[Marseille]

One week from now (March 14th, pi day), Samsung is set to unveil their new Galaxy S4 and hopefully some related devices. I've used my phone as my primary reader for more than 3 years, and before that, my Palm PDAs pulled reader duty. I'm ready to upgrade, and as a frequent night reader, AMOLED's black=off feature is very attractive to me.

My very first reader, the Palm m500, had a monochrome lcd that wasn't backlit in normal lighting, but had a greenish backlight for night that only glowed on active pixels. I loved that backlight. I've been chasing that experience for a long time, mostly with color schemes and masks, but amoled seems like the real deal, but now with tolerable pixel densities!

What I'm most looking forward to is actually the Galaxy S4 mini, the 4.3" little brother of the S4. It hasn't received as much attention, especially in US press, but euro outlets seem to have the impression that Samsung is going to treat the S4 mini more seriously than the S3 mini, which was really light on specs and wasn't distributed very widely or very early.

I don't care about the fastest possible chipset, anything vaguely modern is fine. But I do care about the screen. I'm not a fan of pentile, which is kind of a cheat to inflate the resolution spec. I'm rooting for an RGB subpixel layout with a density of 250+ ppi (qhd or higher), but if they do go pentile, 300ppi or higher will probably do. I'd love to see the SPen included, as I've been using a stylus since '03, and normal capacitive stylii leave a lot to be desired. SPen has been reserved for the Note series of larger devices so far, but I can hope.

If nothing comes of the event, I'm actually pretty well set on getting the Note 2. It's bigger than what I want, truth be told, but it nails everything else.

Anyone else looking forward to the event? What are you hoping for?