Galaxy S10+ review: Too many compromises for the sky-high price

Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S smartphone line is back with the Galaxy S10 and S10+. Since the launch of the Galaxy S8 in 2017, Samsung has stuck with the same basic design for two years across four major devices: the S8, Note8, S9, and Note9. The Galaxy S10 firmly fits into the Galaxy S8 family tree, but with new display and fingerprint technology, the S10 represents the biggest design upgrade since that release in 2017.

As usual, Samsung is gunning for the title of “spec-sheet champion” with the Galaxy S10, and the company is turning in devices with bigger displays, bigger batteries, faster SoCs, more RAM, and more storage. This is one of the first devices that gives us a look at the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC, and it’s also one of the first devices with “Wi-Fi 6,” aka 802.11ax support. The S10 is also the first device with a Qualcomm-made ultrasonic fingerprint reader, and it features Samsung’s new “hole-punch” display tech for the camera cutout. If all that’s not enough for you, the Galaxy S10+ can hit even more stratospherically high configurations—and prices—that would rival some laptops, topping out at 12GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for a whopping $1,600.

We reviewed the bigger Galaxy S10+, where even the base configuration results in a $1,000 smartphone. And if spending that much cash, we’re not really in the mood for the kinds of excuses and compromises that would be acceptable at a lower price point. When a device manufacturer turns up with sky-high prices like this, it’s only fair to go in with sky-high expectations.

Design and build quality

If you’ve seen a Samsung phone from the last two years, you’re already familiar with the basic construction of the Galaxy S10. There’s a glass front and a glass back. The long edges of both glass panels curve to meet a shiny metal band around the sides. The display curves along with the glass panel, distorting the edges of the screen somewhat. Like most glass backs, the rear panel is a huge fingerprint magnet that gets slimy pretty much the second you take it out of the box. I briefly considered photographing it while wearing rubber gloves.

Along the sides there are virtually no changes from past models, which is a good thing. The bottom still has a USB-C port, along with a bottom-firing speaker that teams up with the earpiece for stereo sound. There’s still a Bixby-launching hardware button, combo SIM card, and MicroSD slot.

There is, famously, still a headphone jack on the bottom of the Galaxy S10, which makes it one of the only flagship smartphones still packing the universally compatible analog audio port, sparing headphone-jack users from a lifetime of misplaced dongles and the choice between charging and listening to music. On an ultra-premium device like this—which manages to find room for two extra rear cameras, one extra front camera, an extra hardware button for Bixby, and a heart-rate monitor—removing something as useful as a headphone jack would make zero sense. So kudos to Samsung for keeping it.

There is quite an abundance of tweaks to the Galaxy S formula this year. Both devices are about the same size as their Galaxy S9 counterparts (give or take a few millimeters), but Samsung has managed to cram in bigger displays and bigger batteries. The smaller device moves from a 5.8-inch display on the S9 to 6.1-inches on the S10. The S10 Plus is up to 6.4-inches—the same size as the Galaxy Note9—compared to the 6.2-inch display on the S9+. With the S10+ display now matching the Note series, rumor has it the Note10 display will be even bigger in response.

Both the S10 and S10+ come with considerable improvements in battery density. The Galaxy S10 battery grew 400mAh from last year and is now 3400mAh, while the S10 Plus jumps 600mAh to 4100mAh. Samsung’s battery capacities have mostly been standing still since the explosive battery problems forced the company to recall and cancel the Galaxy Note 7, with the Galaxy S7, S8, and S9 all clocking in at 3000mah, while the larger versions all hang around 3500mAh. That launch disaster of 2016 is years behind Samsung now, though, and the company finally seems ready to start pushing the battery envelope again.

The hole-punch display

The trademark design feature of the Galaxy S10 is the new display. Like many other phones released in the last year, it comes with top and bottom bezels so slim there’s no room for the front components any more. With very little dead space on the front of the device, the front camera and other sensors have to encroach on the screen. Many manufacturers have been using a display with a notch cut out of it to house these components, but Samsung is taking a slightly different approach and cutting a camera hole right out of the display.

