The Samsung Galaxy S6 Review: A Phone to Beat

As I sat down to review the Samsung Galaxy S6, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. This phone has been touted as one of the best devices of 2015, and after spending some time with it, I'm happy to say that it lives up to its hype.

One of the first things I noticed about the S6 is its battery life. The fast charging feature on this device is truly impressive. In my tests, I was able to get from zero to 100% in just over an hour and 20 minutes, which is remarkably quick. Even faster charging is available with the normal charge method, taking only about 80 minutes to reach 100%. This is a significant advantage over other devices on the market, making it perfect for those who need a quick top-up throughout the day.

I also tested the battery life of the S6 in terms of its ability to quickly recharge from a low level. With five percent battery remaining, I set the phone to fast charge and took a screenshot to track its progress. To my surprise, the S6 quickly reached 100% in just an hour and 17 minutes, a full half hour faster than when using the normal charging method.

The difference between fast and normal charging is significant, and it's clear that Samsung has put a lot of effort into perfecting this feature on their new device. This level of speed and efficiency makes it ideal for those who need to quickly recharge their phone on the go.

In addition to its impressive battery life, the S6 also boasts excellent sound quality. Unfortunately, the call quality is not as good as I had hoped, with a speaker at the top of the device that sounds dull and lacking in clarity. However, this is a minor complaint compared to the overall quality of the phone's audio output.

Fortunately, Samsung has made efforts to improve the sound quality on the S6 by moving the speaker from the back of the device to the bottom. While it's not quite as good as some of its competitors, such as the Sony Z3 or HTC One M9, which feature dual stereo front speakers, it's still a significant improvement over previous Samsung devices.

To put the sound quality of the S6 to the test, I played a few tracks through the device and spoke into the earpiece. The music sounded clear and crisp, with good bass response and decent treble. It's not as punchy or accurate as some other devices on the market, but it's certainly an improvement over previous Samsung phones.

In terms of camera quality, the S6 is one of the best I've ever used. The 16-megapixel rear camera takes stunning photos with excellent detail and color accuracy. The front-facing camera also performs well, making it perfect for those who want to take high-quality selfies.

Overall, my experience with the Samsung Galaxy S6 was incredibly positive. This phone is a powerhouse of features, with an impressive battery life, fast charging capabilities, and excellent sound quality. While it's certainly not without its flaws – particularly when it comes to call quality – these are minor complaints compared to the overall excellence of this device.

If you're in the market for a new smartphone and want one that truly stands out from the crowd, the S6 is definitely worth considering. With its impressive specs, excellent camera quality, and fast charging capabilities, it's sure to be a hit with many users. And while the cost may be prohibitive for some, I believe that this phone is well worth the investment.

As I finished writing this review, I couldn't help but feel excited about the prospect of seeing how the S6 stacks up against its competitors in the future. Will it hold onto its top spot as one of the best phones on the market? Only time will tell, but for now, the Samsung Galaxy S6 is definitely a phone worth considering.

