Samsung Galaxy S4 Features: Forget Physical Touch, ‘The Next Galaxy’ Will Track Your Eyes To Scroll Pages; Possible Renders Leaked

In the last couple of days, the tech world has witnessed quite a heavy downpour of rumors and speculations regarding the upcoming Galaxy S smartphone from the South Korean tech giant. While a weekend report suggested that Galaxy S4 would be a world phone with an Exynos Octa 5410 CPU, another report said that the device might be built from plastic.

After that, Samsung Monday introduced young Jeremy, “the secret messenger of Samsung UNPACKED 2013,” to the world in the first teaser video for the Galaxy S4.

All these tidbits were followed by an interesting report from the New York Times later saying that Samsung Galaxy S4 would liberate its users from physical touch with the help of a new page-scrolling technology. The new mechanism would track the users’ eye movements to scroll down a page.

“A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling,” the NY Times report said.

The person, apparently a Samsung employee, revealed that Galaxy S4 would be able to track the users’ eyes to determine where to navigate on the screen. “For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.”

The report also pointed to some patents by Samsung for the eye-tracking technology. According to it, the company filed for a trademark in January in Europe for the name “Eye Scroll,” which was followed by another similar trademark filing, named “Samsung Eye Scroll,” in the United States in February.

Here’s how Samsung has described the technology:

“Computer application software having a feature of sensing eye movements and scrolling displays of mobile devices, namely, mobile phones, smartphones and tablet computers according to eye movements; digital cameras; mobile telephones; smartphones; tablet computers.”

In addition, the company has also filed for a trademark named “Eye Pause,” but it didn’t provide much information on the feature.

As the NY Times report has said, it’s yet to be confirmed whether the new eye-tracking feature would be demonstrated at the March 14 release event of Galaxy S4 in New York. However, the insider did say that “the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.”

Nothing is sure and certain as of now. However, given the fact that the existing Samsung Galaxy S3 already has a feature called “Smart Stay” that prevents the display backlight from turning off while the user is looking at the screen, it’s safe to presume that the successor, Galaxy S4, will be improvised on this ground, making it “an amazing phone” true sense.

Possible Galaxy S4 Renders Leaked

Monday saw yet another Galaxy S4-related leak, this time from @evleaks, which had released two renders of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4.

Phone Arena reported that it was not clear whether the renders were “a leak of what the Samsung Galaxy S IV will look like, or if it is a leak of what the promotional materials will look like with a place-holder image in the position where the IV would be.”

The alleged Galaxy S4 renders apparently ditched the traditional home button and all the other capacitive buttons. Although the renders seemed too good to be believed, they did confirm the specs that are widely expected to be included in Galaxy S4:

- A 5-inch Super AMOLED Full HD display

- A 13 megapixel camera with LED flash

- Storage options of 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB, with 2GB of RAM

- Android 4.2 Jelly Bean

According to the rumors, other likely features of Samsung Galaxy S4 include an Exynos 5 Octa (8-Core) CPU, PowerVR SGX 544MP GPU, a 2 megapixel front facing camera capable of shooting 720p HD Videos, TouchWiz UI and Wireless charging.

UPDATE: Samsung Galaxy S4 American Variant’s Screenshots Reportedly Leaked: Confirms 'Smart Scroll,' Quad-Core Processor And Other Features

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