Samsung have just unveiled their latest flagship smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy S IV, announcing the device will be available in some markets as early as April, and that among its many brilliant new features is something that’s sure to have commuters everywhere gritting their teeth – real-time music sharing between phones.
In the Samsung Unpacked product launch at New York’s Radio City Music Hall a few hours ago, the music sharing feature, dubbed Group Play, was demonstrated onstage by an extremely cheery and hammy group of actors pretending to be a group of friends at some kind of gathering you really wouldn’t be able to stand in real life.
In the demo, one of the “friends” played a song on their Galaxy S IV, and all the others joined the fun by connecting their own devices to the stream via NFC, with all 5 playing the same song simultaneously, at different volumes, by the end of the demo. The feature can apparently support up to 8 devices and also purportedly works as a surround sound setup and can be used for multiplayer gaming.
The Galaxy S IV will also ship with the obligatory hardware upgrades, including a now full 5-inch screen with 1080p resolution, a hefty 2600mAh battery, a 14 megapixel back camera, 4G LTE with 100mbps download capability (speedy!), a 1.9GHz quad-core processor or a 1.6GHz octa-core processor (depending on your region) and, interestingly, an IR transmitter, which means the phone can potentially be used as a TV remote – so long, complicated universal remote thingys!
There are a bunch of other new features and upgrades, and the new interface running on Jelly Bean looks pretty slick, but it’s the Group Play feature that has us here at Music Feeds intrigued. What could this function be used for, other than to destroy the already frazzled nerves of the embattled commuter as youths everywhere besiege buses and train carriages from all angles with their tinny, distorted young person’s music? We’ll have to see how this plays out in the real world, but we’re predicting a sudden interest in bicycles come April.