Samsung calls this the “Infinity-O Display,” but colloquially we’ve been calling it the “hole-punch display” because it looks like someone took a hole-punch tool to the OLED panel. In reality, Samsung really did take an OLED panel and cut a hole out of it, but because just about any mechanical tool would shatter the wafer-thin OLED panel, the company used a “proprietary laser-cutting technology” to surgically slice away the unwanted pixels. The hard part about cutting a hole in an existing display is that Samsung’s laser needs to be tuned to cut away only certain layers of the OLED panel. Since OLED panels need to be airtight to work, some kind of “advanced barrier technology” is placed around the hole perimeter to seal everything up.

While Samsung’s hole-punch display is unique and distinctive, if the goal is “have a front camera while minimally interfering with the screen,” there are better options out there. Samsung’s camera hole goes deeper into the display than a lot of other solutions, so you have less uninterrupted room for apps. Android requires presenting apps with an uninterrupted rectangular area, so the status bar needs to surround any screen blemishes. With the S10 design, this means the status bar needs to be twice as tall as normal. As for the actual icons inside the status bar, they all just start to the left of the camera hole.

Given the extra-tall status bar, I think a minimal notch design, like what is present on the much less expensive, $629 OnePlus 6T, is a better design. You still get a front camera with all the usual sensors, but OnePlus manages to contain everything in the normal status-bar size. Samsung’s design seems to focus just on looking unique rather than fitting functionality in the smallest space possible. Unfortunately for Samsung, competitors like Huawei have already stolen its thunder and beaten the company to market with hole-punch displays.

In landscape, the camera hole is not surrounded by the status bar. But it still gets quarantined by Android with a black box by default, giving apps an uninterrupted rectangular area. Videos from YouTube and Netflix work just fine like this, since there is still enough room to fit the 16:9 videos into the 19:9 display. For landscape apps, Samsung gives you the option to change how apps interact with the hole punch with an “Aspect ratio” setting. “Auto” is the normal option with a black bar, and “full screen” will let apps draw around the camera hole. Just hope it doesn’t block anything!

The unique aspect of the hole punch design over a notch is that you get pixels all the way around the camera cutout. Samsung uses this for one unique flare: if you switch to the front camera in the camera app, you’ll get a quick swirl of white pixels around the camera hole. Third-party apps have come up with all sorts of cute uses for the camera. There are already various sites and apps dedicated to cleverly hiding or highlighting the hole punch with various wallpaper designs. There are even apps that wrap a battery indicator or a notification ring around the hole punch.

Samsung gives you two front cameras on the Galaxy S10+, but the second camera doesn’t have a whole lot of uses. Like the Pixel 3, the idea behind Samsung’s dual front cameras is that one is for normal selfies while the second is for wide-angle selfies, kind of like having a build-in selfie stick. The problem with Samsung’s implementation is that there is a barely any difference between the two focal lengths: 22mm and 26mm. The Pixel 3 uses 18mm and 28mm lenses, giving you a more dramatic difference between the two choices.

The camera isn’t the only thing Samsung has hidden inside the display. First, as illustrated by iFixit, the proximity and brightness sensors live behind the display, too. Just to the left of the camera hole are three vertical spots in the display where the sensors can peer through the pixels. Unlike the camera, these don’t interfere with the display at all, and they are completely invisible while using the phone. Even if you shine a flashlight into the display and go looking for them, they are still nearly invisible. As for the biggest item hidden behind the display….

The ultrasonic fingerprint reader

The Galaxy S line finally, finally has an in-screen fingerprint reader. Going by the rumor mill, this is something like the fifth attempt to integrate an in-screen fingerprint reader into a flagship Samsung device, with the Galaxy S8, Note 8, S9, and Note 9 all reportedly trying and failing to implement an in-screen fingerprint reader at some point in their development. When these older phones finally did ship, they all ended up with weirdly small fingerprint sensors, often in awkward locations tacked onto a side of the camera assembly. If you subscribe to the rumor mill explanation, an easy theory is that Samsung designed these phones around in-screen fingerprint readers and ended up having to tack on a smaller capacitive fingerprint reader wherever it would fit.

