Samsung is no stranger to manufacturing smartphones jam-packed with
the very latest in technology – it's a company that's always marching
forwards. Only one thing has eluded the Korean giant to date, however,
and that's the ability to design a phone that's as gorgeous as it is
functional. The arrival of the long-awaited Galaxy S6 sees the company
finally break free of those shackles; the Samsung Galaxy S6 is,
unequivocally, the best smartphone you can buy anywhere, and for any
price.
As you'd expect from a modern smartphone, the S6 is extremely slim
(6.8mm) and light (138g), and it feels surprisingly compact in the hand,
especially considering there's a 5.1in display up front.
In our view, the S6 delivers the perfect compromise between screen size and one-handed comfort – in fact, it's slightly smaller overall than the Samsung Galaxy S5 – and it combines that with impressive build quality and attention to detail. Even the volume, power and home buttons feel like they've been upgraded: everything about this phone feels perfectly on point.
There are some downsides to the design, however. First, in order to
produce such a gorgeous work of art, the removable rear panel,
replaceable battery and microSD slot for storage expansion have been
consigned to the dustbin.
Second, neither the S6 nor the S6 Edge has an IP rating, so they're not not water and dust resistant like last year's Samsung Galaxy S5 was.
And third, the glass rear of the phones picks up fingerprints like they're going out of fashion. It's easy to clean, but if you own one of these phones, you're going to be spending a lot of your time wiping it on your jeans or the hem of your T-shirt to keep it spotless.
Colour accuracy, brightness and contrast, however, are more important than sheer pixel count, and on this front, the S6 delivers a knockout blow. In manual brightness mode, the screen ramps up to only 347cd/m2, which is what we'd expect of an AMOLED display; pop it in auto-brightness mode and it will soar to 560cd/m2 to aid readability on bright, sunny days. That's an improvement on the Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge, which reached just below 500cd/m2 in the same circumstances.
Turn down the brightness slider to minimum and white tones on the screen will dim to 1.92cd/m2. That's much lower than the 5.84cd/m2
the iPhone 6 is capable of, and means the S6 won't blind you when
you're using it in the dark. Contrast is perfect, which helps movies, TV
programmes and photos really pop out of the screen.
What's most impressive about the S6's screen, though, is its outstanding colour reproduction. In Basic (sRGB) mode it reproduces 98.5% of the sRGB colour gamut. And it's highly colour-accurate, too, with an average Delta E of 1.47 and a maximum of 4.13. In AMOLED Photo mode (equivalent to a professional monitor's Adobe RGB mode), it covers 98.7% of the colour gamut, and gained average colour-accuracy scores of 1.57 and a maximum of 4.29.
These are the sorts of scores we're more used to seeing on professional monitors than a smartphone – it's a truly stunning display.
It's a lineup that makes for a very snappy-feeling phone. Nothing we threw at it caused it to slow down significantly, from hefty web pages to browsing Google Maps - everything feels supremely responsive, and even under load it doesn't get too warm.
And it outperforms most of its rivals in the benchmarks, too. Single- and multi-core results in Geekbench 3 of 1,485 and 5,282 are the best we've seen, falling behind the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus only a touch in the single-core test and trouncing them in the multi-core test.
It completed the SunSpider benchmark in an equally quick 355ms, again matching the iPhones, and it's only in the GFXBench T-Rex HD (onscreen) gaming benchmark that it lags behind Apple's flagships with an average framerate of 38fps. That's mainly due to the higher resolution display, but it's still very impressive.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is clearly a fast phone, but the Exynos 7420 is about more than sheer speed. Just like Intel's new Broadwell generation of CPUs, it's a 14nm part, which should mean greater efficiency and better battery life. And with Samsung reducing the size of the battery by 200mAh to 2,600mAh, it needs to deliver.
In testing it did just that. Playing a 720p video in flight mode with the screen set to a brightness of 120cd/m2, we saw capacity fall at a rate of 6% a figure bested only by the iPhone 6 Plus. With the screen off, the S6 used up its battery capacity at 2.8% - less impressive, but that still places it among the most frugal smartphones we've tested.
