Samsung Galaxy S6 review

[Administrator]

Once the undisputed king of the Android smartphone market, Korean firm Samsung has had a bit of a wobble over the past few years. Its yearly Galaxy S updates have always supplied processing power in abundance, but Samsung's overzealous use of plastic and seeming inability to evolve its basic design language gained the firm some fierce critics. Of course, when sales are brisk it's relatively easy to ignore such negative feedback, but last year was something of a turning point for Samsung. The Galaxy S5 sold worse than expected and overall profits dropped as a result - unsurprisingly, the Korean giant has been spurred into action and this year's flagship offering couldn't be more different - in physical terms, at least.
Gone is the cheap plastic casing and the faux-metal trim of the S5 and in their place is a handset that could have come from the Cupertino drawing boards of Apple itself. The front and back of the Galaxy S6 are fashioned from tempered glass, while a band of machined metal runs around the edge - complete with iPhone 6-style bevel and very similar speaker grille. Enough has been written about Samsung's alleged copying of Apple's designs and there's little point in dredging that up here, suffice to say that the company has perhaps given its critics even more ammo with this slightly derivative design. Still, it's worth asking exactly how much variety we can realistically expect in this market when 99 per cent of phones are practically identical from an aesthetic standpoint, and cloning accusations aside, the S6 is a paradigm shift for Samsung as a company. Finally, it's making premium-priced handsets which actually feel premium, and that's something to be celebrated.
The big news with the Galaxy S6 is that it uses Samsung's own Exynos 7420 chipset rather than a Qualcomm-made Snapdragon. The Snapdragon 810 has issues with performance and heat, while the Exynos offers better results with no temperature problems. With 3GB of RAM also included, the Galaxy S6 supplies one of the best Android experiences yet, with silky-smooth usability and top-tier 3D performance when playing host to the most demanding Android games available. It's also worth pointing out that the camera comfortably beats anything in the Android sector, and gives Apple's own world-beating snappers a run for their money.
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