It's no secret that Samsung needed to do something big with its new phone, to unleash something to stop the rot that the Galaxy S4 began two years ago.I just didn't expect the Samsung Galaxy S6 to be this good.Yes, there are still some elements that prevent it from being the perfect phone (this is Samsung after all, a brand that likes to cram as much into the phone as it can get away with) but to leap to this point from the plastic-clad nonsense of the Galaxy S5 is a really, really impressive feat.
Samsung
didn't take this task lightly, beginning almost completely from scratch
and replacing key members of its design team to make sure it created a
standout phone.
Perhaps the S6 is a little too similar to the rest of the competition (it looks stunningly like an iPhone at the bottom) but at least there's the Galaxy S6 Edge for those that want a really unique-looking device.The big issues are price and battery life: the former being wincingly high. We're talking £575 / $750 / around AU$980 SIM free for the 32GB version – and at 64GB, it's more than an iPhone 6 in the UK, costing £660 (although in other countries it's a little cheaper).
Hunt
around though and you can find the 32GB Galaxy S6 for around £500, $650
(Amazon) - making it slightly more palatable if you want to pick it up
SIM-free.
And
there's a smaller battery on board than last year, which instantly
makes me worry when the screen resolution has been bumped up to give us
the sharpest display on the market.
But Samsung's been at this
smartphone game for a while now, so can it justify that high price tag
by cramming in loads of amazing technology… and make the battery last
more than a day?
It certainly has its work cut out with the Galaxy S6 joined by the iPhone 6, LG G4 and HTC One M9 at the top of the smartphone tree in 2015.
Design
Samsung's
gone bold on the design of the Galaxy S6, taking away the usual plastic
covering that festooned previous models and finally stepping into the
world of metal for its flagships.
It's dallied with a more premium design ever since the Galaxy Alpha was brought out in the middle of last year. But with a higher price and lower spec, that model didn't really catch on, despite feeling really premium in the hand.
So this time Samsung's gone one step further,
adding an all-metal band to a strong glass case and, really, making a
phone that couldn't be much further from the Galaxy S5.
That's
not to say the brand hasn't kept some of the design heritage in there -
after all, Samsung is a company that's big on tradition. The front of
the phone harks back to the Galaxy S4 days, with a rounded and bland
fascia combined with the lozenge home button.
The biggest shame is
that I didn't get to fully review one of the colored variants rather
than 'White Pearl' that you can see above.
The other colors have a
jewel-like sheen, reflecting the light in a luxury way. The white is
just rather boring, and looks like older devices again.
The
reason for sending reviewers the white version first is pretty clear
though: this thing is a fingerprint magnet. I know I've said that before
about other devices, but it's never been truer than on the Galaxy S6.
The
rear of the phone will just become marked and smudged within seconds of
handling it, so like a silver car the white chassis on the S6 serves to
hide those ugly blemishes.
In
the hand the Galaxy S6 is a very nice device to hold, with the 5.1-inch
screen taking up most of the front. It's compact yet elegant, with a
clear feel of premium quality when you're holding it.
That said,
it doesn't feel like the most expensive on the market - whatever reason
Samsung is giving for charging this high premium, it's not coming
through in the design - but it does feel like a device that can be
mentioned in the same breath as the HTC One M9 and iPhone 6 in terms of
build quality.
The metal band around the side is split by strips
of plastic to allow the antenna and other radios to make their
connections - and if it looks familiar, well, it's a very similar design
to that used on the iPhone 6.
These strips are needed as metal
is very inefficient at letting phone signal pass through, and Samsung
isn't alone in including them. However, with the glass front and rear I
was surprised to see them make an appearance.
Combined
with the fact the bottom of the phone, where the speaker and headphone
jack live, looks almost identical to what Apple is doing, this seems to
be a risky line Samsung is treading.
The general layout of the
phone is well designed though. The volume buttons on the left-hand side
and the power button on the right are perfectly positioned, and the home
button has been massively upgraded to deliver a very solid click.
That
might not sound important, but it's not been the case with previous
Galaxy phones so I'm pleased to see Samsung finally step up.
The
back of the phone yields one of the less aesthetically pleasing elements
though, with the camera protruding quite significantly from the rear of
the Galaxy S6.
The reason is obvious: to allow for a higher power
optical system and you'll see in the camera section that this was very,
very much worth it.