As with most high-end smartphones, the S6 struggles to keep up this performance when playing games, with capacity diving at a much faster rate. After running the GFXBench battery test, which loops a 3D scene at half brightness for around half an hour, then extrapolates to provide a total projected runtime, the S6 hit 134 minutes - not great, this result is fairly typical of most high-powered smartphones we see.
Even then, though, we found that on a normal day, using the phone intensively on our morning and evening commute and more lightly during the day, the S6 would normally have capacity to spare at bedtime.
As if to compensate for the lack of microSD expansion, the S6 also
comes with a "new type of flash storage". According to Samsung's
marketing materials, this is a fusion of the eMMC used in smartphones
and tablets and the SSDs deployed in laptops.
Dubbed UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 2.0, the new storage technology employs a serial interface instead of the 8-bit parallel interface used by the eMMC storage typically used in rival smartphones, and this boosts performance dramatically. According to Samsung, UFS 2.0 can carry out 19,000 IOPS (input/ouput operations per second) for random reads, which is "2.7 times faster" than eMMC 5.
It's certainly very quick. Testing with the Androbench app, we saw sequential read and write speeds of 319MB/sec and 142MB/sec and 4K read and write speeds of 71MB/sec and 19MB/sec - very impressive, and a lot faster than the HTC One M9's performance in these tests.
Other specifications are a touch more humdrum, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing, with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Cat6 4G, NFC and Bluetooth 4 all present and correct. At close range, a large file copied to the S6's internal storage at around 12MB/sec, which is about the same speed as we saw with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
The phone also retains most of the core features of the Galaxy S5, with a barometer, and heart rate monitor on the rear of the device, plus wireless charging and ANT+ compatibility. What's new is support for both the WPC (Qi) and PMA wireless charging standards.
And Samsung has even found time to upgrade the fingerprint sensor. You no longer need to swipe your finger over the button, which we've found to be quite awkward with previous Galaxy S handsets. Instead, it's now possible to simply rest a digit on the sensor, just as with Apple's iPhone 6, 6 Plus, iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3.
These sound like small changes, but in practice they make a dramatic difference to the S6's photo- and video-capture capabilities. In all but the darkest of environments, the S6 is capable of capturing stunning images and smooth, stable video. Noise is still visible when capturing murky objects in low light, but even then you'll get usable results in most circumstances.
It isn't vastly superior to the iPhone 6's camera, but it's as quick
and a better all-rounder in tricky light; we particularly love the live
HDR feature, which displays on the screen, in real-time, what your
processed photo will eventually look like. And it has a deft touch,
balancing areas of bright and dark in a scene well without making the
resulting photograph look unnatural.
The camera also boasts some new features on the software front. There's a new quick-launch feature, which allows you to double-click the home button to launch the camera app – in 0.7 seconds says Samsung. The camera software has been simplified, making it easier to access all the various settings. Samsung has made snapping selfies easier, too: you can now tap the heart-rate sensor on the rear to capture a self-portrait.
The front-facing camera provides 5-megapixel images and, with an aperture of f/1.9, selfies look impressively sharp even in poor light.
Impressively, video capture now benefits from object-tracking
autofocus, a feature normally associated with dedicated camcorders. This
worked pretty well in testing, but there's a catch: you can't use both
object tracking and optical image stabilisation simultaneously; it's
either or.
Audio is almost as impressive, both in-call and from the single speaker on the phone's bottom edge. The earpiece speaker goes superbly loud and doesn't distort at maximum volume, and speaker output is very good, matching the HTC One M9 for volume, if not body. The microphone is decent, too, picking up vocals at close and long range with admirable clarity.
This year, however, we see a significant change in direction by Samsung, with the company cutting out the clutter and slimming down what had become a hugely bloated and complex mobile UI. We're still not too keen on the Briefing newsfeed that appears by default to the left of the main homescreen, but it's gratifying to see that Samsung no longer litters the rest of Android's homescreens with a hotchpotch of large, ugly widgets.
