Samsung's new smartphone contains multitudes.

The Galaxy S 4's touchscreen doesn't need to be touched to respond to your actions. Its software looks less like Android than almost any other phone running Google's operating system, but the thing ships with a newer version of it, 4.2, than almost all others. And its 5-inch screen outsizes the 4.8-in. display of the earlier Galaxy S III, but it's smaller and lighter than Samsung's flagship phone of last year.

And like its best-selling predecessor, the S 4 invites an assessment from multiple perspectives.

(Purchase and service costs over two years start at $2,069.75 with Sprint--add $100 if you're not porting your number over--then $2.069.99 at T-Mobile, $2.359.75 at AT&T and potentially 2.599.99 at Verizon.)

Samsung's hardware may be the best end of the deal. Not only did the company cram a 5-in. screen into a device just small enough to allow one-handed operation, it also squashed the phone down to 7.9 mm thick, barely more than an iPhone 5, while keeping a user-accessible battery and microSD Card slot.

The S 4's 2,650 milliamp-hour battery beats the capacity of anything close to its size, but the performance I saw didn't match that spec. After 24 hours sitting idle on a desk, a loaned Sprint model on 3G service (the carrier has yet to activate LTE near me) showed 78 percent of a charge left--worse than the S III, much less the iPhone 5.

The 13-megapixel resolution of the back camera represents another number that overstates this device's capabilities. It can take some amazing outdoor shots and can do surprisingly well with indoor pictures, but it's not much better-suited to photos of moving objects than other phone cameras.

The goofy picture-taking modes included may help you cope with some of these situations and open up some creative possibilities.

On the flip side of the phone, the front camera can track your eyes to see if it should scroll up or down for you. That fascinating option is disabled by default, and I'd keep it off; I found it too jumpy in practice.

An infrared LED can also issue commands to a TV or cable box, but this WatchOn software doesn't seem to have advanced much beyond the limited, confused app I tried on a Samsung tablet last year.

The phone can even detect when your finger is just above an item--say, a calendar entry--and provide a thumbnail preview of its contents. That, however, only works in apps that have been rewritten to respond to this "Air view" option, and it's not on by default either.

So about Samsung's software--if you've never used Android before or are coming from an older release, the S 4 just might look great.

Launching and switching between apps takes no more steps than on an iPhone. The keyboard refrains from the pushy auto-correction of the S III's software, uses the larger screen to include a dedicated row of number buttons and incorporates Swype gesture typing. And a setup screen makes it a little more obvious that some of these input and control options exist.

But Samsung's treatment of Android can also appear an exercise in annoying users who know the unadulterated version of Google's operating system.

Samsung rearranged Android's core system buttons to remove the recent-apps item (to see active programs, you press and hold the home button, as if you were invoking Siri in iOS) and then put the back button on the wrong side. It fragmented the Settings app into four columns, with detailed battery data buried a level deep. Widgets advertising other Samsung apps and sites eat up most of the space in the five home screens. Even just turning airplane mode on and off requires an extra tap in a confirmation dialog.

And yet for many users, the S 4's forked interface will be the only flavor of Android they know. Google must be so pleased.

AUSTIN—The knight who invented the World Wide Web came to SXSW to point out a few ways in which we're still doing it wrong.

Tim Berners-Lee's "Open Web Platform: Hopes & Fears" keynote hopscotched from the past of the Web to its present and future, with some of the same hectic confusion that his invention shows in practice. (The thought that probably went through attendees' heads: "Sir Tim is nervous at public speaking. Just like us!")

But his conclusion was clear enough: The Web is our work, and we shouldn't put our tools down.

The British scientist led off with some candy for the audience at the Austin Convention Center, in the form of stories about developing the Web on the "beautiful magnesium box" that was his NeXT workstation. Did you know that the Web's original default port was 2784 because low-numbered ports such as 80, today's default, needed root access?

"The Gopher people had 79, which was so much less cool," said Berners-Lee, drawing knowing laughter.

But the most important part of the Web's origins was its simple open-ness. Before writing a program that could connect to a program on another computer, he said, "I didn't have to ask anybody."

That paved a path to Berners-Lee's points on preserving the Web as a space where any compatible device works. As he put it: "The Web worked because HTML didn't say anything about the platform you were on."

Part of Berners-Lee's sermon involved encouraging people to see the Web as the ultimate app store.

Local apps can easily do things like access a phone's camera, but the mobile Web is catching up with standards to let HTML apps talk to components such as accelerometers, which let programs respond when we tilt or shake our devices.

HTML5 is also pulling in such media capabilities as video conferencing; Berners-Lee pointed the audience to WebPlatform.org, a hub for those efforts.