But
again, I'm left wondering what Samsung is doing here. In the
desperation for a flat phone, the battery capacity is reduced and the
camera left sticking out, exposing it to possible scratching.
Why
not slightly round the rear, make it sit more nicely in the hand and
improve the space for a battery? HTC does it to terrific effect on the
One series, but it seems other brands are obsessed with a flat phone. As
a result the S6 doesn't even rest comfortably on the desk, with a
little wobble when tapping it at work.
But don't let the above
make you think this is anything other than a great phone design. It's
not up there with the very best - the HTC One M9's craftsmanship puts this head and shoulders ahead of the Galaxy S6 in terms of feel in the hand - but Samsung has finally offered what we've been hankering after for years, and it's done it well.
Screen
Samsung
has always had brilliant screen technology, and once again, that's the
case on the Samsung Galaxy S6. The Super AMOLED display offers clear,
crisp whites against pure blacks, meaning even dark scenes are shown off
perfectly.
The 5.1-inch display now packs more pixels than ever before - 1440 x 2560 in fact, which matches the Galaxy Note 4 but with a higher PPI of 577 - which means you're looking at the sharpest display on the market.
The QHD level of screen was started by LG last year with the G3, but as that was based on LCD technology it left the screen a little dark and power hungry, as each pixel caused a heavier strain on the battery.Then the Google Nexus 6 came along, and that really impressed with its larger screen. Despite the wider display it still looked great, and when the aforementioned Note 4 came along with the same resolution, the bar was set.
So
combining the pixel count of the Note 4 with a smaller display should
yield an exquisite display, right? Sadly, no. That's not to say the
screen on the Samsung Galaxy S6 doesn't look brilliant - it really,
really does - but I'm not sure the QHD resolution really adds that much
to the mix, especially given the higher power drain it commands.
Watching
some optimized video does look nicer, and held side by side the screen
is clearly sharper than a normal Full HD display.
But we've gone way past the point of needing any more sharpness in our phones, and even 720p resolutions don't look terrible (a point well made by Matthew Hanson in his piece on the myths of screen resolution) so I'm wondering why Samsung bothered here.
The
Super AMOLED technology can make 1080p screens look phenomenal, and has
been for years. And with bigger screens, the improved pixel count helps
make them look next generation. But at 5.1-inch, this seems more
gimmick than anything else as Samsung looks for anything it can throw
into a new flagship to grab headlines.
(Admittedly the improved resolution is needed for the Gear VR headset, where the phone is the screen and so more pixels are better. But that's not going to be a real world use for this phone for many).The screen on the Galaxy S6 is superb. It does still have all the real benefits of Super AMOLED, as I've mentioned, with outdoor visibility particularly strong.
There's nothing that doesn't look amazing on
it - but it does come at the cost of battery life and, well, actual
cost, and I'm not sure it adds enough to warrant those sacrifices.
There's something perverse in being happy that Samsung has fewer
amazing things to talk about on its new phone, but for years I've been
forced to talk about nonsensical ideas on the latest Galaxy flagship
phone - we'll not go into the Smart Scroll debacle.
This time
around, it's all about refinement, making it really easy to do the
things you need without having to slap around a thousand menus. And the
fancy stuff is kept to a minimum as Samsung finally takes note of what
people like and focuses on the basics.
It might sound odd, given I
was just saying the gimmickry was reduced, but I'm going to start with
the heart rate monitor. It's still as unnecessary as ever, but it's now
less prone to failing at least.
I've
used it at the end of runs to see my heart rate, but that's not really
giving me much useful information unless I can use it at the exact same
moment after each workout. When charting your resting pulse it works a
lot better, allowing you to see how much fitter you're getting by how
hard your heart is working when you wake up.
To that end, it would
be great if the S6 could prompt you to take a reading the second you
wake up - without that data it all becomes a little moot.
If you
do remember though, it's a much more accurate system, and you get to see
the heart rate displayed visually too, which is really cool.
Even the oxygen and stress tests work better now - on the Note 4 this was just a car crash of inaccuracy, so while I still have no idea why Samsung is sticking with the heart rate monitor, at least it works well.
The
S Health app which eats up all this data is improved too. The interface
is so much cleaner, with special place given to heart rate, stress,
running etc.