Aside from the usual dock at the bottom of the main homescreen, all
you get with the S6 is the clock and weather widget at the top, the
Google search box below this, and space for up to eight standard app
below and above the search box. There's no longer any need to spend your
first half-hour with the phone deleting widgets and tidying up the
homescreens.
Samsung has also added in the ability to wake the phone using a key phrase, just as you can with Google Now on the Nexus 6 and Motorola Moto X (2014). And as we've mentioned, the camera app is much, much tidier than before.
The ability to pull out a series of favourite contacts from the edge is a great idea. What's more, each of these contacts is associated with a different colour; when a call comes in, the edge lights up in that colour, so you instantly know who's trying to get hold of you, even if the phone is face down and in silent mode.
Just like the Note Edge, the S6 Edge displays a clock on its edge in standby if you give it a little tickle, a feature that's a boon if you need to check the time in the middle of the night and your phone is sitting on the bedside table.
It's available in a slighlty different selection of colours to the
S6: there's the same white, black and gold, but instead of "Blue Topaz"
it comes in "Green Emerald".
Physically, the S6 Edge is ever-so-slightly fatter than the S6 at 7mm – not that we noticed any difference when we held the two side by side. It’s also fractionally shorter and narrower, but we’re talking tiny differences here. The S6 Edge is 6g lighter than the standard S6.
And there's a difference in storage configurations and price as well:
the S6 Edge is also available only in 64GB and 128GB variants, and the
64GB model is significantly more expensive than the 32GB S6, with the
cheapest model costing an eye-watering £760.
In terms of the rest of the specifications, the only major change is that the S6 Edge has a larger battery, at 2,600mAh compared with the S6's 2,550mAh battery. Everything else – the size and resolution of the screen, the cameras, processor, RAM and storage options – is identical.
You could criticise it for lacking a microSD slot and removable battery, and we're sure those omissions will put plenty of people off. But in every other respect, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is a superlative smartphone, and significantly better than the HTC One M9. If only the best will do, look no further. The Samsung Galaxy S6 is the best smartphone on the market.
Samsung Galaxy S6: design
No two ways about it, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is a stunner, framed in cool-to-the-touch aluminium, and with a coloured Gorilla Glass 4 rear and front, it's a beautiful phone to behold. It's clad in Gorilla Glass 4 front and back, and the way it gleams and glistens in the light is quite entrancing. The S6 is available in "White Pearl", "Gold Platinum" and "Blue Topaz", but we think it looks best in "Black Sapphire", which you see pictured here.In our view, the S6 delivers the perfect compromise between screen size and one-handed comfort – in fact, it's slightly smaller overall than the Samsung Galaxy S5 – and it combines that with impressive build quality and attention to detail. Even the volume, power and home buttons feel like they've been upgraded: everything about this phone feels perfectly on point.
Second, neither the S6 nor the S6 Edge has an IP rating, so they're not not water and dust resistant like last year's Samsung Galaxy S5 was.
And third, the glass rear of the phones picks up fingerprints like they're going out of fashion. It's easy to clean, but if you own one of these phones, you're going to be spending a lot of your time wiping it on your jeans or the hem of your T-shirt to keep it spotless.
Samsung Galaxy S6: display
Both the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge have a 5.1in Quad HD Super AMOLED display, with a resolution of 1,440 x 2,560 and a phenomenal pixel density of 576ppi, but while we're still not convinced this sort of resolution is necessary on a screen so small, there's absolutely no doubt that it delivers an incredibly sharp image.Colour accuracy, brightness and contrast, however, are more important than sheer pixel count, and on this front, the S6 delivers a knockout blow. In manual brightness mode, the screen ramps up to only 347cd/m2, which is what we'd expect of an AMOLED display; pop it in auto-brightness mode and it will soar to 560cd/m2 to aid readability on bright, sunny days. That's an improvement on the Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge, which reached just below 500cd/m2 in the same circumstances.
