Samsung unveils the Galaxy SIV (photos)

As expected, the North Korean firm Samsung unveiled this evening (11 p.m. GMT) its new superphone running Android (4.2.2): the Galaxy SIV!

As is often the case with this kind of eagerly-awaited product, many of the rumours have turned out to be true. There are no real surprises here, apart from the design (and even then).

As you might expect, the Samsung Galaxy SIV is equipped with

• a 5-inch Full HD screen (1920×1080 pixels)
• two processors, depending on the continent: an Exynos Octa (eight cores) clocked at 1.6 GHz for Europe and a Snapdragon 600 clocked at 1.9 GHz (the Snapdragon is in fact a dual quad-core processor)
• As mentioned here, the successor to the Galaxy SIII has 2 GB of RAM.
• In terms of cameras, it has 13 megapixels on the back and 2 megapixels on the front.

In addition to these most important features, the Galaxy SIV is of course 4G compatible and, more surprisingly, has an infrared port (which is coming back into fashion, apparently). The smartphone's battery is rated at 2,600 mAh, and all this comes in at just 7.9 mm thick (by comparison, the iPhone 5 is 7.6 mm) and 130 grams (112 for Apple's latest iPhone). And in terms of design, as you can see, it resembles the Galaxy SIII, only slightly larger and fairly borderless (very thin edges on the sides).

As for the phone's various functions, the Galaxy SIV has a Smart Pause mode that pauses a video when you're no longer looking at the smartphone, a Smart Rotation mode that adjusts the screen's rotation according to the user's eyes, and Smart Scroll that automatically scrolls the page you're reading (again according to your eyes).

When it comes out (around April, but this will depend on the country), you'll have a choice of capacities (from 16 to 64 GB) and two colours.

We'll be back in more detail on this new Samsung device. But in the meantime, are you satisfied with this Galaxy SIV?