Its Samsung's time of the year again and this year, its not a joke.
Samsung has delivered just what the fans expected: A whole new take on their design language.
Samsung found itself in sort of a bind last year: Its flagship Galaxy S5 wasn't the blockbuster the company hoped it would be. That, coupled with the news that Samsung was going to focus on a smaller number of devices in 2015, signaled a pretty dramatic change for a brand that seemed like it was unstoppable. As if to silence the doubters, Samsung has not one, but two flagships on offer -- the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge -- and they're surrounded by questions. Can they restore Samsung to its former glory? Has the company figured out how to build a truly interesting smartphone again?
Lets find out:
Hardware:
The only difference between the hardware of the S6 and S6 Edge is the screen. The S6 Edge has a wrap-around screen and a few software 'features' to go with it, but we'll get to that in a bit. That aside, rest of the hardware specifications are identical- Same screen size (5.1 inch), same 16 megapixel cameras, same processor and so on.
The design of these devices is a MAJOR change from the last year's S5. Samsung 'took some inspiration' from its rivals and built a metal and glass casing for the S6. There's Gorilla Glass 4 on the front and the back and a nice metal frame to wrap it together. The front glass on the S6 is a bit curved towards the edges to make things easy when you're swiping stuff on your device and makes it feel natural. The button placements are sensible, with the volume rocker on the left and the power button on the right. A mono speaker, micro-USB port and headphone jack neatly placed at the bottom and finally, the SIM card slot and microphone at the top.
Looking at it dead on, though, the S6 is pretty plain. Your eyes will immediately get sucked into the 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED screen, but a 5-megapixel selfie camera sits above it while the Home button lies below, flanked by discrete Back and Recent Apps keys. High on the S6's back is a squarish plateau that houses the 16-megapixel camera, and to the right lies a tiny black divot where the LED flash and heart rate sensor live. Unlike the crater that marked the Galaxy S5's back, the assembly here is almost flush with the S6's rear. It's a small touch, but it makes taking heart rate and blood oxygen readings in S Health quite a bit easier.
The Galaxy S6 looks (and feels) an awful lot like an iPhone 6. From those rounded sides to the chrome-rimmed, fingerprint-sensing Home button to placement of the volume buttons on the left edge and the power button on the right, there's an odd air of familiarity surrounding the thing.
And that's the harsh reality- Samsung wants iPhone customers. It's no secret that none of its other rivals have as much market share to really worry them. It wants Apple's customers and it wants to stop existing customers migrate to Apple. So Samsung built a phone based on what Apple customers care about. Which, of course, is also the problem because the S6 doesn't care about the features of its predecessors. Thus, you want be seeing any expandable storage, removable batteries or water and dust resistance this year.
But the looks, overall, are very impressive, but not very confidence inspiring. Thanks to the metal sides, the phone is slippery and the glass on the front and back, though sturdy, feels very fragile.
Now, about the Edge. It's equal parts gorgeous and gimmicky, but if money is no object, the former definitely outweighs the latter.
The Edge's curved screen falls away from you at the sides instead of angling toward you from the top and bottom. The design does nothing to make the screen more immersive, but that doesn't matter; the screen's novelty and beauty still mean it's hard to tear your eyes off it. The S6 Edge feels substantially thinner than its basic cousin because of how its sides taper to a super-slim edge. But the thing is, the Edge will probably never nestle comfortably into your hands as a result. Then again, Edge's main job is to look good.
Other hardware features include an improved version of the fingerprint sensor; which now works when you simply place a finger on the home button, instead of swiping your finger over it (like it was in the S5).
And that's the harsh reality- Samsung wants iPhone customers. It's no secret that none of its other rivals have as much market share to really worry them. It wants Apple's customers and it wants to stop existing customers migrate to Apple. So Samsung built a phone based on what Apple customers care about. Which, of course, is also the problem because the S6 doesn't care about the features of its predecessors. Thus, you want be seeing any expandable storage, removable batteries or water and dust resistance this year.
But the looks, overall, are very impressive, but not very confidence inspiring. Thanks to the metal sides, the phone is slippery and the glass on the front and back, though sturdy, feels very fragile.
Now, about the Edge. It's equal parts gorgeous and gimmicky, but if money is no object, the former definitely outweighs the latter.
The Edge's curved screen falls away from you at the sides instead of angling toward you from the top and bottom. The design does nothing to make the screen more immersive, but that doesn't matter; the screen's novelty and beauty still mean it's hard to tear your eyes off it. The S6 Edge feels substantially thinner than its basic cousin because of how its sides taper to a super-slim edge. But the thing is, the Edge will probably never nestle comfortably into your hands as a result. Then again, Edge's main job is to look good.
