Samsung's Galaxy S6 is a key handset in the life of the South Korean company. It's likely to be a pivotal handset, heralding either the dawn of a resurgence that takes it back to the top of the smartphone pile or continues the falling revenue and profits that have dogged Samsung since the launch of the Galaxy S5. Ensuring that the handset has an aura of success around it before the critical initial sales commence is even more important than normal.
That aura is built on the reviews of the handset. With the first full reviews of the hardware now appearing in the world's press, it's worth looking at the reaction from a wide range of the writers to find out if Samsung's hardware is ready to meet the challenge of saving the company, or if the collective of reviewers have found any flaws in the design of the handset.
TechRadar's Gareth Beavis talks about Samsung's design of the Galaxy S6. Coming after the lacklustre S4 and S5 designs, the S6 didn't have to do much to be considered an improvement against Samsung's previous flagships, but it has gone beyond the minimum required and can easily stand alongside other 'designer' Android handsets such as the HTC One range:
It's easy to see the S6 is a great phone, and one Samsung sorely needed – but coming from so far back (its flagship device was barely a top 10 phone last year) it wasn't hard to improve dramatically… Put simply: it's a much, much better phone, but again that's not hard when you've got the Galaxy S5 to improve upon. But the S6 does feel very well packaged, the combination of metal and Gorilla Glass 4 giving no hint of creak or give when pressed.
Beavis highlights two issues that are appearing in all of the reviews, the cartoonish nature of TouchWiz and the small battery in the handset.
TouchWiz is still on board, adding a cartoonish feel to things where other brands still feel more premium, but Samsung has refined this again (building on good work from the S5), removed a lot of the bloatware and cleaned up the icons.
The Small Battery Issue
PhoneArena has addressed the other major concern, namely battery life. Down from 2800 mAh in the Galaxy S5, the 2550 mAh battery in the Galaxy S6 may charge faster than its predecessors, but is it too small for a full day's use?
Every reviewer has noted concurs about the battery life of the handset, and almost all of them have given Samsung the benefit of the doubt by noting that 'this needs more testing'. There's no definitive answer on how average the battery actually is. It doesn't have stunning performance, but neither is is dead by lunchtime. This is an area that needs more real world views over the next month. If battery life is a concern, you might want to hold off on your purchase for a few weeks.
The Chips Powering The S6
One of the biggest hardware changes in the Galaxy S6 is the switch from Qualcomm's Snapdragon system to Samsung's in-house Exynos chipset. While this will keep the overall cost down for Samsung, and help drive more recognition of its own chip business, there's a wariness from the geekerati because of the move away from the more popular and well-known Qualcomm chipset.
Stuff's Andrew Williams has pulled out the test bench to compare the two systems, pitting the S6 against the SnapDragon powered HTC One M9.
Our Geekbench 3 scores suggest the Galaxy S6 is a massive 20% more powerful than rival flagships such as the HTC One M9. It scores upwards of 5200 points, where you'll top out at about 4400 points from a Snapdragon 810 CPU – at least from our testing so far. This is incredible power, outdoing some laptops.
We're also pretty impressed with how hot it gets. Or to be more precise, how hot it doesn't get. Sure, it gets a bit warm when put under pressure for a while, but nothing like what some people experience with the Sony Xperia Z3, another metal and glass phone. It seems to get warmest when charging, which Samsung has turbo-charged for 2015.
How does it keep its cool? I have to get a little bit geeky to explain it. The Galaxy S6's Exynos 7420 CPU has transistors that are 14nm across, while the rival Snapdragon uses a 20nm process. Smaller transistors are the grey matter cells of a CPU, and smaller ones mean greater efficiency, and less energy wasted as heat.
We're not quite sure how Samsung has soldiered so far ahead, but it really seems to have done so – and it could prove a huge advantage through this phone generation.
Williams also notes the lack of MicroSD card support, and while many reviewers point out this makes a unibody design more practical, he thinks there's another motive involved… and it's one that is key to making the S6 a success for Samsung:
We're fine with that, but Samsung has also removed the memory card slot. It has presumably noticed that Apple makes more than a few quid upselling people to 128GB iPhones and want a piece of the action. Why would you otherwise when a 64GB microSD card cost about £20 these days? …It's disappointing when this is so clearly a money-making exercise.
The Biggest And Brightest Screen
DisplayMate sums up the stunning screen rather well. Every reviewer has noted the high-resolution of the screen, but it's also a resolution that doesn't seem to have a discernible benefit when placed next to rival handsets. That's not to say there are no benefits to the higher resolution:
There are some significant advantages in going higher than the visual acuity for 20/20 Vision at typical viewing distances. For Smartphones they include a closer match to digital photo resolutions, the ability to display Full HD 1920×1080 images with an additional 1.6 Mega Pixels left over for displaying additional content at the same time, plus efficient and simple rescaling (with small integer ratios) of various HD and Quad screen resolution formats to improve speed processing efficiency and resulting picture quality.
