Samsung Galaxy S6 review: It’s what’s on the outside that counts

Specs at a glance: Samsung Galaxy S6
Screen	2560×1440 5.1″(577 ppi) AMOLED
OS	Android Lollipop 5.0.2 with TouchWiz
CPU	Eight-core Samsung Exynos 7420 (Four 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57 cores and four 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 cores)
RAM	3GB
GPU	Mali-T760
Storage	32GB, 64GB or 128GB
Networking	Dual Band 802.11b/g/n/ac, Bluetooth 4.1, GPS
Ports	Micro USB 2.0, headphones
Camera	16MP rear camera with OSI, 5MP front camera,
Size	143.4 x 70.5 x 6.8 mm
Weight	138 g
Battery	2550 mAh
Starting price	$699
Other perks	Fingerprint reader, heartrate monitor, RGB notification LED, IR blaster, NFC, Qi and PMA wireless charging, Qualcomm and Samsung quick charging, Samsung Pay (coming with software update)

Take a critical look at any Samsung flagship from the last six years, and you could apply the same complaint to all of them: “this ‘premium’ phone doesn’t feel premium.” While Samsung has aggressively pushed the envelope on screen sizes, SoCs, and extra hardware features, the exterior of their devices hasn’t changed over the years.

Recently, this stagnation in design has correlated with a stagnation in sales. The Galaxy S5 didn’t do nearly as well as Samsung had hoped it would, with reports saying sales were 40 percent below Samsung’s estimates. In its quarterly earnings, the company has seen profits drop as much as 60 percent. Apple is building phablets now, ending Samsung’s near-monopoly on the big-screen phone market, and Chinese OEMs like Xiaomi, Lenovo, and Huawei are attacking the company at the low end of the market. It’s been a rough year for Samsung, and with the Galaxy S6, the company needs a winner.

After spending a week with the Galaxy S6, it’s safe to say Samsung built the phone it needed to build. Unlike HTC, Samsung’s response to adversity has been to change. The Galaxy S6 finally ditches Samsung’s infamous cheap plastic exterior, which people have only been complaining about for five years now. The S6 is all glass, and while that leads to some compromises, we think the change is worth it. In every territory, the S6 will be fitted with an Exynos processor, which lets Samsung dodge the heat problems of the Snapdragon 810. The camera is one of the best ever on any smartphone, and some day Samsung will enable a promising new tap-to-pay system that is already integrated into this hardware.

Upgraders from the Galaxy S5 will find a lot to complain about, though. The Galaxy S6 is aimed more at the mainstream phone market and less at the power user, so the S6 cuts the MicroSD slot, removable battery, water resistance, and Micro USB 3.0 port. The glass back, while more premium feeling, is more fragile than the old removable plastic back. Power users should probably look elsewhere.

Design and materials

Even the first few iPhones were made of plastic, but the industry has evolved since then, with Apple leading the way toward glass backs and then aluminum. The rest of the industry slowly followed suit: HTC has been milling phones out of aluminum for some time, Xiaomi just launched a phablet made of glass and aluminum, and Motorola offers aluminum-framed devices with leather or even wood backs. The companies that do make heavier use of plastic—Motorola (the Nexus 6) and Microsoft (with the Lumia line)—at least use thick, often milled, plastic with a matte finish.

For the most part Samsung has let these material improvements pass them by—the Galaxy S5 felt like it was made out of the same low-quality plastic as the Galaxy S1. Even across Samsung’s price ranges, the exterior didn’t change much—there isn’t a huge difference between the $100 Samsung Z1 (the Tizen phone) and the $650 Galaxy S5.

This year Samsung finally took a serious step toward improving the exterior of its flagship—it finally stopped using plastic. The front and back of the Galaxy S6 is Gorilla Glass 4, while the sides are an exposed aluminum frame. Samsung’s new choice of materials isn’t perfect—glass gives you a better, more solid feel in exchange for a loss of durability. We’re only moving from 50 percent glass to 100 percent glass, so it’s not like the Galaxy S5 was indestructible, either. The glass back is just another reason not to drop your phone, which is something you should try to avoid anyway.