What's most impressive about the S6's screen, though, is its outstanding colour reproduction. In Basic (sRGB) mode it reproduces 98.5% of the sRGB colour gamut. And it's highly colour-accurate, too, with an average Delta E of 1.47 and a maximum of 4.13. In AMOLED Photo mode (equivalent to a professional monitor's Adobe RGB mode), it covers 98.7% of the colour gamut, and gained average colour-accuracy scores of 1.57 and a maximum of 4.29.
These are the sorts of scores we're more used to seeing on professional monitors than a smartphone – it's a truly stunning display.
Samsung Galaxy S6: specs and performance
In terms of the performance-critical elements, Samsung is really pushing the boat out. Both the S6 and the S6 Edge employ its octa-core Exynos 7420 SoC, which comprises twin quad-core CPUs (one running at a frequency of 2.1GHz and one at 1.5GHz) and a Mali-T760 GPU. There's 3GB of RAM to accompany this, and storage runs to 32GB, 64Gb or 128GB on the S6 and 64GB or 128GB on the S6 Edge.It's a lineup that makes for a very snappy-feeling phone. Nothing we threw at it caused it to slow down significantly, from hefty web pages to browsing Google Maps - everything feels supremely responsive, and even under load it doesn't get too warm.
And it outperforms most of its rivals in the benchmarks, too. Single- and multi-core results in Geekbench 3 of 1,485 and 5,282 are the best we've seen, falling behind the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus only a touch in the single-core test and trouncing them in the multi-core test.
It completed the SunSpider benchmark in an equally quick 355ms, again matching the iPhones, and it's only in the GFXBench T-Rex HD (onscreen) gaming benchmark that it lags behind Apple's flagships with an average framerate of 38fps. That's mainly due to the higher resolution display, but it's still very impressive.
The Samsung Galaxy S6 is clearly a fast phone, but the Exynos 7420 is about more than sheer speed. Just like Intel's new Broadwell generation of CPUs, it's a 14nm part, which should mean greater efficiency and better battery life. And with Samsung reducing the size of the battery by 200mAh to 2,600mAh, it needs to deliver.
In testing it did just that. Playing a 720p video in flight mode with the screen set to a brightness of 120cd/m2, we saw capacity fall at a rate of 6% a figure bested only by the iPhone 6 Plus. With the screen off, the S6 used up its battery capacity at 2.8% - less impressive, but that still places it among the most frugal smartphones we've tested.
As with most high-end smartphones, the S6 struggles to keep up this performance when playing games, with capacity diving at a much faster rate. After running the GFXBench battery test, which loops a 3D scene at half brightness for around half an hour, then extrapolates to provide a total projected runtime, the S6 hit 134 minutes - not great, this result is fairly typical of most high-powered smartphones we see.
Even then, though, we found that on a normal day, using the phone intensively on our morning and evening commute and more lightly during the day, the S6 would normally have capacity to spare at bedtime.
Dubbed UFS (Universal Flash Storage) 2.0, the new storage technology employs a serial interface instead of the 8-bit parallel interface used by the eMMC storage typically used in rival smartphones, and this boosts performance dramatically. According to Samsung, UFS 2.0 can carry out 19,000 IOPS (input/ouput operations per second) for random reads, which is "2.7 times faster" than eMMC 5.
It's certainly very quick. Testing with the Androbench app, we saw sequential read and write speeds of 319MB/sec and 142MB/sec and 4K read and write speeds of 71MB/sec and 19MB/sec - very impressive, and a lot faster than the HTC One M9's performance in these tests.
Other specifications are a touch more humdrum, but this isn't necessarily a bad thing, with 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Cat6 4G, NFC and Bluetooth 4 all present and correct. At close range, a large file copied to the S6's internal storage at around 12MB/sec, which is about the same speed as we saw with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4.
The phone also retains most of the core features of the Galaxy S5, with a barometer, and heart rate monitor on the rear of the device, plus wireless charging and ANT+ compatibility. What's new is support for both the WPC (Qi) and PMA wireless charging standards.
And Samsung has even found time to upgrade the fingerprint sensor. You no longer need to swipe your finger over the button, which we've found to be quite awkward with previous Galaxy S handsets. Instead, it's now possible to simply rest a digit on the sensor, just as with Apple's iPhone 6, 6 Plus, iPad Air 2 and iPad Mini 3.