The cleanliness of the interface extends to being
able to see the graph of heart rate over time, for instance, with an
easy slide across showing the important information.
There's still
not a lot of point to this app, of course - and now it's shorn of the
life coaching ability, which would give handy hints on how to improve
your wellbeing through eating, life goals and more.
It's now just a
hub of slightly inaccurate information (a 100 minute run was logged as
only 70 minutes according to the app, despite being in motion for the
full period).
Fingerprint scanner
The fingerprint on the Samsung Galaxy S6 is one of the best on the market - and I didn't think I'd be saying that after the sliding option we had on the Galaxy S5. I was under the impression that Apple had the monopoly on decent scanners, but this changes things.Like Apple, Samsung employs the single touch way of verifying your print, but after the simple set up the scanner here is amazingly accurate. A light touch will be enough to open the phone, and it rarely fails.The other benefit is for Samsung Pay as well as using PayPal. The payment system from Samsung, which is promises will fill in all the gaps left by Apple Pay, has yet to fully launch (and won't be in the UK for a while, it seems) and the idea of paying for stuff through PayPal is rather hard to actually use unless you've managed to find anywhere that will actually let you pay using the app.
But
it seems like the security side of things here, a situation created by
Samsung's retooling of its fingerprint tech, is massively improved, and
is a great way to get into your phone.
Smart Manager
Samsung's
refined a well-worn app well on the Galaxy S6, allowing you to see all
the important stuff in one place. The Smart Manager lets you track
security on the phone, the battery life, storage and RAM usage. A quick
tap will 'clean' all of these, but it doesn't do a huge amount.
For
instance, you're only going to need to clean up storage once in a
while, with unused app info being deleted, and the RAM usage is still
something that I'm not sure how it works.
If you clear the RAM,
the phone doesn't speed up or slow down much, and it seems that it could
be affecting apps with opening and shutting. Battery usage is easy to
work out, but I've not seen anything happening from asking the phone to
'clean up' this area.
It's a nice app to have in one place, and
when you do need to have a look through stuff it's a very good option to
have, but I was hoping for more for this idea from Samsung.
Double wireless
This
could be a big one: Samsung's packed both versions of wireless charging
into the thin frame of the Galaxy S6. When you see how much heft that
usually adds to a phone to have ONE standard on there, having both the
PMA and QI on the phone is amazing.
It shouldn't be this way, with
a brand having to pack two competing technologies in one place. We need
a single, unified, standard for wireless charging, but whatever the
landscape Samsung is ready to service it.
I tested the S6 on the Tylt stand, which promises to let you chuck the phone down any which way and get it charging wirelessly, and for the most part it's right. I also tried the Fonesalesman's QiStone+ Wireless charger, which is a battery pack as well for wireless charging on the go - it's good, but unless you're in a very still area it's very easy to make it slide off the pad.
Even the official wireless puck from Samsung,
with a rubber ring to hold the phone in place, doesn't quite grip it
well enough thanks to the protruding camera on the back. Were this phone
flat, it wouldn't be as much of an issue, but it's a slider.
The
wireless charging on the Tylt stand was very quick, similar to what I'd
expect on a normal charger. This was impressive given the input was only
0.75 amps, which is much less than the phone can handle. However, the
phone does heat up rather significantly on all the wireless pads, so
it's worth keeping an eye on that if you're keeping in your bag near
some sandwiches.
Microsoft's on board
A lot's been made of
the fact that Samsung has bundled the Microsoft suite of apps onto its
phones this year, but in reality it's not something to get that bothered
about.
The only really cool addition is OneNote, which is a good
alternative to Evernote (which was previously placed on Samsung phones).
It allows you to create notes, lists and mini documents on the fly in
an easy to use interface, and is a good addition.
Being able to disable apps is as easy as pressing edit, and the smart manager is mostly usefulThe other Microsoft apps added in are Skype and OneDrive - not really the full suite I was expecting. The former is on many new phones now - including the One M9 - and is easily downloaded anyway.
What's
more annoying is that the app pops up every so often on the battery
screen, sipping a little bit of power, even when not used. OneDrive is
cool in that it gives you 100GB of storage space, but I'd rather Samsung
had partnered with Google in the same way as HTC to give that space on
Google Drive.