Like other Samsung phones, the Galaxy S6 gets a metal band around the outside, but now it’s actually metal, instead of plastic made to look like metal. Samsung previously did metal frames on the Note 4 and Galaxy Alpha, which used straight metal sides with chamfered edges. The Galaxy S6 takes a new approach—rounded aluminum—which is a dead ringer for an iPhone 6. It feels and looks great, but it will earn Samsung some ridicule given its history with Apple.

The Galaxy S 1 through 6 (not to scale). Samsung’s phone design hasn’t changed much over the years.

One part of the device we’re not happy with is the design of the front, which looks like every other Samsung device in existence. The Galaxy S6 uses basically the same front design as the Galaxy S3, which makes four flagships now where Samsung hasn’t significantly changed the part of the device its users see the most. We wish Samsung would have the paid as much attention to the front of its devices as it does to the internals—Samsung now has the redesign cycle of a car manufacturer. This is the other half of the “Samsung devices feel cheap” equation: a $100 Samsung device has the same design as a $650 one, and that design is four years old.

The back is the complete opposite. It’s a brand new design, and it looks great. It’s just a smooth, flat sheet of glass with a sparing logo size and placement—we have a Sprint Galaxy S6, and there isn’t even a Sprint logo on it! All of the colors in the S6 range have a shimmery metallic look to them that changes depending on how the light hits them. Our “blue” version runs the gamut from black to blue depending on the lighting conditions. The back is interrupted only by the returning LED/heart rate monitor (which still isn’t very accurate) and the camera bump. The camera bump is substantial, which prevents the S6 from sitting stably on a flat surface, but it’s worth it once you see the pictures it pumps out.

And now for the obligatory part where we talk about SD cards and removable batteries. These features were both in the Galaxy S5 and aren’t in the Galaxy S6, and Samsung fans are mad about it. With the Galaxy S series, though, Samsung strives, above all else, to be mainstream. This is a phone designed to appeal to people who saw the advertisement on TV and walked into a Verizon Store to purchase “the new Galaxy phone.” Normal people usually don’t want to deal with the clunky process of using an SD card or swapping a battery—the absence of these features certainly hasn’t hurt iPhone sales—so we really have no problem with those niche features not being in a company’s most popular phone.

Power users and cloud-averse data hoarders are a market that should be addressed, but it’s a good bet that these features were a waste for most of the millions of the non-tech savvy people who bought a Galaxy S phone. These are the most popular Android devices, purchased by millions of people, and we really don’t see anything wrong with Samsung tailoring the phone feature set for that market.

The good news is that the S6 comes in a 128GB version now, so data hoarders still have an option. A 128GB MicroSD card is about $100, though—to upgrade from the base 32GB version to the 128GB version, you’ll have to pay about twice that. And for those wondering, our fully updated Sprint GS6 had 9GB taken up by the OS, pre-installed apps, and updates.

Samsung Pay

A few months ago Samsung bought a company called “LoopPay,” one of the most interesting mobile payment companies out there. LoopPay allowed you to tap and pay not with NFC, which requires special support in the credit card terminal, but with a technology called “Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST)”—basically instead of your credit card data being read by a magnetic reader passing over the black strip on your credit card, LoopPay generated a magnetic field and beamed the data wirelessly to the terminal’s existing mag strip reader. Apparently it worked with any swipe card reader, which LoopPay’s FAQ says covers 90 percent of merchants out there (“Dip-style” readers that suck in the whole card are another story).

The biggest downside to LoopPay was the hardware. It required a bulk case with the magic magnetic field stuff in it. That is, until Samsung bought them and integrated LoopPay’s technology into the Galaxy S6. It’s now called “Samsung Pay” and seems like one of the more promising forms of mobile payment, just because it should work with a large variety of card readers.

So how is it on the Galaxy S6? We have no idea. It’s not out yet. Samsung says it will enable the feature via a software update in a few months.

TouchWiz—Disable all the things!

TouchWiz on the S6 is now up to Lollipop (Android 5.0.2), and Samsung has paved over most of the niceties of Material Design with its own design. The reskinning of Android just gets more and more annoying as time goes by. With Material Design, Google is pushing a single design style on developers, and they are actually adopting it. So on the Galaxy S6, you’ll be using a whole ecosystem of Material Design apps on an OS that doesn’t adhere to those design standards. The OS now sticks out like a sore thumb—nothing uses a navigation drawer, action bars use iOS-esque text buttons instead of symbols, and some apps remove the status bar for no reason. Samsung did keep a few things, like the card-based Overview (formerly Recent Apps) screen, and some of Samsung’s apps have Material-inspired colored round action buttons in the bottom right corner, but overall they just aren’t quite right.