Other hardware features include an improved version of the fingerprint sensor; which now works when you simply place a finger on the home button, instead of swiping your finger over it (like it was in the S5).
Display and sound quality:
The S6 and the S6 Edge have absolutely gorgeous screens. They're both Quad HD panels (2,560 x 1,440, if you haven't memorized it yet) akin to the one you'll find in the Note 4, but they only measure at 5.1 inches diagonally. That means we're looking at two of the most pixel-dense screens on the market today. As far as your eyes will be able to tell, individual pixels don't even exist.
As is usually the case with Samsung's AMOLEDs, colors are incredibly vivid, while blacks are deep and sumptuous. A quick bit of screen nerdery for you: AMOLED panels typically skew a little more toward the blue end of the spectrum than LCDs do.
It wont be an overstatement to say that the S6 and S6 Edge have the best displays in the market as of today.
Both devices share the same single speaker nestled into the bottom-right corners of their frames, and it's dramatically louder than the clunker we got in last year's Galaxy S5.
Software:
The biggest turn-off about Samsung phones has been the software. The TouchWiz UI is known to bring along all the bloatware and take the Android design away by replacing it with its own design elements. That said, Samsung has spent the past year or two slowly cranking down on the sheer amount of stuff it slops on top of stock Android. It really shows, too: The version of TouchWiz that ships on the S6 and the S6 Edge is about as restrained as I've seen on a Samsung phone yet. Turns out, chopping out extraneous menu options and visual cruft was high up on the company's list of priorities this year, so don't ever let anyone tell you that complaining ad nauseam can't get huge conglomerates to rethink their plans.
Anyway, all of Samsung's greatest hits are still here, and they're paired with a flatter, cleaner, Material Design-y look that jibes nicely with Android 5.0.2. Seriously, it's terriblyrefreshing if you're coming from a Galaxy S5. Swiping to the left once again reveals your Flipboard Briefing, a BlinkFeed-like stream of news stories culled from news sources around the web. It might not pull choice updates from your Twitter or Instagram accounts like on an HTC phone, but it does look a hell of a lot handsomer. The app launcher itself is a little less attractive, at least at first. By default, Samsung has arranged all of its apps (including Microsoft pack-ins like OneNote and OneDrive) and everything else you install gets tacked on the end of the list in the order you downloaded it. Thankfully, there's an "A-Z" button in the corner to whip things into more manageable shape. Oh, and you can resize the app grid on your home screen to accommodate up to 20 shortcuts, not including widgets.
You can choose from about 12 different themes if you're itching for something else. Right now Samsung's Theme Store leans heavily toward the cutesy side with themes that feature super-simple, hand-drawn icon sets and artwork; the only deviation from the norm is a tie-in theme for The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Nothing like the smell of brand synergy, right? Anyway, moving on. A quick tap on the Recent Apps button brings up the usual deck of app cards, but you'll notice a Multi Window icon on some of them -- tapping that'll resize the app to take up half the screen, leaving enough room to either see the app running beneath it or resize another one to fill the other half completely. Works like a charm when you need it , and it's so much less of a headache to activate now.
Oh, and while we're talking about apps, no, you cannot uninstall whatever you want by pressing, holding and tapping a delete icon. Trying it on an app you've downloaded works fine. Try it on a preloaded app (say, S Health) and you'll instead get a prompt to disable it; that is, you can shut it off, but you can't remove it from the phone. What about stuff you don't want to delete, but don't want anyone else seeing? Private mode is still around and ready to keep your media and files out of the wrong hands.
The Edge:
This is where you might expect the Edge to shine. Swiping in from the upper left or right part of the screen (you'll indicate during setup if you're a righty or lefty) causes an array of colored bubbles to drift into view. That's People Edge. You can assign up to five people their own specific color, so that when they contact you, the edge of the phone will spring to life with their assigned hue. It's a neat trick, for sure, but its value is limited. To start, why the limit on five people and colors? And if the edge that lights up happens to be pointing away from you, you might as well just flip the phone over and see who it is instead of turning it around to see what color is throbbing.
Meanwhile, rubbing the edge of the screen while it's off causes Samsung's so-called Information Stream to pop up, giving you access to the time, notifications and news updates without lighting up the whole panel. Truly, it's so much more convenient to tap the Home button to see all that than to stroke the edge of a screen; in fact, it's so much easier that to even bother just seems silly. It'd be another story if the news headline that showed up was somehow tied to your preferences as set in Flipboard Briefing, but nope -- it's just some random nothing from Yahoo News. Oh, and you can turn on a clock that'll live on the edge until the battery level drops below 15 percent. That's the only truly useful feature in the mix... except it only works for 12 hours at a time. What? The thing is, I appreciate that Samsung didn't try to bog the Edge down with nonsense, but in doing so, it proved it still doesn't know what to do with that extra space. That'd be a greater sin if the screen didn't look so damned cool, but none of this helps sell the Edge to anyone who's on the fence.