Samsung's use of its OLED screen technology does make the screen more efficient in some use cases than the LCD screens on other handsets. Display Mate's tests show that with 'mixed color' images, the S6 is more efficient than the LCD screens in the iPhone:
The Galaxy S6 is in fact 23 percent more power efficient than the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus for mixed image content (that includes text together with photos, videos, and movies, for example) with a typical 50 percent Average Picture Level, APL. OLEDs have been rapidly improving in their power efficiency. The balance point has now moved all the way up to 65 percent APL: the OLED Galaxy S6 is more power efficient for all APLs from zero up through 65 percent, and the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus LCDs are more power efficient for APLs above 65 percent.
…the smaller package means there's less space for a battery (a 2550mAh pack is smaller than the 2800mAh seen in the Galaxy S5, which is a bit of a worry) and in early tests it doesn't seem like it's a brilliant performance in terms of the battery.
TouchWiz Goes On A Diet
Jessica Dolcourt takes on Samsung's changes to TouchWiz to help it sit on top of Android 5.0 Lollipop over on CNet. TouchWiz has always been a weak point of Samsung's handsets in reviews, with an overabundance of icons and options, multiple applications for matching functions, and generally not looking as professional as other handset manufacturers.
The Galaxy S6 has improved on this viewpoint, but it still feels like more work is possible:
For years, customers have moaned about the thick, heavy TouchWiz interface that Samsung uses as its custom layer over Android. No longer. Samsung's take on Android 5.0 Lollipop scales back its own additions and leans heavily on Google's "Material" design. Samsung succeeds in embracing a simpler layout without shedding all the software it's built over the years, though Android deserves much of that credit for providing the framework.
While Samsung has said it will be reducing the levels of bloat ware in the handset, that doesn't mean that the heavy levels of additional software have disappeared. I suspect that the financial rewards of bundling certain key apps are too much for Samsung to sacrifice:
A few folders repopulated by vendor apps buttresses the simplified look. There's a bucket of Google apps and services, and one for new partner Microsoft (this folder has Skype and OneDrive, for instance). Bonus: you can edit the folder color.
As for preloaded apps, a few Samsung programs remain, like Milk music and video and S Health, which are Samsung's answers to the iTunes Store and Apple Health, respectively. S Voice is another constant. To get more Samsung apps and partner apps, you'll need to open a shortcut and select them from the buckets marked Galaxy Essentials and Galaxy Gifts. One such Gift is Fleksy, a keyboard alternative that will come free with all S6 phones.
The Camera Could Be The Best Ever
And so to the camera, an area which Samsung has been heavily marketing since the reveal of the handset at MWC. Yahoo's Daniel Howley takes a closer look at the images it captures in his review of the S6.
For years, Samsung has been playing catch-up with Apple when it comes to its smartphone cameras. With the new 16-megapixel cameras on the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, though, Samsung has taken the lead. In side-by-side shots, the S6 repeatedly outperformed the iPhone 6. What's most impressive is that the S6 actually took better images than the iPhone in low-light situations, something that Samsung has struggled with for years. A portrait of a handsome man [in fact it was Howley himself] taken with the S6 under office lights was equally colorful, while the iPhone 6's shot was a bit too white. The iPhone, though, offered slightly more detail.
A real photography shoot out with an excessive eye for detail is needed to decide a clear winner, but what is clear from Howley (and others) is that for day-to-day use, the Galaxy S6 matches the iPhone 6 and the other leading camera phones. Samsung's major weak point has improved enough to be considered a contender, which is a good thing.
Conclusions
Summing up the Galaxy S6′s initial run-in with the critics is pretty simple - I'll quote Zach Epstein at BGR:
It has now been about a month since I first used Samsung's new Galaxy S6… so why can't I find anything to complain about? …the Galaxy S6 is hardly perfect, and I'm not suggesting that it is. But when it comes to real flaws — serious issues that hurt the user experience — there really isn't much to speak of.
This seems to be the conclusion of everyone. Everything that was seen as 'wrong' with previous Galaxy handsets has been addressed, notably the build quality. It continues in Samsung's quest to deliver the most powerful handset possible, and it follows modern smartphone design trends so it is not going to look out-of-place or awkward.
At the same time, almost every reviewer notes the similarities to Apple's iPhone 6 design, the lack of waterproofing, and the decisions made to drop the removable battery and MicroSD card support. Questions remain over the real-world battery life, and while TouchWiz might be an improvement it's still a weak link.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 feels like a workhorse phone. The flaws of the previous generation have been smoothed off, new flaws have been introduced, and there is very little 'wow' that makes the handset stand out. It's above average in every single department, it will always get the job done, and has been respected by every reviewer.
What it doesn't seem to have delivered is a sense of magical awe. It's better than previous Galaxy handsets, it's in the running to be the leading Android handset of 2015, but in achieving competency for the S6, Samsung seems to have forgotten to add any soul.
The Forbes Tech team will be taking our own look at the Samsung Galaxy S6 over the next few weeks, both as a standalone handset and in comparison with other handsets.
0 comments:
Post a Comment