For the Galaxy S10, though, the in-display fingerprint reader is finally here. Samsung is using an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor from Qualcomm, called the “3D Sonic Sensor.” We’ve seen in-screen fingerprint sensors before, mainly on the OnePlus 6T, but that was an optical fingerprint sensor. In theory, ultrasonic is a superior, more secure in-display fingerprint technology because it takes a 3D reading of your finger. An optical fingerprint sensor only takes a 2D image of your fingerprint—it’s literally an under-screen camera taking a picture of your finger—and is subject to easier spoofing with another photo of your fingerprint.

Qualcomm’s solution isn’t impossible to spoof though, thanks to the proliferation of 3D printers. Any fingerprint reader is probably good enough to stop a random theft. If you think you’d actually ever be the subject of a targeted spoofing attack, you probably shouldn’t be using any biometrics.

As far as actually using the in-screen fingerprint reader, Samsung’s setup could be better. Just like the OnePlus 6T, the first problem is that in-screen fingerprint technology is slower than a traditional case-mounted capacitive fingerprint reader. Unlocking still happens in under a second, but compared to the near-instant speed of some capacitive readers, it’s sluggish.

The second problem is the size. Qualcomm says its fingerprint sensor “can be implemented under a device’s full display,” but on the Galaxy S10, that isn’t the case. Samsung went with pretty much as small of a sensor as it could get away with. The fingerprint reader is normally completely invisible, but if you turn the screen off and whip out a flashlight, you can see the sensor taped to the back side of the display (ripping the phone open works, too). Samsung is repeating the same mistakes here it made on the Galaxy S8, Note8, S9, and Note9 by using a fingerprint reader that is much smaller than a fingertip. At most, you’ll be scanning about a third of your fingertip, which increases the error rate and makes you need to carefully aim at the sensor.

In software UI design, there are already-established minimum touch target sizes for icons and other controls, and they are much bigger than the fingerprint sensor on the Galaxy S10. We’ve set these minimum sizes because people have trouble reliably hitting things smaller than an app icon, so why did anyone think a sensor this small would be a good idea? To make matters worse, a fingerprint reader requires pinpoint, dead-center accuracy to work. Meanwhile, you can hit the corner of an app icon and everything will be fine. A much bigger fingerprint scanner would be a huge improvement. The ideal size would probably be even bigger than an app icon, like maybe four app icons put together. I want something large enough that I will never miss it, even if I am not looking at the screen.

Problem the third: visibility. Case-mounted capacitive fingerprint readers all have a built-in tactility feature: you can find them by touch, because they are sunk into the back of the phone. The good ones have round fingertip-shaped sensors that live in fingertip-sized divots, so your finger has a natural resting place while it is being scanned. In-display fingerprint sensors don’t have any of this tactility. They are behind a smooth piece of glass, so you can’t find them by touch. You have to find in-display sensors only by sight. Samsung handles this by drawing a (misleadingly large) fingerprint icon overtop of the sensor when it’s time to scan your finger. The problem is the Galaxy S10 doesn’t do this often enough.

The first thing you do when you pick up a phone is scan your finger to unlock it, so immediately reminding the user of the sensor location is very helpful. The S10 has an “always-on” display mode that never turns off, and it would be extremely helpful to see the fingerprint location on this, 24/7. The fingerprint position isn’t indicated, though—the always-on display only shows the time and notifications. To see the fingerprint location, you have to pick up the phone, wait (and hope) for the lift-to-wake feature to kick in and the lock screen to fully turn on, and then you can see the fingerprint reader. It adds another step to the already-slow process of using the fingerprint reader even slower, and it just really unnecessarily. A big improvement (and one that Samsung could easily patch in) would be to always show the fingerprint reader location on the always-on display.

