S-Beam uses NFC to initiate a Wi-fi Direct connection between devices to transfer files/pics/links etc.
Smart Stay is a feature which uses the front facing camera to check if the users eyes are looking at the display and won't time out the display when the timeout threshold is reached.
When is it actually useful? I can't recall the last time my iPhone locked the screen while I was using it. In most cases I'm periodically interacting with the device. When I'm not interacting with it but I'm using it, that typically means there's some video content on the screen, which prevents lockouts implicitly, or some app is displaying changing data, and apps can also disable the lockout when appropriate.
I'm not trying to say here that "omg iOS is better", I'm genuinely curious as to when this feature actually makes a difference. Seems to me all it's going to do is suck up power running a camera. And the idea of having the front-facing camera on at all times is also a bit sketchy. It'd be like having my computer's webcam on at all times.
it is useful - I do read a lot of text on my phone - books / and web.
its one of those features you don't advertise though. I mean I wouldn't buy a device just for this but small things like this make people miss them when using another phone / platform. I guess its not the big stuff that build the brand loyalty but these subtle details.
If you're reading text, don't you have to interact with the device to scroll/page the text? Or do Samsung phones have some sort of absurdly low timeout? I could imagine this feature being useful if the screen typically locked itself after, say, 20 seconds of inactivity, but a much better solution is to simply increase the lockout time to something reasonable.
