Galaxy S6 review: how does project zero feel like

I know it's late, maybe a little too late for some of you. But hey, it's here. So let's get right to the stuff. 

Galaxy S6 is easily the most ambitious smartphone Galaxy S till date, and arguably the most ambitious smartphone of 2015. It's the project zero, by which the company means that they started from zero, or basically started from a clean state. 

The most apparent change of project zero is the design. Let's talk about this design for a bit. 

Design

The design is, well, changed. There is no plastic here. It's either metal or glass. Whether you like its look or not is all your preference and I can't convince you otherwise. But let's talk about other things that are facts. 

What I like: 

• The sides are metallic and feel great. They are rounded and hence extremely comfortable. Also, the sides are flattened a bit making it less slippery than say, iPhone 6. 
• The buttons are just great. They have enough travel, they provide great feedback, strike the right balance between loose and too firm and most importantly, are located at the right places. 
• The speaker and headphone jack have moved to the bottom where they make more sense. Personally, I would have preferred front-firing speakers but it's at least better than back-firing one. 
• The size: the phone has pretty minimal bezel making it only 70.5 mm wide which is pretty good for one-handed use. 
• The coating beneath the glass makes the phone look different at different angles. Look above at the photo, you'll get what I mean. Depending on the lighting and angle, the phone can look from light blue to black. 
• The thinness: the phone is almost impossibly thin at 6.8 mm. Whenever I handed the phone to anyone, the first words they said were: "OMG, how thin it is!"

A little concerning: 

• No microSD card slot: Galaxy S6 ships with 32GB, 64 GB and 128 GB configurations, and that's all you get(along with 100GB cloud). So, choose wisely as you can't expand it. If this is any solace, the phone supports USB OTG. 
• No removable battery: arguably, this is a lesser concern than the missing microSD, but these things are sometimes binary for people. What this means is that you won't be able to swap batteries. 
• Protruding camera: the camera protrudes, a lot. 

The ugly:

• Glass back: Glass is extremely fragile material, gorilla glass 4 or not. It will crack if it falls hard, that's a fact. It also get's smudged easily and not so good with thermals and it's slippery. At the end, you will cover it with a case and that means you are not getting any 'premium' feel what you think you will be getting. 

Screen

This screen is just drop-dead gorgeous despite what kind of screens you like. It can get more accurate than almost any LCD, get more colorful than even the real world, is impossibly bright, has infinite contrast ratio. There's almost nothing wrong with this display and you can't do much better. 

To describe the screen of this thing, let me remind you what is the basic purpose of a screen is. A screen is made to emulate what we want to see. So an ideal screen would be the one that doesn't look like a screen, irony isn't it! 

The Galaxy S6 comes incredibly close to achieving that goal. It has overkill sharpness, so no pixelation. It has infinite contrast ratio, just like real life. It can almost match the color gamut of a human eye, when the software catches up. It's pretty much perfect in every way and man, does it look nice. 

The display looks like a printed paper. And it's easily the best screen on a smartphone, period. 

The only very small problem with the screen is not related to the screen itself, but the mild software sharpening Samsung applied around text. Most people won't even notice it and even if you do, it's not nearly as bad as on the LG G3.

If you are concerned about the sharpening, think about this. You have read a lot of reviews by now. Did any reviewer mentioned this? It's that mild and you have to really look for it. 

Performance:

I have already posted enough articles on how powerful the Exynos 7420 is. If you want to see benchmarks, you can go read them up here. 

Let's talk about real life performance, and the phone absolutely flies through everything, as expected from a flagship. 

The more important question is: is the speed difference noticeable compared to other flagships? or Do the Exynos 7420 and UFS 2.0 memory make a difference in real life? 

The answer to this question is a little complicated. You see, once you get the phone, in a few days you get accustomed to its speed. And unless it lags or stutters, you anticipate the time it should take for a certain task to complete and if the phone performs as expected, you don't notice if the phone is slow or fast. 

Let me give you an analogy to explain what I just said. Imagine 2 games. One game plays at constant 30 fps and other plays at 60 fps but intermittently switches to 30 fps, and goes back to 60 again. Now, game 2 is playing as good or better game 1 at any instant of time, but guess what, game 1 will be more enjoyable to play. Because the game 1 will play as you expect it to play while game 2 will slow down at some points and you will notice it as it will spoil the experience. Now imagine a game 3, which plays at 60 fps at all times. Between game 1 and game 3, you won't notice a very huge difference in long term as both games are playing exactly as you suppose them to play. But, when you switch from game 1 to game 3 or the opposite, you will notice the difference. 

So how that analogy applies here? I wanted to convey that as long as your phone performs as expected, you will never be needing for more. For example, a moto G runs perfectly fine. It completes a task when you expect it to and hence you don't want for more. It's like a 30 fps game. Now, there are some laggy flagships like the Galaxy S5 or my old S4. Those are like game 2. They can run really fast but occasionally drop frames and lag. Hence it's not a very good experience. S6 is like game 3: you will notice difference when switching from your old phone or when you go back to your old phone after using the S6. But you will get accustomed to that speed and it will feel like a normal phone after a few days of using. 

The problem is that once you use this phone, even 2014 flagships look a little slow. It can spoil you, just like the 60 fps game. 