Looking back at Qualcomm’s February press release about the ultrasonic fingerprint reader, there are plenty of claims in there that don’t seem to match up to reality. Qualcomm says the sensor can “detect blood flow within the finger and actually prevent hackers from spoofing the device with a photo or a mold.” But that didn’t stop a plastic, 3D-printed fingerprint from unlocking the device earlier this month.

Since capacitive fingerprint sensors read the electrical capacitance of your finger, they don’t work when wet. Qualcomm claims the ultrasonic fingerprint reader is an improvement here and will work “across a wide variety of conditions and contaminants, including when the finger is wet or dirty.” After washing my hands without drying them, I failed a fingerprint scan five times, got locked out for 30 seconds, then failed another five times and got locked out again.

Qualcomm’s description of “dirty” is a little more open-ended, but I did several trials with barbecue sauce and actual dirt. The fingerprint reader couldn’t manage either situation. Qualcomm’s sensor doesn’t live up to the hype. After covering the phone in dirt and barbecue sauce for science, I was able to thoroughly test the Galaxy S10’s water resistance in the sink afterward.

With all of these downsides, the Galaxy S10 fingerprint reader is not great. It’s too small, it’s too slow, and its location isn’t indicated early enough in the unlock process. None of these things is bad enough to be a deal breaker though. Samsung biometrics have been rough for the last few years, and this isn’t much worse than the tiny, rear-mounted (often too high) fingerprint readers that it shipped on older phones. A traditional, full-size capacitive reader would be better, if you work on your aim, and taking three-quarters of a second to unlock the phone isn’t terrible.

Samsung is still actively tweaking the fingerprint reader, with the last update coming out April 12. I tried the reader before and after the update, and Samsung’s patch improved the speed somewhat. I would still like to see a fingerprint indicator on the always-on display.

In other biometrics news: with the Galaxy S10, Samsung has killed the Iris scanner that debuted on the Galaxy Note 7 and survived though five Samsung flagships. I can’t say I miss it.

The software

The Galaxy S10 ships with Android 9 Pie and Samsung’s Android skin, formerly called “TouchWiz,” then “Samsung Experience,” and now “One UI.” Everything gets a new coat of paint, but for the most part, all of the critical parts of Android are here and in a reasonable state. The notifications and recent apps are only lightly tweaked, and while the default lock screen only shows icons, you can revert it to the normal behavior (showing notifications in full) in the settings. Pretty much everything else in Android can be replaced nowadays.

Samsung has revamped its UI along with the release of Android 9 Pie, and it seems like Samsung has made some progress with putting controls in reachable areas. Google has started to suggest doing this in the Material Design specs, but Samsung has actually implemented lower-screen controls in its Android skin.

The first big change is that many of Samsung’s apps put tabs at the bottom. For apps like the clock, phone, messages, and Galaxy Store, the tabs at the bottom make it easy to switch sections. The second big improvement is in the scrolling behavior for lists. For many apps, like the settings, they load with a huge title above the list that takes up about half the screen. This means the list starts at the halfway point on the screen, allowing you to easily reach the first item.

I remember when phones like the iPhone 5 stuck with a 4-inch display because it matched the arch of a thumb. The idea was a screen this size allowed you to reach any part of the display with one hand. The human hand hasn’t gotten any bigger since 2013, but displays just won’t stop growing. Samsung’s nods to reachability are appreciated.

Another up-and-coming Android trend that Samsung is ahead on is a working, system-wide dark mode. The dark mode works in plenty of places on the S10, changing to a white-text-on-dark background for the settings, notifications, and numerous built-in apps like the clock, phone, messages, and more. On the “Samsung Internet” browser, dark mode will even forcibly change the looks of websites to match the white-on-dark motif. There is no dark mode for sites like Google.com, but Samsung will force one anyway. Samsung’s packed-in apps don’t completely support dark mode though; notably, Galaxy Apps and Samsung Pay are still all-white.

