9mm thick. My daughter has the gold version - also available in black, pink or blue. The colour refers to the back and side edges, the front of all of them are black.

The back of it however is a finger print magnet, within minutes of handling the phone it was covered in smudges and marks.

For a mid priced phone the screen is very impressive. 720 x 1480 pixels on a 6" display offers a very crisp view.

The left side has the volume buttons as well as the SIM and MicroSD card tray/slots. The right side has the power button and speaker. Yes, the speaker is on the side. It sounds odd but it makes better sense than on the back (which can be muffled when laid down), but I prefer mine on the front.

The J4+ runs Android Oreo 8.1 overlaid with the Samsung Experience - the newer name for TouchWiz. The system runs fast and there are a lot of fans of the Samsung interface but I prefer stock Android without the cutesy bright interface.

The cameras perform well, the 13 megapixel camera takes great pictures, that only suffer in very low light and the 5 megapixel front camera works excellent for its intended purpose - selfies and video calls.

It has a huge 3300 mAh battery gives it enough power for nearly two days - and it could be pushed more with light use.

Overall, I have - and my daughter has - been impressed with this offering from Samsung. It is a great looking phone and runs super smooth. Anything we have run on it, loads and operates with no lag or feeling sluggish (not that you should expect it to for a new phone).

It is difficult to write a review for phones these days, as they all do the same and in fairness all do it very well. Unless there is a feature not up to standard or a design that isn’t to your liking, then a phone is going to please you.

With that in mind, the Samsung J4+ is a great mid priced handset with a great feature set, decent power, great battery and nothing bad to say about it and if you like the Samsung Experience you will enjoy this phone.

If you are wanting a big phone to keep up with your followers all day and pose for selfies then you will like this phone.

Written by Simon Royal. Follow me at twitter.com/simonroyal

CyanogenMod Installation on my Samsung Galaxy S3.

On Thursday the 8th May, Samsung announced that it will not be bringing Kit Kat to the Galaxy S3 (and S3 Mini), which is rather annoying to say the least! Apparently because they only have 1GB RAM so neither can handle the bloat of Samsung's Touchwiz interface, Kit Kat is supposed to run on as little as 512MB! The 2GB RAM LTE version of the S3 will get Kit Kat. Also of course Samsung also want you to buy a new S4 or soon an S5!

I have also finally got tired of the lag that Touchwiz causes and decided to take the plunge and install Cyanogenmod on my S3. I didn't do this before since I was worried about the camera not working properly, as I had already had a bad experience with my Atrix 4G. I was also worried that I would have to use Windows (I don't have a single Windows Vista, 7or 8 install, nor do I want one!).

It seems it is easier to install a ROM on the Galaxy S3 than I expected, and it is fairly easy to do without Windows and without even having to root the device too. I followed Cyanogen Mod's guide for the i9300. I decided to install CM11, M6 Snapshot, since I didn't want to go too bleeding edge with a 'Nightly' but I didn't want to stay on Jelly Bean with a 'Stable' release. For all I know the Nightly might be perfectly stable, I was just being cautious, I can always install another ROM later on.

Since I was using Linux Mint, for Step 1, I installed the Heimdall for 13.04 deb package and used it to install the custom recovery in step 2, which installs when the phone is in Download Mode. The Windows-only step 4 is skipped, then continue the tutorial to the end.

Once the Recovery image is installed it's just a case of flashing the correct CM image and Gapps in Recovery mode. I was amazed how quickly it took compared to my Atrix which spent about 30 mins on the boot screen! My S3 was done in minutes. The only step I had trouble with was putting the CM image on the MicroSD card. I could not be bothered to figure out how to get adb installed and working on Mint, I merely took the card out and used a multi card reader on my desktop to drag 'n' drop the image onto the card. One thing I wish I had done before factory reset and wipe was backup my Nova Launcher config! I had everything else backed up. I use Gcloud Backup to regularly backup my SMS messages.

Default Trebuchet Launcher setup and CM wallpaper

Upon first boot with CyanogenMod 11, I was greeted with the nice CM boot screen then the usual account wizard. There was a slight glitch when the Cyanogen account setup crapped out on me but was no big deal. It was then just a case of waiting for Google Play to reinstall all my apps, including Nova Launcher which I prefer over Trebuchet since I can install my favourite custom icon set, RoundOS and I like the unread message plugin for Nova. Here's how my Home screen looks now:

I found the wallpaper in the Wallbase app and you can also grab the wallpaper here.

 Pretty much the first thing I tested once I had my S3 all setup was the camera, and it works very well, at proper resolution and everything, except I found that it does not have Photosphere mode because that is apparently proprietary. Then I tried to install the official Google Camera available in Play. It installed fine but crapped out on trying to take a photo.

For now, I have settled on using the default camera app for general photo taking, Camera MX for HDR and other effects, and Panorama 360 for Photospheres, or equivalent of at least. If anyone has any better suggestions for alternate camera apps, please comment below, I'll gladly give them a go.

I think if I could afford a new phone right now I would probably not go for Samsung again, I would get either a Nexus 5 (for vanilla Android and updates) or a Moto X (the next best thing). I really like what Motorola are doing with bringing smartphones to every budget with the X, G and now the E.

Overall am I very impressed with the speed of my S3 with Cyanogenmod, it feels like a new phone again, no Touchwiz lag! I have not done a proper battery test yet since I have been using my phone a lot more the battery has gone down quicker since I have been trying apps and such. Though rooting was not needed for the install I rooted after install because it's very useful for other stuff, particularlythe excellent DriveDroid which allows you to use your phone as a virtual live Linux CD - I booted up a spare PC with Xubuntu 14.04 using nothing but my phone and charge lead!  Well I am happy with my S3 again thanks to CyanogenMod, just need to sort out a camera app and it'll be perfect.


Update: I have upgraded to a Nightly build since it apparently fixes the camera problems somewhat, specifically this build:  cm-11-20140513-NIGHTLY-i9300.zip
I am now upgrading pretty much every day to each Nightly build, which can be done in the update manager built into the ROM's settings.