You can see that Samsung knows Google Drive is the
bigger hitter, as you can link your phone's file manager system to Drive
with one tap, with the same option nowhere to be seen for Microsoft.
Apps disabled
That
said about Microsoft, you can get rid of most of it if you fancy
anyway. While Samsung's not chucked as much bloatware onto the Galaxy S6
as normal, there are still a fair few apps that come out of the box.
The
good news is these can now be uninstalled with a simple tap - even the
Google Play Store for some reason. Don't get rid of that though, as it
will make getting new apps on there really rather difficult.
It
doesn't seem that these apps are really uninstalled, merely disabled and
hidden from view, but given the capacious storage on offer from 32GB to
128GB, it's essentially the same thing for most users.
The TouchWiz UI on top of Android 5.0.2 is impressive in that it's
been upgraded well from last year, which in itself was a big step
forward.
The look is more refined than before, with larger and
flatter icons festooning the home screen, and the amount of menus
reduced too. Samsung made a big deal of the amount of clutter it
removed, and while it is reduced, there are still myriad pop ups and
options to play around with.
I don't mind that too much though, as
it's a clear and clean interface to wander through. A tap on the
settings icon will take you to all the options in one place, with your
favorite settings on the top of the screen - it would have been great if
this was auto-populated with most used, but being able to customize it
is good enough.
Things like the camera, which prefers to take
options off the screen rather than instantly give every single setting
within one tap, show that Samsung is trying to clean things up, and for
the most part it shows.
Flipboard's back, but still only mildly entertaining hereEverything
is well laid out, and save for the cartoonish way it's all been
designed (there's still a lot of scope for Samsung to make things look a
lot more mature and cultured here, something I hope will happen soon to
make all criticism of TouchWiz's UI disappear) I'm generally a fan of
TouchWiz.
A lot of people don't like it, but I think it's as good
as many other interfaces out there. It lacks the sophistication of HTC's
Sense, or the simplicity of Apple's iOS, but what it does have is
really great power and obvious buttons.
If I need to do
something, it's not hard to work out where it is, and yet there are
loads of useful settings to play with if I dig in.
It's
also been improved through some clever gesture-based tweaks, which are
found often by accidentally sliding a finger right or left. The camera
now jumps into photos with a swipe more easily than ever and a slide
right in the gallery pops open folders.
Options to share items,
send your screen to a larger display or just connect to another device
pop up just when you need them, and combined with a reduction in
annoying warning messages the UI is a lot smarter.
One thing Samsung isn't great at is making a responsive UI, and that's evident here on the Galaxy S6 again.
I'm
not saying there's judder or lag in the OS - far from it, this is one
of the most fluid interfaces I've ever used, which you'd expect with
Samsung's own octa-core Exynos CPU running things - but things like the
multi-tasking menu take a second to open when pressed.
Or waking
the phone up from sleep can take a second or two, a problem that's
plagued Samsung phones throughout the ages. I've no idea why these
little quirks exist, and can only assume that it's to do with the way
Samsung constructs its operating system as there's plenty of power there
with the 3GB of RAM backing up the four 1.5GHz and four 2.1GHz cores.
Generally
though the S6 is brilliant in terms of interface. Double tapping the
home button will open the camera wherever you are in the phone in under a
second (0.7 seconds to be exact) and you can even do it when the phone
is locked... although that's not quite as fast to open.
GeekBench
3 shows us that this is the most powerful device on the market, topping
even the impressive iPad Air 2's A8X chip. Where that came in at 4500,
the Galaxy S6 offered up 4850 as an average score.
It's worth
remembering that Samsung isn't adverse to a little results manipulation
in the benchmarks, but there's no doubt this is a massively, massively
powerful phone.
Messaging and calling
The other elements
of the phone, the bits that make a phone a phone, are improved once
again too. The messaging app benefits massively from the fact the
keyboard is a lot better, learning my typing habits as I go, although I
still would want to download a third party app like SwiftKey to make the
process a little slicker.
The current keyboard has an annoying
issue in that it will correct your words (accurately), but this includes
the capitalization too, meaning it can override the auto capitalization
of words when typing. Not what you'd hope for in a phone of this
quality.
The call quality is amazing though, with the S6 able to
pick up signal in nearly any scenario (although again slightly bettered
by the One M9 in terms of signal strength).