Bixby is still here and still a combination of annoying and pointless. It now kicks on as soon as you start phone setup, loudly talking about what a good idea it would be to press the “next” button. “Wi-Fi would be quite handy here! Please choose a network!” Thanks, Clippy. Bixby actually uses Google for a lot of the hard questions, so asking it something like “When does the new Avengers movie come out?” will query the Web and return the same response as the Google Assistant. It makes you wonder what the point of Bixby is when it’s going to forward everything to the Google Assistant, just with worse voice recognition.

There is still a hardware Bixby button on the side of the phone, where it is easy to accidentally press or confuse for the power button. The hardware button is kind of remappable—it still has to open Bixby, but you can set whether it opens Bixby on a single press or double press. For the other option, you can pick an app. Ideally, you would be able to press this button and start the Google Assistant, and Google even provides a downloadable app shortcut for the Google Assistant specifically for situations like this. In a very anti-consumer move, though, Samsung actually blacklisted other assistant apps from being used for this button. Samsung specifically blocks launching the Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft’s Cortana with the Bixby button. It will list every other app on your device other than these three.

Since this is a Samsung phone, let’s talk crapware! This is an unlocked phone direct from Samsung, so with no carrier involvement, this is as good as it gets. Despite being a premium, $1,000 smartphone, the Galaxy S10 comes loaded with ads, even my unlocked version. There are apps from Flipboard and Spotify as well as a unremovable version of Facebook. McAfee Anti-virus is baked into the operating system as “security,” and the Samsung Gallery app wants to share my location with Foursquare. The storage management settings, which is just a simple file-cleanup app, is “Powered by Qihoo 360,” a Chinese security company. A caller-ID feature built into the phone app is provided by a company called “Hiya.”

Once you run through setup and connect to Wi-Fi, the phone spawns an undismissable “Secure Wi-Fi” notification, which, it turns out, is an ad for McAfee VPN subscription service. I tried blocking the notification—it’s not blockable—but it turns out you can open the advertisement, carefully consider subscribing to McAfee VPN, say “No,” and then it will go away. Cool.

The clash between Google and Samsung is visible all over the phone, and mostly it will manifest in having two competing version of every basic phone feature. During setup, you’ll be asked to sign in with two different accounts, one from Google and one from Samsung. There are two app stores, Google Play and Galaxy Apps; two voice Assistants, the Google Assistant and Bixby; two browsers, Samsung Internet and Chrome; two security systems, Google Play Protect and McAfee; two “find my phone” systems, two password systems, two galleries, and two music solutions. The duality of everything makes some common tasks profoundly weird. After the usual ritual of setting up the phone and installing all the updates in the Play Store, I wandered into Galaxy Apps and found 14 more updates waiting for Samsung apps. You really do have to straddle two different ecosystems.

Samsung has made strides with the One UI, and its skin actually wouldn’t be the worst thing on Earth if there was some cohesiveness to it. Right now, it’s a messy pile of apps from Google, apps from Samsung, and apps that basically boil down to Samsung selling space for rent on your $1,000 smartphone. There is a clear priority here: Samsung’s interests are valued over the interests of the user. Rather than just ship software that would create a good, cohesive experience and make the Galaxy S10 the best it can be, Samsung’s One UI is a conflict of interests from various Samsung divisions and spots sold to app partners.

Samsung’s Android update outlook

We’ve been over this many times now, but Samsung’s update program is severely lacking compared to other premium phones from Google or Apple. It’s even bad compared to phones from HMD’s Nokia line, which cost a fraction of the price. Samsung takes about five to seven months to ship an Android update, so after this initial up-to-date release window, you should expect to be perpetually one version behind the latest Android release.

