The book I read to research this post was The Samsung S4 Manual The Complete Galaxy S4 Guide To Conquer Your Device by Daniel Forrester which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This book is written in an easy to understand way and although it's only 68 pages certainly covers all the basics with this smartphone. The processor is a quad core 1.6 GHZ so is only a small upgrade on the S3 but the memory has gone from 1 GB to 2 GB and the software is much more efficient so the phone is much faster at doing things. It has a rear 13 MB camera and a front 1.9 MB camera and has technology incorporated to let you take several shots and combine them into 1 photo and also there is a built in eraser app that lets you remove moving objects from the background if they are a bit blurred for example. It runs the Android 4.2.2 operating system called Jelly Bean. I think as updates become available you can upgrade that as time goes on as with most smartphones. The case and the bezel to this phone are smaller but the screen is actually bigger which does mean things like the keyboard might take a bit of getting used to as they are bigger than the previous version. I did see a review of this phone in a technology magazine and it was rated as the best smartphone available. I enjoyed reading this book and I know it's quite a new phone but there doesn't appear to be that many books and ebooks available about it although I am sure that will gradually change.

The book I read to research this post was The HTC Guide which is a very good guide which I bought from a local newsagents. This guide is probably only available in Britain and is published by Android Magazine although hopefully even if You can't buy this guide you will find this post interesting. The company HTC formed in 1997 and has been at the forefront of Android smartphones from the start. The current really popular one is the One X but they were also given the first Google named franchise with the Google Nexus One which was also very popular. There are some 600,000 applications available for Android smartphones and many of them are free. We are seeing the price of smartphones come down to a reasonable level a process we saw with mobile phones in general some years ago. With these smartphones they do far more than just place phonecalls and also do MMS & SMS messaging, skype, integrating with social media and even do video calls either directly or via your wireless network. Skype is good because you can download the program free of charge and can call other skype users free of charge. There is even an integrated office program called polaris and there are also alternatives you can download like one called write. You can download or rent movies,listen to internet radio, download podcasts and even read ebooks many of which are free and open source. One program I'd particularly recommend is spotify where you get a free download but then for £9.99 per month can access a huge catalogue of music albums over the internet. They seem to have most of the latest albums and their catalogue is enormous and particularly good for niche music.