One clunkiest part of TouchWiz is the Flipboard page that has been integrated into the launcher. Flipboard lives on the leftmost home page—just like Google Now—with the idea being that you can just swipe over to it instead of launching an app. Google Now does the swipe from home screen-to-app seamlessly because the Google app is the launcher—the Google app is always running, and it’s the thing that draws all the icons and home pages. Flipboard is not the TouchWiz launcher, which means it isn’t running, which means when you innocently swipe over to the Flipboard “page” the whole home screen stops so Flipboard can load.

While Flipboard is loading, which takes about a second, you can’t swipe back to your home screen. If you’re someone who quickly flips through your home screens, it’s definitely something you’ll notice. When you swipe over, you’ll see a fake preview of Flipboard, then the real Flipboard will load, and sometimes the preview doesn’t even match the app. If you like to fiddle with the home screen or enjoy quickly flipping between pages, this gets annoying fast.

Thankfully, you can disable Flipboard by going to the home screen edit screen and removing the page, or you can just use an alternate launcher. A lot of TouchWiz is like this on the Galaxy S6—bad, but disablable. It’s not a big deal for power users, but considering the Galaxy S6 will be used by “normals” across the world, we would have liked to have seen better-functioning defaults.

Always-on voice support is ruined by S-Voice

The Galaxy S6 has support for the best new smartphone feature to come along in a long time: always-on voice recognition. Usually this is the “OK Google” hotword that allows a user to wake the phone at any time to input a voice command. Google added an always-on voice API in Lollipop, and, after playing with the Nexus 6, it’s something we want to see on every new flagship. Unfortunately Samsung completely ruined the feature by tying it to S-Voice, its in-house copy of Siri and Google Now. While you can set up “Ok Google” to work when the screen is on, only S-Voice can wake the phone when it is sleeping.

S-Voice doesn’t seem to be a full-screen app anymore, but a small bar that appears at the bottom of the screen. S-Voice allows you to use anything as a hotword, as long as it is multiple syllables. The app recommends “Hi Galaxy,” but you can teach it to recognize “Ok Google” or “Hey Jarvis” or whatever you would like. Like Siri, S-Voice is Nuance voice recognition with answers from Wolfram Alpha. If it can’t answer something, you get kicked out to a Google results page.

The problem with S-Voice is that it’s slow. You say the hotword, and there is a multi-second pause while the app starts up. Programming it for “Ok Google” allows you to do side-by-side comparisons with the Nexus 6, and Google blows it away. Usually the Google app has woken up, received the voice command, processed it, and is reading a result before S-Voice has even started up.

S-Voice also likes to just turn off a few seconds after starting up, cutting off your command. We even once got “Sorry, your request timed out” in response to a voice command. Maybe some day someone will come out with a hack to get “Ok Google” working while the device is asleep, but for now Samsung killed a fantastic feature because it wanted to use its own inferior software.

Overview and Split Screen

Viewing YouTube and Ars at the same time; the Overview screen with split screen buttons; and the mini home screen shows an error message.

One genuinely good feature of TouchWiz is the split screen implementation. While it isn’t everyone’s style, being able to see two apps at once is occasionally useful. Samsung has been shipping this for a while, but the S6 has the best implementation yet: just long-press on the Overview button to start it. Your current app will be snapped to the top window, and a list of apps—kind of like a mini home screen—will show up in the bottom. You can also access split screen by opening the overview and pressing the split screen button in the top right of an entry, and it will snap to the top half of the screen while leaving the overview open in the bottom. Nearly all non-game apps are compatible with split screen, including Google’s apps, but anything that takes over the entire screen (most games) doesn’t seem to work.

One misguided addition is a “close all” button at the bottom of the Overview screen, which will wipe out the list of apps. The Overview displays a list of recent apps, but many people—and Samsung, apparently—confuse this list with running apps and demand a “close all” button. This is the equivalent of clearing your browser history because you think the Web page listings are taking up RAM.

