We won't go too deep into the aesthetics of each phone as they are both very good looking devices. The Galaxy S IV loses a bit of the "polished stone" that the Galaxy S III had and exchanges it for a more elegant, taller shape that is about the same dimensions as the Galaxy S II. Overall the phone looks very good with the major flaw being the plastic body, which feels a bit cheap when compared to phones like the iPhone and HTC One. The HTC One has a single piece of Aluminium cut out to be its body; overall a very elegant and minimal design that looks extremely good. According to many other reviews out on the web it is the first phone that feels more premium than the iPhone 5.

One place where we can comment is that the HTC One uses Gorilla Glass II while the Galaxy S IV has upgraded to Gorilla Glass III. What exactly does this mean?

Well: according to Corning, the makers of Gorilla glass, this means twice as much scratch resistance and load resistance, which means the material is twice as strong as the previous iteration of Golrilla Glass which can be found on many devices including the Galaxy S III. This may be something to consider when choosing a smartphone if you are prone to dropping your very expensive gadget. Click Here for more information on Corning's Gorilla Glass

Both screens come with a resolution of 1920x1080, which is considered Full HD. However, the HTC One manages to pack the absolutely astounding number of pixels in a smaller, 4.7 Super LCD III display. The previous Super LCD display, the LCD II found on the One X is considered to be one of the best displays ever. The LCD III does lives up to its predecessor's standard and is being called the best display available, next to the Galaxy S IV's 5 inch HD OLED. Like previous OLED Displays it is characterized by being heavily saturated and very bright while keeping the blacks as dark as they should be. It is expected that the HD OLED display will be more efficient than the Super LCD III.

Finally, several people have reported the HTC One heats up quite a bit when under heavy use, which is particularly noticeable due to the thermal conductivity of its aluminum body. While is can be a bit uncomfortable to the touch it is certainly not dangerous. Also, keep in mind that Samsung's devices (in general and in my own experiences) can become very hot as well, it simply seems to happen less often and is less noticeable thanks to the plastic build.

In the Americas it appears that the Galaxy S IV and the HTC One will pack the same internals; 2 GB of LPDDR3 RAM clocked at around 500 MHz. Both phones will come in 16, 32 and 64 GB of storage, however, only the S IV features expandable memory via a micro-SD card. Bluetooth 4.0 and high speed Wi-Fi are also available from both devices. They will also be LTE compatible thanks to Qualcomm's Snapdragon 600 SoC, which offers performance that is comparable (according to Antutu benchmark) to the new Exynos 5450 big.LITTLE SoC found in the international Galaxy S IV.

An interesting note; Geekbench has found that the Snapdragon 600 based Galaxy S IV is substantially faster than the HTC One with an identical chip. The Galaxy S IV is also twice as fast as the iPhone 5 and Nexus 4 and nearly twice as fast as the Galaxy S III, which is an impressive feat.

This benchmark creates a bit of confusion for all of us since previous benchmarks showed the Exynos Based S IV was only a little bit faster than the Snapdragon 600 HTC One, which would mean that the Snapdragon 600 was a faster chip than the Exynos. These minutia are not important, however, what really matters is that both the HTC One and Galaxy S IV are both insanely fast devices that will provide more than enough power for every day tasks. Even power users will have a hard time doing anything that might possibly slow the devices down. 

One aspect of hardware that is not always considered is audio quality, and as someone who enjoys Hi-Fi audio I feel it is important to write a little bit about this. Qualcomm typically packages a built-in DAC (digital to analogue converter) that is responsible for producing sound.

 

The graph above shows the response volume per frequency on several devices, the HTC One X, One X with Beats enabled and the Nexus S with the Voodoo exploit. Typically what we look for is a flat graph, which shows that the DAC is doing its job outputting sound with minimal distortion all at an equal level. The graph shows that the HTC One X, which uses the same DAC as all of Qualcomm's devices, is heavily biased toward the bass when the Beats Audio is enabled. This is not a terrible thing if you love bass, however, it can mean there is more distortion, as will probably be experienced around the 15k range where the green line spikes to a ridiculous level. The Nexus S packs a Wolfson DAC that also comes with the internation Galaxy S III and Original Galaxy S. The Wolfson DAC is praised for producing sounds that please even audiophiles. We expect that the international galaxy S IV will pack a Wolfson DAC while the HTC One will pack the Qualcomm DAC and codec with Beats Audio.

We did not forget the camera, however, we will not be talking about it because there is a lot of confusion regarding the quality of the HTC One's camera compared to that of the unreleased Galaxy S IV.

The S IV will ship with Android 4.2.2 while the HTC One will ship with 4.1.2. While there are little differences between the systems, some might prefer to have the latest version of Android installed. 

On the One, HTC Sense has been completely reworked to the point where it is both nice to look at and remains fairly easy to use. The skin is very minimal and has few added features like HTC Zoe, which allows you to take short videos and embed them into videos, and Blinkfeed, a Flipboard like home screen. Samsung's Touchwiz is almost the opposite, offering a ridiculous number of features from touchless scrolling to hoovering over tiles to expand the information they contain. Some of the features look very cool, others a little bit gimmicky, however, they can all be disabled if so preferred. There are a ton of features that would take pages to list. If you would like to learn more about them click here

So there you have it folks, all of the information that you could possibly want about the two giants that will be facing off in 2013. Normally in a review we would tell you who we think the winner is but this time we want you to tell us below, who will it be this year for your upgrade: Samsung's Galaxy S IV or HTC's One?

Stick around as we give you more detailed reviews that include battery life when both devices are available.