Mobile phone colours had always been pretty standard with either black or white body. Not only mobile phones, but other electronic devices too! This makes it unfair for those people who love other colours as they were left with no choice but to choose a pre-standard colour. However, Samsung has always been hearing out customers’ opinion and requests. They’ve recently launched the Samsung Galaxy Note II in Amber Brown colour, specially for those people who seek for strong, elegant yet comforting and down to earth.

Samsung Galaxy Note II has been a pretty hit in stores around the world and definitely it is an impressive phone from Samsung. With such a great phone, it became even greater as it is now available not only in standard colours but with Amber Brown as well. For those who seeks for a serious, organized yet strong and elegant looking phone, the Samsung Galaxy Note II Amber Brown might be the phone you’re looking for.

In conjunction with the new colour, I also made a short video about a guy (Vincent) and a girl (Careen) who had been childhood friends since primary school. The guy’s favourite colour is brown and he likes everything brown. The girl prefers white but instead of despising the guy’s choice of colour, they maintained really good friends (or rather best friends forever if you would call it) even as time goes by from young to teenage and then working adult. Nothing beats a love like friendship.

I’ve been using my new Samsung Galaxy S4 for quite awhile now and it’s time for me to just write down on some of my verdicts on the phone. So for this post, I’ll just start off with the Galaxy S4 camera. A feature which almost ALL of the smartphone users will play with once they got their brand new phones haha.

While the Samsung Galaxy S4 is quite impressive in its looks, shape and lighter weight, it packs an even better camera than the S3 with a 13-megapixel camera on the S4. The great HD screen on the Galaxy S4 fully compliments the camera output from the phone. It also packs with many different features within the stock camera on the Galaxy S4 as well. One of the many features is called Dual Shot where now you are able to photos from the back camera AND front camera at the same time. This helps when you’re taking a group photo but you also want to be inside. Apart from that, it’s also a useful tool for Youtube Vloggers where they vlog on-the-go, showing places they’re visiting while having a small column with his/her face talking to the front camera.

So, imagine that I was actually taking a photo on my computer screen, but I’m also taking a photo of myself using the front camera.

There are many more camera features such as Drama, Sound & Shot, Best Face, Best Photo, Beauty Face, Animated Photo and so on. They are all pretty nifty features I’d say, and I’ll show you some example pictures below.

If you don’t already know, it’s actually quite difficult capturing a photo of a dog running around / hyperactive. My dog is one of them. I took this shot of my dog with Best Photo and it turned out pretty well la. Out of the other shots that were taken, this was the one that was decent and my dog was looking at the camera. Mind you, he actually jumped up to me after the shot was finished (phew).

Now this… was a pretty interesting one. You can actually shoot GIF animated photos with the Animated Photo feature on your Galaxy S4. This was a random test shot that my friend played with during one of my friend’s birthday party. It was pretty dark at the place so the photo didn’t turn out that well but I guess I just wanted to show you that those GIF images you see on Tumblr site is now possible with S4

The Galaxy S4 camera is great and images are pretty sharp during the day or with sufficient light source, but frankly speaking the low light performance on the Galaxy S4 camera is still somewhat below par though.

This was a random self-shot at a well-litted area full of sunlight. The image came out pretty sharp.

This was taken during one of the shoots for Samsung Galaxy Note 2 Amber Brown video, you can check it out HERE. With decent-ish lighting in the restaurant, it looks decent as well.

However… with a low light environment, it suffers quite a bit. This picture below was taken when I was helping Hannah Tan with some video stuff up in Genting One World Hotel. We took a photo along the hotel room corridor and it turned out like this.

Bottomline is… the camera on Samsung Galaxy S4 is pretty decent if you’re lazy to bring out your DSLR everywhere. It’s pretty decent during daylight or with sufficient amount of lightsource. It’s been treating me well so far, I got the pictures that I needed. I guess it didn’t really matter since these days people are so used to putting on filters and edit in photo editing app before posting online haha. Oh did I mention, the Galaxy S4 camera also has a built-in filters while taking photos as well. Many didn’t notice that but you just have to click on the bottom arrow during camera mode (there you go, S4 tips 101 haha).

