Apple iPhone 5S vs Galaxy S4 vs LG G2: good things come in all packages

The iPhone 5S is very thin, despite the premium glass/aluminum build, and keeps it very light, too, even though it has a new fingerprint sensor built right into the sapphire crystal home key. The Galaxy S4 and LG G2 also keeps things on the lighthearted side, and they have much larger display panels, too, so kudos for everyone's engineering chops in this department. Those display panels of the Koreans are Full HD with pixel densities north of 400ppi, though Apple's 326ppi panel still means you can't tell the individual pixels with normal vision.

The crazy part is Apple's new A7 chipset, which is the first 64-bit one in a smartphone, and a harbringer of things to come, though there aren't much apps that take advantage of it. We can't wait for some cross-platform benchmarks, but we have the feeling everyone's silicon might get smoked by the new A7, especially in the graphics department, so no complaints about the SoCs either. 

Moreover, Apple's chipset has gotten paired with multiband cellular radio that promises compatibility with the most LTE bands of all handsets out there - we counted a version with 11 bands, whereas the previous king in that aspect, the Xperia Z Ultra, is octaband. This makes the iPhone 5S the first truly global LTE handset.

The other big difference is seemingly the camera resolution, which stays 8 MP in the iPhone 5S, whereas the S4 and G2 sport 13 MP sensors. A camera is as good as the pictures it takes, of course, and resolution is not even in the top 5 of criteria here, so we'll pass judgment when we do a thorough camera comparison between the three. The Galaxy S4 and LG G2 have proven to be the most capable Android snappers so far, before the Xperia Z1 hits retail, so the iPhone 5S will have a steep hill to climb, but its True Tone LED flash might be of help in the low-light comparison.