The
amazing part comes from the range of things the phone can do with
calling: voice over LTE is important as it lets you call while
downloading on 4G, and Wi-Fi calling is going to be a big new trick when
it finally becomes widely available.
It's only months away from
being widespread on carriers like T-Mobile in the US and EE in the UK,
and will let you seamlessly text and call using the Wi-Fi signal, which
is brilliant for houses with low radio penetration or when underground.
Battery life on the Samsung Galaxy S6. Now we get to the real issue
of this phone. It's not good enough, and that's hugely frustrating.
Let me put this into context: it's as good as the HTC One M9 and iPhone 6 in terms of being able to last just about through the day. Given that last year we were seeing phones that could easily make it to bed time without running out of juice, it's maddening that Samsung, like others, has gone backwards here.
The reason is simple: the battery pack in
the new S6 is smaller than last year, 2550mAh compared to 2800mAh. The
reduction is there solely so Samsung could make a slimmer phone,
focusing on design over functionality. And unlike previous years, the
battery can no longer be removed, taking away one of the big things fans
loved about the phones.
I'm
not convinced a removable battery is that important any more - I don't
know many people who bother to buy an extra power pack, especially when
portable packs are so widespread now - so I think the need for it is
more a hygiene factor, something that makes users feel safe.
But
it comes at the expense of function and design, and I think dropping it
is fine. HTC, Apple, Sony and more have all done the same thing and
we're not seeing widespread reports of failing units all over the world.
In
terms of the actual battery life of the Samsung Galaxy S6, in moderate
usage you'll get a full working day of around 17 hours out of it. This
means you might have to decide whether or not you want to watch a movie
on the commute home, and that's simply not good enough.
In 2015 we
expect phones to be able to last more than a day easily, especially for
the prices Samsung is charging for the S6. To lower the capacity
beggars belief, although I do understand that the design was the most
important thing this time around, given how vociferous the criticism was
from smartphone buyers was.
But the two aren't mutually exclusive. You can have an efficient phone with a decent-size battery and not make it ugly... Sony did it well on the Xperia Z3, for instance.
What's
more confusing is that I can't really tell what it is that's sucking
the battery so quickly. The screen is the obvious culprit, and it
doesn't burn a little quickly when turned on, but I'm not seeing the
same drops when tested that I'd expect.
For
instance, playing a 90 minute Full HD video at full brightness showed a
drop of 16%, half that of the HTC One M9 which doesn't have as many
pixels to power. That's a very good result.
Similarly playing a
high power game for 30 minutes only saw the battery drop 10%. Yes, the
phone warmed up a bit, but 5 hours' hardcore gaming on any phone is a
very good result again.
Let's put it in real world context: leaving the phone overnight with a full charge saw it only drop 5%.
A
75 minute commute on train and bike, with wireless Bluetooth headphones
connected to offline Spotify and a fair slug of streaming Netflix, saw
me only go down to 80% by the time I reached the office. That sounds
like a big drop, but apart from gaming there's not much more I could
have done to push the phone hard in that time - it's a pretty good
score.
So there's something in the background that's chewing the
battery. Google Play services is the big issue, with the phone
constantly chattering with servers and downloading updates throughout
our week-long test.
This might calm down over time, and would
dramatically improve the phone's battery performance, but to still be
doing a week in is a bit worrying.
If only wireless charging was
widespread. Then you could throw the S6 down on nearly any surface and
have it sip power in the background, and if you shell out for a wireless
pad or stand at home and work, you'll never have any battery problems
even if you forget to plug in.
But this isn't good enough for a
phone of this caliber. Samsung usually makes long lasting phones, and
battery life is crucial to the needs of a consumer. Must do better.
Let's
move onto one of the very, very big highlights of the Samsung Galaxy
S6: the camera is simply brilliant. From the instant start to the range
of modes to the extraordinary photos, this has the capability to be the
phone of choice for even the hobbyist photographer.
The options are simple yet powerful, the choices great and the ease with which you can get a great picture amazing. There's a range of ways brands approach the camera technology in their phones, from the Nokia Lumia 1020 with a 41MP sensor and three camera apps at launch to the iPhone 6, with an 8MP sensor and limited options.Both of those listed above yield great snaps, but Samsung has combined the simplicity of Apple and the power of Nokia (well, Microsoft now) to make a really powerful snapper.