Web apps, in turn, comply with Berners-Lee's "principle of least power," a rule of simplicity, security and interoperability he defined as "If you're going to transmit something, you should use the least powerful language that you can."

He did not, however, present himself as an opponent of digital locks. During a post-talk Q&A, he defended proposals to add support for "digital rights management" usage restrictions to HTML5 as necessary to get more content on the open Web: "If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in, people will just go back to using Flash," he claimed.

Berners-Lee's biggest fear is not a mobile experience dominated by iOS or Play Store apps, but one in which the basic protocols of the Web are eaten away by ISP interference and state surveillance.

Deep packet inspection, for example, allows third parties to "look at all the stuff you're looking up on the Web, and store it, and use it." An Internet provider might employ that to sell ads or charge some sites and services extra; a government could exploit it to slow or disconnect sites it considers harmful.

In all of those warnings, exhortations and technical digressions (such as the virtue of coding in Objective-C, the declining cost of displays that may leave taxis "covered in pixels," the perils of "Turing-complete" languages), however, Berners-Lee didn't emphasize one of the most important features of his invention: the fact that it was also open-source. It fell to introducer John Perry Barlow to make that point.

"One of the more important things that Tim Berners-Lee did was what he didn't do," added the Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder. "He did not say World Wide Web^TM"

But the $249 Samsung model I've been testing for the past two weeks can do those things and also plausibly replace a low-end laptop.

Like an iPad or an Android tablet such as Google's Nexus 7, this Chromebook demands no special setup, provides an excellent window on the Web and updates itself almost automatically. But Samsung's WiFi laptop adds a physical keyboard and a bigger, 11.6-in. screen and then welcomes other digital devices without needing adapters: Like any other laptop, you can plug in a USB flash drive, SD Card, digital camera or HDTV.

It's a better computer than I expected after last summer's disappointing Samsung Chromebook--much less my dismal experiences with older attempts at the cheap, simple Internet terminal like the Sony eVilla, the 3Com Audrey or the AMD Personal Internet Communicator.

The basic Chromebook formula hasn't changed since 2011: This machine and Acer's heavier, $199 C7, a Chromebook with more storage announced Monday, still amount to a frame for the Google Chrome browser in which nearly every app runs.

But Chrome OS is now a little more welcoming to Windows or Mac users. Instead of being dumped into a full-screen browser window, you see what looks like a simplified version of the Windows taskbar, with the Chrome browser in a window above that strip of shortcuts to Web sites and apps.

I still think I prefer this to the new, $199 Acer. That model's Intel Core processor and 320-gigabyte hard drive, instead of the Samsung's ARM chip and 16 gigabytes of flash memory, limits its battery life to an estimated 3.5 hours and requires the addition of a cooling fan. (It's also unclear how you'd use that extra storage, since Chrome OS's view of local space stops with your downloads folder.)

Even in a house with more computers than people, I could see this filling in as a backup machine. (I've used it all day at a tech-policy conference and haven't missed my MacBook Air as much as I thought.) "Road warriors" and "prosumers" probably won't go for it, but home users who don't throw around that kind of marketing vocabulary just might.

The cable box can make channel serfs of us all. It's big, it's bulky, it has an interface an Excel spreadsheet might salute, and it sucks down too much electricity. It's one reason why cable TV bottom-feeds in customer-satisfaction surveys--only airlines and newspapers score lower in the University of Michigan's research.

But for a still-sizable majority of American viewers, the cable box is How They Get TV, and nobody can fix it except for their cable operators.

The industry's just-finished Cable Show in Boston featured exhibits by dozens of networks hoping to see new channels added to cable lineups, plus a few starry-eyed demos of technology we may not get for years. (Disclosure: A freelance client, Discovery Communications, owns quite a few channels.) But it also revealed modest hope for "clunky set-top boxes"--to quote an acknowledgment of subscriber gripes in National Cable & Telecommunications Association president Michael Powell's opening speech.

One came from Comcast, the largest TV provider in the U.S. Its X1 "next-generation television experience" features a streamlined home screen that downplays the program-guide grid to give greater prominence to DVR recordings (as seen above) and video-on-demand offerings. And because this front end is hosted on Comcast's servers, it should be easier to tweak than one coded into each DVR.

An Apps menu on the X1 home screen includes versions of Pandora, Shazam and Facebook plus sports, traffic and weather tools--but not the Netflix and Amazon video apps on most "connected" TVs.

