Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 preview: First look

Air View and Smart Screen, S Voice and Google Now

The Samsung Galaxy Mega 6.3 comes with a number of advanced features shared with the Galaxy S4. Some features are left exclusive to the flagship, but the Mega 6.3 still gets a good set.

The first one is Air View, which debuted on the Galaxy Note II and worked with the S Pen. There's no S Pen on the Galaxy Mega 6.3, or a need for it - the phone can detect your finger hovering over the screen.

This enables information preview (e.g. texts, calendar entries and so on), previewing videos just by pointing to a spot in the timeline, the next track in the music player by hovering over the next button (works with the previous button too), previewing folders, speed dial contacts, and magnifying links in web pages. Air view detects fingers 1cm / 0.5" away from the screen, so there's no danger of accidentally tapping the screen when you meant to use Air View instead.

Air View turns your finger into an S Pen

The familiar Smart Stay and Smart Rotate features are enabled too. Stay prevents the screen from locking as long as the front-facing camera can see your face (great for reading) and Rotate uses the orientation of your face rather than accelerometer info to decide how to rotate the screen.

Smart Scroll and Smart Pause are not included although the Mega has the required hardware for it (a front-facing camera), unlike the Air Gestures, which need a special new sensor on the front.

Then there are a number of motion gestures, which are not exactly new. There's direct call (dial the contact whose info you're currently viewing by lifting the phone up to your ear), smart alert (makes the phone vibrate when you pick it up if there are missed events), zooming and panning in the gallery, a shake of the phone to refresh the list of Bluetooth devices and muting alarms or pausing music playback by putting the phone face down.

The gestures from S III and Note II are on board too

You can also pause the music player by putting your palm on the screen. A palm swipe takes a screenshot.

S Voice and Google Now

S Voice is Samsung's answer to Apple's Siri and Google's own Voice Actions - it can be used to initiate or answer a call, dictate text, play music, open an app, change a setting, make a memo (including voice memo), add a reminder, schedule an event, set or snooze an alarm or timer, check the weather, do a search on the internet, take a photo, look for local listings (e.g. nearby restaurants) and even get an answer to a question.

S Voice

The problem with S Voice is not nearly as fast or as accurate at recognizing your speech input as Now.

Naturally, being a Jelly Bean smartphone, the Galaxy Mega 6.3 also comes with Google Now.

Google Now integrates with your Google account and can access your daily routine, internet searches, email, etc. and give you information relevant to your interests and daily needs.

It provides traffic information to your work or home, knows those scores of sports teams you follow, has the weather forecast for your location and can even tell you who Kevin Spacey is.

Google Now

Google Now also has its own separate widget on the homescreen.