It’s another sad day with a FedEx box reluctantly leaving my hands. This time I’m mourning the Samsung Galaxy S6 from Verizon Wireless. As a Samsung product, I already knew I was going to love it. They just haven’t made much I didn’t like lately. So much so, I’m almost a complete convert. (I still need a TV and some Galaxy Gear.)
First Impressions: It’s a totally new look.
Remember when iphones were still new? They were the icon of smart phones. You could spot one across the room and you just knew it was an iphone. Androids don’t typically have that recognizability “Oh that’s a….” reaction. But that’s the first thing I noticed: Other people noticing my phone and commenting: “Oh nice, the S6?” or “Oh the S6! Don’t you just love it?” Or “That’s the S6, how do you like it?”
The look and feel is so different than the previous plastic bodies we are used to from Samsung.
Design Features:
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.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display
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Slim and sophisticated, lightweight design
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Metal bezel
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Corning® Gorilla® Glass 4 on the front and back of the phone
It’s like THE dress: Is it Blue or Black?
That Gorilla® Glass over the black body creates an interesting optical effect. It looks blue in some light. I always encase my personal phones from the time they come out of the box. This is a necessity as I am just tough on phones. But the Gorilla® Glass makes this phone as tough as it is beautiful. It’d be a shame to cover it up.
Can it keep up?
I’ve read a few places that people were disappointed with the battery life. I ran this phone on a full days use, it got gamed on hard anytime a tester kid was near and I never noticed it being an issue. This ‘how long can I use the battery’ test was repeated several times with the same result. I was able to drain it if I used the hotspot for more than a brief time, but that is expected. It clearly warns that it should be plugged in while using the hotspot feature.
I was however disappointed that this newest in the Galaxy line has eliminated the removable battery. My phones usually outlive the lifetime of the first battery.
- (Photo : AndroidGameE | YouTube)
Lightning speed
Operating on the Android 5.0 Lollipop and having a 64-bit, octa-core Exynos 7420 and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM This phone is fast. How fast? Faster than your iphone. No, really, TechTimes did a side by side test, you be the judge.
Storage
This phone, like all smart phones these days, comes in varying sizes. 32GB, 64GB, 128GB.
The kicker here is no SD slot to bump it up. I live on my phone. I’m not sure how easy it would be for me to adapt to this setback. It forces the user to utilize more cloud based storage. Even though I do use many cloud based apps like evernote, dropbox, and Google apps, I still store much on my phone.
Camera
With the main camera boasting 16 MP, 2988 x 5312 pixels, optical image stabilization, autofocus and LED flash, it is definitely a powerful image capturing tool. By far my favorite things about this phone are some of the small changes in the camera features like the wide angle selfie. The rear facing camera is not only a higher resolution (Iphone’s main camera is 8 megapixel and the rear facing camera is a whopping 1.2 megapixel.) better overall camera, it took the panoramic feature and put it on the rear facing camera so you can take large group selfies and get everyone in on the fun. It also has a beauty mode, HRD, voice capture and more.
- Sample of photos taken with the Samsung S6