The main interface is simple, with options laid out nicelyThe
main thing to note about this phone's camera (other than it protrudes
from the back of the handset quite markedly) is that it's instantly able
to take a good snap.
The colors are rich (although only on the
phone screen - they can look a little washed out on the monitor as
Samsung looks to make them look better on the handset), the shutter
speed instant, and most importantly the auto focus is very quick and
accurate.
A variety of snapping modes on offerThat
was one of the big things that got in the way with the HTC One M9, and
I'm glad that Samsung has improved the speed from the Galaxy S5.
The
really powerful thing here is the ability of the S6 in low light. It's
very good indeed, better than the iPhone 6. And yet it's got a 16MP
sensor. This is impressive because the more pixels you pack in, the
harder it is to get a decent shot in the dark.
You can lose the settings for a cleaner interfaceAnd
yet Samsung's got something that's better than the rest. The pro mode
is genuinely useful, allowing manual focus and control of the sensor's
sensitivity, and Bokeh effect (letting you take three shots of the same
thing so you can set the focus after the snap) is really strong too.
The
HDR mode on the iPhone 6 is often used as a shining example of the
power of its camera (and if you're not using it, you should be, as it
takes a range of photos of different exposures and intelligently mixes
them together to get bright and clear photos of whatever you're
shooting) and yet Samsung has done it better.
In auto mode, the
HDR option activates more readily, which improves the clarity of snaps
without having to do anything. The macro mode is so good too, allowing
you to get so close to whatever you're thinking of shooting.
Pro mode is really usefulOf
course there are some extra elements that aren't needed: virtual object
asks you to walk around something while keeping your camera pointed at
it. This then lets you swipe the picture and see all the angles... but
it's like just taking a video of it and fast forwarding or rewinding.
Not sure what that's for.
It's doubly odd as the cool thing
Samsung has done this year is strip out some of the camera modes and
made them downloadable, with things like Sports Shot not on there from
the start. I'd like to be able to tailor the experience better, which
means getting rid of the superfluous options.
The fast and slow
motion video is OK as well - the latter especially works at 240FPS, but
is nowhere near the smooth clarity Apple brings on the iPhone 6. It's
there as an easy to tag option though, and you'll be able to take some
fun videos with it.
4K video shooting it also included, but still
lacks a real USP given there are few monitors that can show it off, and
eats up valuable storage (a key consideration given there's no microSD
slot on board the Galaxy S6).
The selfie mode is there, and it's
pretty good as cameras go. There's all the same features you'd expect
and more, with HDR, beauty mode, effects, voice capture and full 1080p
video recording, as well as 'wide selfie' to get more people in. The
resulting picture is a wider ratio than the phone screen, so you'll get
more info from it too.
It's got a decent field of view as well, in
case you want to have more people in the shot... but don't do that.
Just focus on how powerful the rear cam is.
Check out the samples
below to see what I mean - but I've not enjoyed using a camera this much
since some of those before Microsoft took over Nokia, and the pictures
are some that I've genuinely wanted to show off to friends.
The media capabilities of all Samsung phones have always been nigh-on
unbeatable, and that's largely remained the case here – it's not even
shouting about the fact it can manage hi-res audio as well.
The
main issue some will have here is the lack of microSD expansion on the
phone. That's a real deal breaker for some, and I can see why.
However,
the way Google is working with Android is starting to make the memory
card a little redundant, as you're not allowed to install a great deal
to the extra storage any more, where previously you could dump most
things in there and save space.
Samsung's
done this for a very simple reason: to improve performance. It's a
simple fact that the more you rely on the microSD card, the more the
performance suffers, be it from opening the picture gallery or apps that
have installed stuff to it.
By keeping things all in one place,
you're guaranteed the best possible experience in terms of stability and
speed, and Samsung has prioritized that for the S6. HTC, Sony and some
of the smaller brands are sticking with the slot, and that's good in
terms of choice.
I'm torn. I prefer my phone to work more
effectively, and Samsung has notoriously struggled with performance in
the past, so this makes sense as a move. The 32GB of space as a minimum
is a brilliant move, and should give more than enough space to nearly
every user.
But if you want to go up in storage sizes, things get
tricky. Firstly, it's a lot more money to jump in capacity (and we've
not even seen the cost of the 128GB models yet) and it doesn't cost the
same to up that space through microSD.