The problem with the performance I found was in the RAM management. Apparently, Samsung has not fixed the memory leak in lollipop while HTC and Sony have. I expect a 3 GB RAM phone to have at least 1 GB RAM free but I get about 600-700 MB free with normal usage. But hey, Samsung has acknowledged this problem and they are working on a fix. As of writing this review though, it has not been fixed. 

Touchwiz

Now, this will require a whole new article to fully cover and you bet, it's coming soon. But for now, let's get away from what I like and dislike in short: 

What I like: 

• The stock apps follow material design guidelines. Apps are layered and look really good. 
• Speed: the new iteration of touchwiz is wicked fast and on par with sense or stock android. 
• Multiwindow and pop-up window: Do I need to explain it!
• Excellent integration with fingerprint scanner: You can unlock your phone, login to sites with autofill working after you put your finger on the pad, pay with paypal, switch between private and normal mode and Samsung pay is coming soon. 
• Features like ultra power saving mode, download booster, double press home button to launch camera. 
• Animations: the animations are extremely bouncy and lollipoppy. The execution is excellent and they show off the power of device with no frame-lapses. 
• Customization options like screen grid, theme engine, quick settings etc are good to have. 

A little concerning: 

• Many of the features like grayscale mode, one-handed mode, toolbox etc are taken away. 
• The theme engine is practically a disaster currently. Most of the themes are downright bad. It's improving but at a slow pace. 

The ugly:

• The ugly in this case is ironically ugly. The icons are almost the same as they were in the ICS era and some color choices like the status bar one are questionable. 

Battery life: 

Surprisingly, the battery life has been excellent for me in my one month with the device and every update has made it better. 

You can read about my battery findings by clicking here if you want an in-depth scoop. 

In short, the battery life should be the least of your concerns while buying this phone. It lasts a while and it'll easily last you a day. 

Camera

Unfortunately, I'm still testing the camera and just like with the UI, an article with some samples should be done soon. Till then, you'll have to do with my findings thus far. 

UI:

The UI or user interface of a camera is hugely important and can make or break the experience of using a camera. 

This is what the main interface looks like. It's clean with main options on the tap. On the right there are options to  capture, record and toggle between front/back camera along with shortcut to gallery and mode options on top and bottom. There are finer controls with settings on the left. 

This is what happens when you click on mode toggle. Gone is the ugly, laggy and unintuitive mode of the galaxies of yesteryear. 

The UI is finally clean and I can safely say that Samsung has done it right. 

'Pro' mode:

Let's talk about the so called 'pro' mode. As you are probably aware of, lollipop supports camera2 api. This allows phones to do pretty much everything a photographers' nerdy dreams are made of. 

This is what the pro mode looks like. The controls are simple to access and there is no problem regarding the UI. 

What I like: 

• The UI is nice and intuitive with auto toggle in each. 
• There is manual focus which helps to pull off shots like this one(click to zoom): 

A little concerning: 

• The ISO slider goes from 100 to 800 while in Auto mode it can easily go from 50 to 2000+. 
• The White balance control just has 4 presets instead of a slider which goes from warm to cold. 

The ugly: 

• No option to shoot in RAW. 
• No option to adjust shutter speed. 

Image quality:

Firstly, when I got the S6, I was a little underwhelmed by the camera. You see, I read the reviews and they said all these great things about it. I had an S4 and a G2 prior to this phone and I expected it to be a huge jump from them. Sadly, that didn't happen. 

This phone has a good camera, just don't expect to get blown away. 

For the full resolution sample shots, go to this link: 

https://flic.kr/s/aHskcYdy8n

As I promised, I will have a full blown article with way more sample shots in a future article. But for now, I guess a short one will have to do. 

Images:

In good lighting, the phone does as expected. The shots are detailed, focusing is on point and fast, exposure is great and detail is splendid. If you plan on doing most of your shooting in daylight, S6 can replace your SLR for a trip or two, and I'm not kidding. 

In low light, the phone does good too. Don't expect it to replace your SLR in low light though. To put you in perspective, it's a shade better than iPhone 6 in low light. 

HDR works fantastically and macro focus is great. See the donut shot in sample shot album for an example. 

Videos:

Videos by the S6 are not as great. I don't have samples as of now to share but I will include them in a new article soon. 

What I like: 

• The detail, exposure, focusing and white balance. 
• The option to shoot in UHD as well as QHD. 
• QHD video recording from front camera. 
• HDR video.

A little concerning: 

• Slow-mo video lacks detail. Also no 240 fps option.
• If you turn software stabilization on, you can see warping effect around the edges.

The ugly:

None in particular. 

Test notes:

• The fingerprint scanner works great. It's a little faster than TouchID, but a little less accurate. 
• Speaker sounds pretty fine and gets pretty loud. Though if you want to listen to music, put the volume at 90% as that's where you get optimal quality. 
• Selfie camera works fine and is more than enough for average selfie needs i.e. posting it on facebook/instagram. 
• Audio quality via the supplied earbuds is pretty good for included ones. Though you want to keep your old ones if you have a dedicated pair. 
• Call quality is pretty good and clear. Better than the S4 and G2 I had before. 
• LTE speeds are great at my carrier. I was able to get past 50 Mbps down with half the signal strength. 

• There are minor bugs with google play services eating up the battery sometimes. But those are more of issues with lollipop than the device. 

Conclusion:

By now, your mind would be already made up, from this review or otherwise. My experience has been pretty positive thus far and I'm happy to make it my daily driver for 1/2 years.