Samsung will sometimes implement user-facing Android features before they actually come to stock Android (you can see this on the S10 with things like dark mode). But the company doesn’t do much when it comes to under-the-hood changes. That means, with a Samsung phone, you’re missing out on a lot of the latest security, privacy, and ecosystem changes that arrive in new Android versions. Even when you do have the latest version of Android, some parts of Samsung’s OS configuration are just shockingly out of date. For instance, Samsung still hasn’t adopted Android 7’s dual partition scheme for background OS updates, so updating a Samsung phone requires significant downtime. It has to boot into a special update mode where you can’t run any apps, get messages, or connect to the internet. Even for small updates, this downtime needs to happen for 15 minutes to a half-hour. This was eliminated on modern Android phones in 2016, and for whatever reason Samsung refuses to adopt this feature.

As far as security updates go, Samsung provides a security dashboard that discloses vulnerabilities and announces new software releases. These announcements do not correlate with the experience on my unlocked Galaxy S10, though. My phone has consistently been one to two months out of date. Security patches come out at the beginning of the month, but my phone arrived in April and would only update to the February patch, making it two months out of date. In the middle of April, the March security update finally arrived. Meanwhile, many of the other Android manufacturers do the right thing and ship the April update during the first week of April.

Performance

The Galaxy S10 is one of the first devices to ship with Qualcomm’s new flagship smartphone SoC for 2019, the Snapdragon 855. This chip should show up in just about every flagship Android phone in 2019.

Like in past Snapdragon chips, the 855 has eight CPU cores, but the power profile this year is different. Traditionally, Qualcomm has used ARM’s “big.LITTLE” architecture, which, in an eight-core chip, would have four slower, lower-power chips for background processing and idle work and four more powerful, more battery-hungry cores for foreground activity. This year, Qualcomm is extending this idea with a “Prime” core design, which takes one of the “big” cores and boosts the clock rate. The idea is that this gives you better performance for single-threaded workloads.

So, in the Snapdragon 855 there are three different core sizes: a “prime” Cortex A76-based “Kryo 485” core clocked at 2.84GHz, the three regular “big” Kryo 485 cores clocked at 2.42GHz, and the four “little” Cortex A55-based cores clocked a 1.8GHz.

The bottom line is that Qualcomm promises the Snapdragon 855 CPU will be 45 percent faster than the Snapdragon 845, and sure enough, we can see about that much increase in single-threaded Geekbench. Multi-core jumps up around 30 percent. Qualcomm’s promise of a 20 percent faster GPU is spot on, too, with benchmarks showing about that much more FPS.

Battery life is great! I swear we could work out some kind of equation where battery capacity is divided by display size to get some kind of runtime. There is not much variability in Android phones anymore. The 4100mAh battery is just a bit bigger than the battery available in most other phones this size, so you get just a bit more runtime. Every little bit helps.

Camera—Quantity over quality

The Galaxy S10 has a whopping five camera lenses: two on the front and three on the back. On the front, you have a 10MP selfie camera and an 8MP RGB depth camera. On the back, you have a main 12MP sensor with the same variable aperture setup as the S9, a 12MP 2x telephoto, and a 16MP wide-angle camera. There are so many cameras.

The camera setup of the Galaxy S10+ is a microcosm of Samsung design: it’s created primarily to look and sound impressive on paper. When the non-tech-savvy consumer wanders into a Verizon store, the salesperson can say “Look at how many cameras the Galaxy S10 has! You don’t have this many cameras on an iPhone!” and with that, Samsung has met its design goal. The reality is that the image quality is not competitive with the best cameras out there, and something like the single-lens Google Pixel 3 (itself a microcosm of Google design) will smoke the Galaxy S10 camera, particularly in low-light situations.

What is the point of all these lenses anyway? As far as I can tell, the second front camera doesn’t do anything. It’s supposed to be a “depth camera,” but there aren’t any astounding 3D selfie effects, and those can be accomplished with a single front camera anyway. The three rear cameras just act to give you “zoom in” and “zoom out” buttons in the camera interface (sometimes at the expensive of image quality!). You could accomplish that with a single camera by taking few footsteps in either direction. It all feels like such an incredible waste.