Comcast says it will push this to many existing boxes, starting in Boston, within weeks. In a month, users with an iPhone or iPad should have a remote-control app that lets you issue commands with simple gestures and opens a search dialog when you flip the device to its landscape orientation. The 37-button remote shipping with new X1 boxes itself represents a simplification from the 53 buttons on current hardware.

The two companies that lead the cable-box business in the U.S., Cisco and Motorola Mobility, also seem anxious to get off the program grid.

Cisco's Videoscape interface offers a simple sideways menu of basic options that reveal further choices above or below each item--like the "Xross" menu on Sony PlayStations, TVs and Blu-ray players--and offers remote-control apps for iOS and Android. The Videoscape set-top box supports WiFi video streaming through a house, another good idea. But you'll have to wait for your cable operator to sign on; services in China and Israel offer the Videoscape front end, but none in the U.S. have so far.

Motorola's plans look a little further out. Its "DreamGallery" interface (from a Swedish firm it acquired recently enough for the demo setup to price movie rentals in krona) fills its home screen with thumbnails for live, recorded and on-demand programs; the program guide hides beyond one button among many. But Motorola's iOS and Android apps duplicate that look instead of tailoring it to fit phone or tablet screens.

And, once again, you'll have to wait on your cable operator for these upgrades.

For most viewers, the only easy alternative to a cable service's taste is TiVo's DVRs--which this fall will be able to send recordings via WiFi to iOS devices with an add-on TiVo Stream box.

The Federal Communications Commission has explored mandating an "AllVid" standard for cable and satellite tuning that would open this market, but FCC personnel, including chair Julius Genachowski, didn't bring it up at the show.

A further hope for box-free cable surfaced on a Samsung TV tuning into Cablevision's full feed over the Internet through an app. But it's only a test, with no timetable for deployment.

So the most relevant part of the Cable Show for current customers was the exhibit of a new "light sleep" mode to cut idle cable-box power consumption by roughly 20 percent--on one sample box, from about 27 watts down to 20. Future hardware, possibly including flash storage instead of hard drives, could make a bigger difference (and some current models offer untapped efficiency options, as Daniel Frankel noted on PaidContent). But even this modest improvement, due in software updates and new boxes later this year, should deliver one inarguable benefit: electric-bill savings to offset the next hike in your cable rate.

It's tempting—oh so tempting—to lead off a review of Samsung's Galaxy Note by mocking its enormous size. So I shall.

The Note is big enough to give me a sense of empathy for our toddler when she picks up our phones. Its 5.3" display is the largest I've used in a pocket-sized gadget since 1998's MessagePad 2100.

But at $299.99, with a two-year AT&T contract, it has bigger problems than being the SUV of smartphones. Although it offers good ideas and could fit well for people who want a credible tablet-phone, it embodies the least appealing trends in the Android ecosystem.

LTE first, battery life second. The faster speed of Long Term Evolution means short-term usage away from an outlet, to judge from the numerous LTE phones I've tried that didn't make it through a full day without a recharge. The Note has a higher-capacity battery than the scrawny hardware on other Android phones and so managed to last through over six hours of Web-radio playback. That said, standby battery life was still subpar.

Specs before experience. Enough about the Note's screen—let's talk about the camera on the other side of the phone from it. We're supposed to be impressed by its eight-megapixel resolution, but I'd gladly trade a lower resolution for less lag after pressing the shutter and between shots.

Carrier bloatware. The Note is not as bloated by with somebody else's idea of a good time as other Android phones, but it needs a cleanup. I would start with AT&T's $9.99/month AT&T Navigator—except that you can't uninstall it. Ditto for the CityID, Social Hub and YPMobile apps here. Why do carriers still think this is a good idea?

Proprietary, user-hostile input. The onscreen keyboard Samsung built into the Note, to allow for input with its "S-Pen" stylus, is excruciating for thumb typists. Its errant autocorrect changed "tweets" to "sweets" but left a standalone "i" uncapitalized, but refused to butt out when I was trying to delete its mistakes. You don't type on this thing so much as you duel with it. By default, it vibrates with every keypress, as if we haven't already been using touchscreen phones for the last five years.

Uncertain software updates. Like almost all other Android phones, the Note ships with Android 2.3, not the current 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich version. AT&T says it will ship 4.0, but hasn't said when. AT&T also offers no assurances about further updates for this phone.

It, Samsung and other Android vendors did pledge in May 2011 to offer 18 months' worth of Android updates for new phones. But the commitment's "as long as the hardware allows" clause renders it meaningless. How can we trust them after such a sad history of abandoning earlier models?

As an Android user, I hope other manufacturers and carriers are taking notes. But I worry that they're only doing so to make sure they don't miss out on any new obnoxious habits.

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