Steve Kondik, the founder of the aftermarket firmware CyanogenMod project, announced on Monday that he has left his position at Samsung Mobile as a software engineer and is moving on to other projects. He had some nice things to say about the new Galaxy S4, but he didn't leave without giving his own criticism of the device.
Before getting into his disappointments with the Galaxy S4, Kondik praised the device's specs, saying they "blow the competition out of the water." He even commended Samsung for making the TouchWiz interface more consistent, but still expressed some concern regarding the operating system.
"Unfortunately, it [the OS] feels like it has been sent a few years back in time to the Froyo days," Kondik said in a post on Google+ (via Android Police). "Say goodbye to all of the nice touch-friendly ViewPagers and say hello again to a fully tabbed UI. You'll also enjoy the seemingly endless onslaught of popup windows and modal 'Loading...' dialogs."
As for the Galaxy S4's treasure-trove of features, Kondik was split. Some things, like the hover preview and new camera quirks, were things he felt like users would enjoy. Interestingly, some of the hyped-up eye-tracking tech seen in the Smart Scroll wasn't near the top of his "like" list.
"On the features side, it's absolutely loaded with stuff. Some of the new features are very useful like the "hover" preview where you can just point at an email message without touching the screen and it shows a preview of the message," Kondik said. "The multi-window feature is present here, and is nice to have around when you need it. The camera app has seen some significant upgrades too, with live previews of the postprocessing effects and a new UI."
"My least favorite new feature is 'Smart Scroll.' which is supposed to scroll based on face detection + tilt, but it mostly serves to anger me into disabling it."
All in all, Kondik is still a fan of the Galaxy S4 (he plans to get one, after all), but he does say that upgrading from an S3 probably won't be necessary for many.