Also, having a microSD just
means I feel a little safer... although with the advent of streaming
services, I find I'm using that space a little less. It's now at the
point where it's personal preference - either option has some drawbacks,
but dropping the microSD slot has really damaged the performance or
luster of the S6.
Music
The audio capabilities of the
Galaxy S6 are strong. Very strong, as usual. You can control everything
on there, with even support for high bitrate FLAC files offered up to
24-bit sound in case audiophiles want to get involved. The sound quality
is higher, but you'll need the files to get the most of it - and M4A
lossless isn't supported.
Most people won't use it, but given the
rivals are starting to make a big noise about it it's weird Samsung
hasn't gone down the same route.
There
are so many settings in here to change the audio quality of your
listening experience – and my word, AdaptSound is good. It really does
go through all the quality settings on your headphones to make sure the
sound it optimized for them specifically and it's really impressive to
hear the new quality side by side.
The other options also help
improve sound, but the main equalizers are only available for the sound
in the music player, which is a shame.
I'm still a bit sad that phones haven't got smarter in the ability to
play the right music at the right time (when the Galaxy S3 had the 'mood
grid' to let me make a playlist based on tempo, I assumed this was the
future) but the S6 does the job more than ably, with clarity and
richness.
Then again, there's only so much quality needed when you're dancing to Usher with two cats. What? Shut up. No, you're weird.
Video
The
video prowess of the Galaxy S6 harks back to the issue I faced with the
screen: it's too high res. Well, not 'too', as that suggests the
quality is diminished in some way by being QHD, but it doesn't really
add much.
The visuals are glorious, and if you fancy playing back
any 4K YouTube then it's definitely an improved experience. But general
video watching didn't inspire that 'wow' moment I expected, rather just a
satisfied nod of the head that the Super AMOLED display was doing its
job.
Samsung
reckons the speaker at the bottom of the phone is the right place for
it, allowing for the best sound quality. It's really not.
The
front facing speakers of the HTC One range, or even recent Sony phones,
are better as the sound is directed in the correct way, rather than
shooting out in a direction that can be easily covered by the hand.
The
sound is decent enough considering it's popping out of a mono speaker,
with a lot more bass than I expected, but it's still just a good phone
speaker, which means it's something to be embarrassed about showing off
in public.
It does the job for showing off YouTube clips, but lacks the impressive audio quality of HTC's BoomSound.
What
is good / confusing is something I alluded to earlier: the video
playback doesn't hurt the battery too much. Given it's powering a lot of
pixels for a long time, it shows that Super AMOLED technology is rather
efficient in this regard.
Gaming
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is
a good phone for a number of things, but gaming is one of its strong
points. The octa-core Exynos processor seems to be able to handle
anything I can throw at it, often exposing the graphical limits of games
themselves.
For instance Real Racing 3, a game I'll often play to
compare the capabilities of phones as it's rather intensive, looked a
bit TOO clear, taking away from the graphical prowess and highlighting
the graphical elements as they streamed by a little too slickly.
But
for screen response, load times and general game play, I'll easily turn
to the Galaxy S6 time and again. The only downside is the screen size,
which is a little smaller than I'd like for a good session, but it's
still more than good enough for day to day.
Peel TV
Samsung's
got a little bit confused with the infra-red blaster on top of the
phone, as it's packed two TV apps into the Galaxy S6. The normal Smart
Remote app is there, allowing you to watch TV and set the phone up as a
remote control easily. It's a fine app that does just what you'd expect
it to, albeit it with a rather shoddy UI at times.
And then
there's Peel TV, the app that Smart Remote is based on. Also installed
on the phone, and offering an arguably slicker experience with easier
management of controls.
Both
can be pinned to the lock screen or notification area, so I'm not sure
why both are on there. Maybe it's a bit like Chrome and Internet both
being offered as browsers on the phone... I don't need too.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is the second big phone launch at the moment and
as such doesn't have the full compliment of rivals to face off against -
but there are still some good choices in the market.
Let's
move onto one of the very, very big highlights of the Samsung Galaxy
S6: the camera is simply brilliant. From the instant start to the range
of modes to the extraordinary photos, this has the capability to be the
phone of choice for even the hobbyist photographer.
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