Samsung cameras have always had a tendency to over-process photos and turn fine details into mush, and the Galaxy S10 is no exception. The S10’s camera isn’t terrible, but it can’t hang with the best cameras anymore. You could probably live with the Galaxy S10 camera, and it’s probably fine if all you are doing is posting scaled-down photos to Instagram. That is not the goal of these $1,000 smartphones, though. Samsung itself wants to call this a “pro-grade camera,” but the image quality isn’t competitive with the best cameras.

I think the problem here is software. As companies like Google turn smartphone photography more of an AI-powered multi-shot composite-fest, hardware companies like Samsung can’t keep up. It doesn’t seem like the Galaxy line has had a significant image quality increase in some time, and taking the hardware-company route of slapping on extra cameras and variable apertures doesn’t make up for the lack of image improvements. Samsung is developing a “night mode” to try and compete with other low-light modes, but that has yet to arrive on our unlocked device.

You can do better for less money

Nothing about the Galaxy S10 will change your mind about Samsung devices. The things the company is good at—displays, specs, and quickly integrating new components—are all well-represented on the Galaxy S10. The things Samsung is bad at—software, crapware, and updates—are big downsides to the Galaxy S10. I would love to see Samsung focus on its areas of weakness, but the Galaxy S10 is just the latest version of the typical Samsung package.S

Still, for a typical Samsung phone, there are some nice upgrades here. The batteries and displays are bigger and better, the SoC is faster, and there is more RAM. You get the wiz-bang features checked off with a new-school hole-punch display and an in-screen fingerprint reader, which are both neat, even if there are better competing designs out there. In a similar vein is the camera system, which sounds oh-so-impressive on paper with a whopping five cameras, but none of these five cameras actually turns in top-tier image quality.

Samsung sells piles upon piles of phones, and a big part of a sale is the initial appearance. The Galaxy S10 seems built around winning in the showroom. You get more RAM than an iPhone, more cameras than an iPhone, a higher tech biometrics system, a heart-rate sensor, a curved display, and so many other nonsense features that give a good demo but aren’t actually things you’d want to live with. The cameras aren’t great. The fingerprint reader is slow. The curved display just distorts the image. What good is a heart-rate sensor that isn’t on a watch? The phone will be quickly be out of date. The entire device feels like it’s designed around a sales pitch rather than the end user.

Samsung is asking a lot to slap a $1,000 price tag on the Galaxy S10, and in return you are getting… what, exactly? Yes, it’s a new phone with high-end specs, but what about the Galaxy S10 is better than other new phones with high-end specs? There are better cameras, better fingerprint readers, and better front-camera designs out there. You can certainly get better software, more timely OS updates, and more reliable security patches. You do get a fantastic display—probably the best display on the market. Most smartphones come with fantastic displays though; it’s not like Samsung displays are exclusive to Samsung phones. With the S10, you get a brand-new Qualcomm SoC, too, but that will be everywhere in a few months. After that, I’m out of ideas.

I think when you are charging $900-$1,000 for an Android phone, you ought to be able to offer the whole smartphone package. But Samsung’s cluttered software and its historic inability to deliver the latest functionality and security improvements in Android make the Galaxy S10 a tough sell at this ultra-premium price point. High prices come with high expectations. You’ll have to accept a lot of compromises with the Galaxy S10, and I just don’t see a reason to. When companies like OnePlus are offering a similar hardware experience with a superior software package, why would you spend $350 more for a Samsung phone?

The Good

• Great battery life.
• A beautiful display.
• The new and speedy Qualcomm 855 SoC.
• Better dark mode support than stock Android.
• More reachable controls than stock Android.

The Bad

• The hole-punch display design means the camera takes up more display real estate than it needs to.
• A fragile glass back that is also a fingerprint magnet.
• Five cameras that all turn in mediocre images.
• The fingerprint reader could be faster. I actually think OnePlus’ in-display reader is better.
• With Samsung’s update speed, expect to always be one version behind the latest Android release.
• We aren’t even getting up-to-date security patches on the unlocked version.