Camera:
The cameras in Samsung's high-end phones have always been at least above average, but that's not good enough anymore. Nailing the camera was just crucial this time around and, long story short, Samsung did a great job. But first, the broad strokes. The S6 and the Edge share the same 16-megapixel rear camera (made by Sony, no less), which doesn't sound incredibly impressive compared to some of the other sensors used in other phones. Still, the combination of the sensor plus optical image stabilization and an f/1.9 lens is highly effective. It's best used when you're photographing dim landscapes or subjects that can sit still. The fact that we've got a beautiful Quad-HD AMOLED screen to view them on is a huge plus too (though your screen color settings might mean the actual photo looks different on your phone than on a computer or television). Meanwhile, the wide-angle lens on the 5-megapixel front-facing camera makes for some seriously spacious selfies -- it captures way more of your surroundings than you might expect, so bring the phone in close for the best results. Just be sure to dial down Beauty Mode to keep your face from looking like you got plastered with foundation.
The huge letdown in the camera department comes when you test the low-light performance. The images have too much noise and it takes some work to get it to focus and autoexposure is not reliable.
Otherwise, its a great point and shoot camera and there's no doubt about it, but if you're expecting it to perform in low light conditions as good, don't.
For the sake of speed, you can fire up the camera by swiping up on the home screen or by double-tapping the Home button at any time. Samsung says it only takes 0.7 second to jump into the camera proper. By default, the Samsung camera app is straightforward; the shutter button and mode selector live on one end, and a quick tap reveals controls for your flash, timer and HDR on the other. You can also jump into a Pro mode where you can fiddle with your exposure, ISO and metering settings, and it's easy enough to save those changes as a preset to be fired up later.
Pro mode aside, you've got your usual slew of kooky features to play with, but the new ones are worth pointing out. Kicking the camera into background defocus mode is a nifty little attraction that lets you selectively blur parts of your shots, sort of like a Lytro, but all in software. Thing is, you can often coax that sort of bokeh from the lens and camera without software trickery at all so long as you stick the phone close to your subject. There's a Virtual shot mode that captures a 3D video of an object if you can move around it smoothly enough too, and it's cool enough until you realize you can't share it and still maintain the flashy effect. The ability to record 4K video is back as well, and with the same five-minute limitation Samsung aficionados will already be familiar with.
At the end of the day, I'd still give the photographic edge to the iPhones, but it's an awfully tight race and Android fans can buy an S6 or S6 Edge without fear of working at a disadvantage.
Performance and Battery:
With each passing year we demand more and more from our tiny pocket-computers, especially when they're hyped up the way flagships are. The S6 and the S6 Edge sport a homebrew octa-core Exynos 7420 chipset, which pairs a quartet of 2.1GHz processor cores with another quartet of 1.5GHz cores and 3GB of RAM. When it comes to regular, day-to-day performance, the differences are slight. That's to be expected, really; we're inching toward an age so profuse with processing power, so rife with RAM that flicking through home screens and firing up apps on flagship phones is nearly seamless. Both the S6 and the Edge are incredibly snappy, with virtually zero lag during normal use.
That the S6 and Edge would be super-snappy was sort of a given, but the bigger question is how long they'll last before they need a trip to the power outlet. Before we tackle that, it's worth noting that the two S6s aren't identical in this regard: The basic S6 has a 2,550mAh battery while the Edge has a slightly bigger 2,600mAh one. Oh, and don't forget that both batteries are sealed too; the age of swapping spare cells into your new Galaxy S is finally over, I'm afraid. Samsung says its new line of 14nm Exynos processors are designed to deliver more horsepower at greater efficiency, which leads to both versions of the phone sticking around for between 11 and 12 hours of continuous workday use.
Verdict: Both, the S6 and S6 Edge are promising new devices and a breath of fresh air in Samsung's design philosophy. But when it comes to choosing one of them, you need to think, if that Edge is really of any use to you or is it just a gimmick which you won't really be using daily. After all, you end up paying roughly Rs. 9000 extra just for that curved screen. The S6 is priced at Rs.49990 whereas S6 Edge is priced at Rs. 58990, all for that curved screen. If that is not your priority, you should be just as happy with the S6. Overall, it's nice to see a flagship phone from Samsung that does actually look and feel like one, and even though the battery life is inconsistent, the host of features and specifications should make up for it. So, for everyone who is a fan of Samsung's Android devices, you might want to check these out; for iPhone users, its not really necessary.
What do you think about these new devices?
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