Besides wiping out your recently used app list, the “Close All” button will actually close a few apps, but unused RAM is useless RAM, and closing everything will just make apps take longer to start up again. Android handles all of this automatically.

Samsung gets the fingerprint reader right

The Galaxy S5 and Note 4 both have a fingerprint reader, but they don’t work very well. These readers worked basically the same way as a laptop fingerprint reader: you had to hold the phone in one hand and swipe your finger across the home button with your other hand. The two-handed approach was clunky, slow, and prone to reading errors.

For the S6 the fingerprint system is completely revamped and… it just works. It’s pretty much the same thing as Apple’s Touch ID now—you just press your finger on the home button and your fingerprint is read. It’s easy to do one-handed, it’s fast, and it’s usually fairly accurate. Fingerprints can be used as a lock screen, authentication for your Samsung account, and somehow “Web Sign On” is an option, but we couldn’t find any websites that are compatible with it. We’d rather use an app anyway.

Enrolling a fingerprint is a bit of a pain. Each fingerprint has to be scanned about 15 times, and we got lots of read errors while trying to enroll a finger. “Hold your finger down a little longer.” “Make sure your finger covers the entire home key.” Then you’ll be interrupted with new instructions to switch to the tip of your finger, which shows up in an annoying popup box. Everything’s fine once you get a finger enrolled, and we don’t get many errors logging in, but boy is it picky during enrollment.

Themes

Like HTC, Samsung has integrated a theme engine into its skin. The theme engine is pretty comprehensive: themes can change the icons, wallpaper, notification panel, bundled apps, settings, keyboard, and the overview items. There’s a theme store with about 25 themes in it, and while right now everything is free, there’s support for paid themes, too. The themes all seem to be curated by Samsung, and the company has officially licensed themes from the Avengers and Lego.

The system looks great, but for right now there’s a very small theme selection, and most of the themes are awful. They all seemed to either be designed for five-year-olds or have legibility problems. Nothing in the store is as usable or as professionally made as the default TouchWiz theme, and that’s a shame. We’d love to see a stock Android theme, a “Like TouchWiz but dark” theme, or really anything that’s just a little less intense than the current theme selection. We’d have trouble living with any of these.

For now the theme store seems to just be Samsung and a few companies Samsung has gotten in touch with. In the past Samsung has released a theme designer tool for an older TouchWiz theme engine, and apparently the S6 theme store will be thrown open to the public soon, along with a new designer tool.

A fantastic mobile camera

During the Galaxy S6 launch event, Samsung threw down the gauntlet and did side-by-side comparisons of the 16MP Galaxy S6 camera and 8MP iPhone 6 Plus camera. The company claimed its new camera could beat the iPhone 6 Plus camera—a blasphemous statement in the world of usually sub-par Android cameras.

Somehow Samsung did it though. The Galaxy S6 camera is fantastic and is easily in the same league as Apple’s best. In fact, we preferred the Galaxy S6 pictures in our comparison tests—it regularly produced brighter, more detailed pictures.

Performance

Qualcomm dropped the ball this year on the Snapdragon 810. In its rush to produce a 64-bit chip, Qualcomm dumped its custom Krait CPU architecture and went with an off-the-shelf design from ARM. The result is a very hot SoC that throttles easily and doesn’t necessarily compare well to older Qualcomm chips. Thanks to Qualcomm’s near monopoly in the high-end US market, the 810 is hurting all of Qualcomm’s customers, namely LG with the G Flex 2 and HTC with the One M9.

While Samsung usually ships Qualcomm SoCs in its US Galaxy line, the company is one of the few with a Qualcomm alternative—its own Exynos line. This year the company skipped the Snapdragon 810, apparently due to heat concerns, and is loading all Galaxy S6s with Samsung Exynos SoCs (some of the CDMA variants still seem to be shipping with Snapdragon modems, though).

Specifically the Exynos 7420, an eight-core big.LITTLE design with Four 2.1 GHz Cortex-A57 cores and four 1.5 GHz Cortex-A53 cores. It’s cooler than the Snapdragon 810 and performs as well or better in our benchmarks. While every SoC throttles, we haven’t seen the Exynos 7 throttle as dramatically as the 810. Until Qualcomm solves its heat problems, Samsung’s in a great position for this chip generation.