I have recently started using ChatOn application by Samsung (read here: http://bryanlyt.com/2013/04/chaton-by-samsung/) and it has been a fun and great app to use thus far! ChatOn is a useful way to chat with your friends and it is compatible with almost all leading mobile platforms namely Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows. However, what makes ChatOn different from sending an email or a text message for free is that it is MORE than just a text messaging service. It allows us as users to let loose our creativity and communicate in a much more personal way than a text message or any other messaging service.

One of my favourite feature in ChatOn is the Animation Message ; it allows us to express ourselves in a way which other messaging platforms don’t allow. It would be much convenient if you’re using a Samsung Galaxy Note then you can write or draw your animation with the S Pen (though using a finger works quite well too). It also offer a large array of colors, pen types and nib-sizes for us to play with. Imagine if you’re an art student then you can instantly draw your friends’ portraits on your smartphone to impress them! Ahh, how I wish I had talent in drawing…

Another thing is that ChatOn allows us to record voice messages to share with your friends, location sharing as well as calendar appointments sharing with each other. Voice messages feature is a fun tool, acting as a walkie-talkie talking to your friends. The location sharing feature also definitely comes in handy for me as I always have friends who had trouble locating my house and location sharing would come in handy. ChatOn makes it easier for me to share calendar appointments with my colleagues and friends too.

ChatOn also has this feature called Buddy Interaction. It shows us which friends we chat with most frequently and makes a ‘game leaderboard’ out of our interactions with our buddies. This is one of the feature that is not present in any of the existing mobile messaging platform out there right now. However, personally I am not a fan of this as I can’t see why this feature is needed. It might be to encourage us to use the service more and get competitive for interacting with our buddies, but surely all this sort of thing can do is increase narcissism? Hahaha but yeah it’s a fun feature to have anyway. Probably some people did like this feature and might be constantly monitoring it, right?

Basically ChatOn has everything we need in a mobile messaging application + a few new features which aren’t provided by the current most used Whatsapp Messenger. A few other features that I like from ChatOn is the ability to hide my number, adding friends by ID instead of just contact number (it works both ways), enhanced privacy options such as Password Lock (so that our friends don’t simply read your messages) and the extra cute Anicons.

So what do you think of ChatOn? Will you move on to ChatOn? Let’s ChatOn lah

Samsung Galaxy Note 2 is my very first Android / Samsung phone and I absolutely did not regret jumping ship from using Apple. However ever since the announcement of Samsung Galaxy S4, I’ve been anticipating it for quite awhile now and hoping that it’ll be a decent phone alongside my Samsung Galaxy Note 2. So last weekend, it was Malaysia’s launch of the long awaited Samsung Galaxy S4. It was no ordinary single launch event, but they had tour bus going around places to have their launch ceremony event with different telco providers.

They started off the morning by stopping at Sunway Pyramid. There was a whole entourage of circus clowns, dance performers, cheerleaders, etc during the launch, it’s as if there was a Samsung Fun Fair Festival kinda thing going around.

Next on, the whole troupes adjourned to The Gardens, Times Square, as well as Low Yat Plaza as the final destination.

Love the colorful Samsung official phone covers too! Which is your favourite color?

Samsung will make available the Galaxy S4 via all leading operators in the country namely Celcom, Digi, Maxis and U Mobile, as well as Samsung Mobile Brand Shops. The retail price for the Samsung Galaxy S4 will be RM2,199 in stores.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on the Samsung Galaxy S4 to try out all the new features that my current phone doesn’t have.

S Health seems pretty interesting as I kinda need to bulk up and keep track of my calories intake daily as well as exercising.

Eraser shot on S4 camera is also one of the things that’s missing from my current Note2. I’m sure it comes pretty handy when I can just photoshop off an unwanted person/object in the background straight from the phone and post it on Instagram!

Dual camera capture is also one of the feature that’s quite convenient for ‘behind the scenes’ people like me. I’m always behind the camera, thus I can now be IN the shot with Samsung’s new dual camera recording feature!

Apart from that, Smart Scroll / Smart Pause also comes in handy when reading my favourite blogs/e-books as well as watching Youtube video.

Will Samsung Malaysia provide me a unit to try? Maybe, hopefully soon?