Samsung launched Galaxy S4 amid much fanfare at Radio City Music Hall in New York, throwing a direct challenge to Apple.

In terms of hardware, Galaxy S4 had nothing much impressive to offer. The design was nearly the same as Galaxy S3 and it came in a polycarbonate body (read: plastic). However, the device was light (130 gm) and thinner (7.9mm) than its predecessor.

Galaxy S4 measures 136.6x69.8x7.9mm (length x width x depth), boasts of 5-inch Full HD AMOLED display (1920x1080 pixels resolution, 441 ppi), is powered by 1.9GHz  Quad-Core processor / 1.6GHz Octa-Core processor (U.S. owners will have to be satisfied with the quad-core chip), comes with 2GB RAM and 16GB/32GB/64GB storage options and will run on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean out of the box.

Samsung will offer the device in two colors initially - Black Myst and White Frost - and will be juiced by 2,600mAh battery.

Here's a quick look at the top 3 specs/features that left us impressed:

Camera - Galaxy S4 boasts of 13-megapixel rear-facing camera and 2-megapixel front-facing camera for video chat. It can record full HD (1080p) videos @30fps and take over 100 shots in 4 seconds.

Galaxy S4 also comes with Dual Camera Mode which allows you to use both cameras at once and (you can take cool photos and videos in picture-in-picture format or side-by-side format. And here's the cherry on the cake - you can add sounds to the photos after taking the shot.

And there's the Eraser Mode which allows you to easily remove/erase unwanted background in the photo (a la photoshop, but automatically), without the need to download any third party app.

S Translator - An improvement over Google translator. It offers 9 languages in both text to speech as well as speech to text format.

Smart Pause and Smart Scroll -Galaxy S4 features face recognition technology that lets the smartphone know whether you're looking at the screen or not. If you're watching a video and you turn your face away, the video will pause and it will resume when you turn again to look at the screen. Similarly, the Smart Scroll feature allows the user to scroll through the content by moving the face up or down or by the mere flick of the write.