Not many surprises on the battery front. The S6 has a higher resolution screen and a smaller battery than the S5, so naturally the battery doesn’t last as long. It’s not terrible by any means, though. With normal usage you should survive a day, but as with every other smartphone, heavy days will have you reaching for a power cord.

As a bonus, the S6 is equipped with every form of charging known to man. Qi and PMA wireless charging are built in, along with awesome quick charging, provided you use a compatible charger (like the included one).

Update: The S6 supports Qualcomm Quick Charging 2.0 and Samsung’s version of quick charging. The included charger is a Samsung quick charger. Normally Android has no way to distinguish between “charging” and “fast charging,” but thankfully Samsung added a fast charging notification so we can confirm that the S6 supports both types. There’s no way easy to tell if the Samsung charger will fast charge a Qualcomm 2.0 device, though.

Samsung makes all the right moves for a mainstream flagship

Yes, when comparing the Galaxy S5 spec sheet to the Galaxy S6 spec sheet, there are more features on the S5. Life is about more than spec sheets, though, and we think it’s great Samsung finally realized that. Build quality and materials matter, and the S6 is a huge improvement over the S5. You touch the outside every single time you use the device, so making it not feel like a Happy Meal toy is an important improvement. It’s a big deal in the market, too. Customers comparing the Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 won’t immediately get a bad impression from Samsung’s flagship.

Power users of the GS5 are in a bit of a predicament, though. “Upgrading” means losing a lot of features, some of which they may have come to rely on. Perhaps Samsung will keep the removable battery and storage in the Note line and push power users over to those phones. The Galaxy S6 is Samsung’s mainstream product, though, and the vast majority of Samsung’s customers will see nothing wrong with the lack of an SD slot and removable battery.

While the upgrade to metal and glass is the biggest change, it merely makes the Galaxy S6 competitive with other devices that are out there. What makes the S6 a winner is the Exynos SoC and the camera. The Snapdragon 810 is going in most flagships this generation, and it’s not a very good performer. This makes the S6 one of the few new devices that doesn’t have to deal with the overly hot, heavily throttled processor. And oh, that camera. The S6 camera is a triumph—an Android shooter that finally competes with Apple’s best.

Our biggest complaint is the always-on voice recognition. Live with a phone that has it, and you’ll want it on every device. Samsung has it, but it’s tied to the uselessly slow S-Voice. While you can have “Ok Google” work while the screen is on, Samsung made it so only S-Voice can wake the device. What a bummer.

We would still like to see the company refresh the stale front design and do something about TouchWiz, but it’s nice to see Samsung finally break some of its bad habits. The S6 is a great device and is something that should help Samsung’s newly uncertain market position. There are some tradeoffs, but, finally, we’ve got a Samsung phone that feels nice. What the heck took so long?

The Good

A spectacular camera. Better than the iPhone 6 Plus—yep, we said it.
Big improvement in materials. Glass and aluminum make this Galaxy actually feel like it’s worth the price tag.
Qualcomm dropped the ball with the Snapdragon 810, and Samsung was one of the few companies with a viable alternative SoC. The Exynos 7 is faster and cooler.
A fingerprint reader that actually works! It’s as good as Apple’s Touch ID, though enrolling fingerprints is a pain.
Themes will be great once Samsung allows talented designers to make themes.
Samsung Pay sounds like a promising tap-to-pay service. The hardware is here but we’re waiting on Samsung to enable it.

The Bad

TouchWiz is still bad. The Flipboard home screen is a laggy hack. Apps hide the status bar for no reason. Things look different for no reason. Your OS looks like TouchWiz, but you’ll be using an entire ecosystem of Material Design apps.
The G6 supports always-on voice commands that can wake up the phone, but only through the terrible S-Voice app. We want to fully switch to Google’s voice recognition!
A stale front design that wasn’t even attractive when it was new.
A non-standard button layout. For the millionth time Samsung: it’s supposed to be “back, home, overview,” from left to right.
Glass is fragile. Handle with care.
Update: Lollipop’s built-in multi-user support is completely removed.