Samsung Galaxy S6: camera, audio and call quality
The S6's camera isn't a radical upgrade. It has the same 16-megapixel resolution as the S5 and retains that super-quick phase-detect autofocus, but this year adds a wider aperture and optical image stabilisation.These sound like small changes, but in practice they make a dramatic difference to the S6's photo- and video-capture capabilities. In all but the darkest of environments, the S6 is capable of capturing stunning images and smooth, stable video. Noise is still visible when capturing murky objects in low light, but even then you'll get usable results in most circumstances.
The camera also boasts some new features on the software front. There's a new quick-launch feature, which allows you to double-click the home button to launch the camera app – in 0.7 seconds says Samsung. The camera software has been simplified, making it easier to access all the various settings. Samsung has made snapping selfies easier, too: you can now tap the heart-rate sensor on the rear to capture a self-portrait.
The front-facing camera provides 5-megapixel images and, with an aperture of f/1.9, selfies look impressively sharp even in poor light.
Audio is almost as impressive, both in-call and from the single speaker on the phone's bottom edge. The earpiece speaker goes superbly loud and doesn't distort at maximum volume, and speaker output is very good, matching the HTC One M9 for volume, if not body. The microphone is decent, too, picking up vocals at close and long range with admirable clarity.
Samsung Galaxy S6: Android Lollipop and TouchWiz features
As with any high-end smartphone worth its salt, the Samsung Galaxy S6 runs with Android 5 Lollipop on board, and as usual it's heavily modified, by courtesy of Samsung’s TouchWiz launcher software.This year, however, we see a significant change in direction by Samsung, with the company cutting out the clutter and slimming down what had become a hugely bloated and complex mobile UI. We're still not too keen on the Briefing newsfeed that appears by default to the left of the main homescreen, but it's gratifying to see that Samsung no longer litters the rest of Android's homescreens with a hotchpotch of large, ugly widgets.
Samsung has also added in the ability to wake the phone using a key phrase, just as you can with Google Now on the Nexus 6 and Motorola Moto X (2014). And as we've mentioned, the camera app is much, much tidier than before.
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge: software features
There’s also a host of modifications targeted at the curved screens on the S6 Edge, which are a subtle evolution of those we've already tried out on the Note Edge. We haven't yet had the opportunity to test the S6 Edge for any significant length of time, but we do know what the key features are.The ability to pull out a series of favourite contacts from the edge is a great idea. What's more, each of these contacts is associated with a different colour; when a call comes in, the edge lights up in that colour, so you instantly know who's trying to get hold of you, even if the phone is face down and in silent mode.
Just like the Note Edge, the S6 Edge displays a clock on its edge in standby if you give it a little tickle, a feature that's a boon if you need to check the time in the middle of the night and your phone is sitting on the bedside table.
Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge vs Samsung Galaxy S6
The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge is even more eye-catching than the standard S6. It has the same coloured glass and metal frame, but the screen curves away at the sides, giving it a unique and very appealing look.Physically, the S6 Edge is ever-so-slightly fatter than the S6 at 7mm – not that we noticed any difference when we held the two side by side. It’s also fractionally shorter and narrower, but we’re talking tiny differences here. The S6 Edge is 6g lighter than the standard S6.
In terms of the rest of the specifications, the only major change is that the S6 Edge has a larger battery, at 2,600mAh compared with the S6's 2,550mAh battery. Everything else – the size and resolution of the screen, the cameras, processor, RAM and storage options – is identical.
Samsung Galaxy S6 review: verdict
While the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge catches the eye with its unusual looks, though, we suspect it's the standard, slightly more affordable S6 that most consumers will opt for. And why not? The design is simply superb. The build is excellent. It's fast, slick, and its camera captures great pictures and superlative video.You could criticise it for lacking a microSD slot and removable battery, and we're sure those omissions will put plenty of people off. But in every other respect, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is a superlative smartphone, and significantly better than the HTC One M9. If only the best will do, look no further. The Samsung Galaxy S6 is the best smartphone on the market.
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