The shiny new Samsung Galaxy S4 might not seem quite so different after all. Many of the new features announced with the handset could be coming to the current-gen Samsung Galaxy S3.

"Anything that we can do that's not dependent on hardware, like infrared, we'll definitely bring to all the flagship devices," said Nick DiCarlo, vice-president of portfolio planning at Samsun,g in an interview with PC Mag.

The camera features could easily be translated across, as well as some of the other UI tweaks which don't involve the new hardware in the Galaxy S4. This means functions such as S Translator, the update S Health and new S Voice Drive.

Samsung is clearly keen to differentiate the SGS4 from the rest of its devices. Given the successes of the previous phone, the company will want to make sure this is a big seller, but handsets like the HTC One and Xperia Z should be giving it a run for its money.

The interesting thing is that the real defining functionality of the SGS4 is all software based, as the hardware is only a marginal spec jump over the previous phone. As such, if the upgrades do come to the current iteration, it could become defunct quite quickly.