Finally, I want to thank my viewers for tuning in and checking out this review. If you enjoyed watching me put the S6 through its paces, be sure to subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bell so you can stay up-to-date with all of my upcoming reviews and tech-related content. With Samsung's continued dominance in the smartphone market, I'm excited to see how their future devices will shape the industry and what new features we can expect.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi guys my name is tom and i'm the tech chap and welcome to my in-depth samsung galaxy s6 review now the galaxy s5 was a great phone but one of the biggest issues people had with it was it just didn't look that great it wasn't much of a looker so it's great to see that samsung's finally listened and made real and significant improvements to the look and design of the s6 it really does look a lot nicer and also feels a lot more comfortable in the hand in any every single way in my opinion this looks nicer than its predecessor now this has come at a cost unfortunately some say that's a little reminiscent of the apple iphone 6 in some ways whether you agree or not is up to you but one thing perhaps they have copied from samsung is this design ethos of form over function we've lost the water resistance the expandable memory and the removable battery of the s5 just for a sort of cosmetic improvement just for better looks now this is a bit of a divisive issue many will appreciate the much better looking phone but others will miss the functionality of its predecessor so it's come at a cost but overall it does look a lot nicer but of course design is only one improvement on the s6 there's a vast array of other improvements and changes samsung's own exynos processors we've got three gigs of ram we've got a qhd screen we've got fast charging but wireless charging there's a whole lot to this phone and uh i'm looking forward to showing you in the full review so stick with me as we go hands-on and let me tell you why i think it's gonna be one of the phones to beat for 2015. so one of the biggest changes we're seeing this year with the s6 is the overhaul of the design and it's a pretty big change and in my opinion a pretty big improvement over its predecessor the s5 this is a really really nice looking phone it's not quite without its flaws but the side bezels are thinner it's uh the home button is taller the whole back is completely redesigned with a nice glass finish so it's small changes on the front uh pretty significant changes on the back we've gone on the is the dotted textured look of the s5 and now we've got this gorilla glass 4 back which is very reminiscent of the sony zed series which also features a glass back but also gorilla glass 4 on the front so it's pretty uh fairly well protected all round although we'll get into a bit later the fact that i have actually made a couple of micro scratches already so it's still a little fragile and i would still recommend putting a case on it because uh the camera does protrude out the back quite significantly it's uh not flush in the slightest so uh to protect the uh glass off the camera lens and also just because it's such a nice looking phone you might want to uh protect it by putting a case on generally this is an extremely nice phone and i'm really impressed with the design on the right we've got a single power button and a nano sim port on the left we have the volume rockers two separate uh buttons here now it's worth noting that the power button is about two thirds the way up if we're going from the bottom on the right side which means it's nice nicely positioned to be easily clickable but either by your perhaps index button if you're left-handed or your thumb if you're right-handed and uh we've got a single uh speaker at the top and but that's simply for the earpiece the earpiece speaker but the actual speaker itself has been upgraded from which was on the s5 originally on the bottom right is upgraded now to a very iphone-y sort of uh bottom here although it does look similar to the iphone 6. it's not quite exactly the same but uh you know that that works well there so why not here and it's a definite upgrade in performance and whether that's due to the speaker being just improved or it's just a better placement of it next to that we have a micro usb 2 port so we're still not seeing micro usb 3 or 3.1 so it's still not it's not reversible or anything but it does have quick charge technology it's very similar to the qualcomm quick charge tech but obviously this is using samsung's own processors so uh it's not quite it's not qualcomm but it does quick charge and it's very impressive as well and we'll go into that later when we talk about the battery and next to that we have this standard three and a half millimeter jack for headphones on the top we've got a very small ir blaster which is uh impressively small considering on the m9 from htc it takes up pretty much the whole of the top surface and we've got a noise cancelling mic at the end of the day it's a really nice looking phone it's a step up from the s5 and obviously we have lost some functionality uh as an up as a result of the sort of cosmetic upgrade for some it's not going to be worth it but for others this would be exactly why you want to buy the s6 it's really really nice the only other major difference to the design is that the flash and the heart rate monitor has been moved from below the camera up to the side of the camera but um that doesn't um really mean anything or have any impact other than it just looks a bit different so we've got samsung logo on the back we've got uh something on the top this is in the midnight blue color which i i was is one of the three that is being shipped at the moment when it came out and i really really like it it's sort of almost a black but it does have a a bluey tint to it which if i can find the light for you you can see it's a quite a premium quite a classy looking color and one i'd actually really highly recommend beyond that on the front we have a front facing 5 megapixel camera and the camera on the back is a 16 megapixel optical image stabilized camera which is exceptional i'm looking forward to showing you some of the photos i've taken with this later on but as for the design that's pretty much it as i say it's still got a 5.1 inch screen and it's actually incredibly comfortable to hold as well this is thanks to just how thin and light it is and also that the corners are nice and rounded weighing just 138 grams and being just 6.8 millimeters thick means that this is really nice really comfortable really lightweight device which fits really nicely in my hand i get a good reach on the uh for my fingers thanks to its pretty compact uh overall size it's got a decent screen to body ratio of just over 70 percent so that's pretty good it's not class leading but it's uh better than others and especially better than the iphone for example so overall design i'm really impressed with i think it's a big step up from the s5 it is a little reminiscent of the iphone 6 and the front doesn't look that dissimilar from the s5 but overall as a package it's much much nicer just from the comfort the feel the overall ergonomics it's a really really nice phone and great to look at and my friends have commented it's a really really cracking looking device so let's move on to the display and as i say this is a 5.1 inch qhd display so that's 1440 by 2560 res affording it a ridiculous pixel density of 577 pixels per inch which i believe is one of the sharpest if not the sharpest you can possibly get on a phone and in my opinion probably quite way beyond what you're likely to even notice in real life it's reasonably common to see qhd displays on 5.5 inch plus phones such as the lg g3 or the note 4 or the g4 the upcoming g4 but at 5.1 inches this screen is just stupidly sharp and it's uh well as i say whether it's noticeable by the human eye is debatable but you at least you know that you're getting an incredible market leading crisp and sharp display so in conjunction with that qhd display which makes everything really nice and crisp and sharp uh we're still using something super amoled display technology which in my opinion is one of the best uh displays on any android smartphone so uh very very impressive screen it is obviously as we're used to with samsung it can be very very punchy now let me run through very quickly with you regarding the colors uh some of the display options that we can go to if we go to screen mode in the settings i've currently got this on amoled cinema that's my preferred screen mode but it is by default on adaptive display so you can flick through these and see a bit of a bit of a difference you can see the basic is the most muted but actually i believe the most accurate and the most natural so people who want a natural reproduction want accurate colors i would suggest basic uh for me personally i like a little bit of punch i like my phone to pop just a little bit so i stick it on amoled cinema uh but adaptive display for me just uh goes a little overboard for example if i leave that on and then go to youtube you can see that uh the reds at the top although it's not coming out quite so much on the camera because the perhaps my iso is a bit a bit low uh it's it's really really red it so almost loses a bit of detail it looks like it looks a bit fake so personally i prefer keeping it on the uh cinema amoled cinema screen mode but obviously again this is a personal preference and it's nice that we get those options so the whites are beautiful the blacks are really dark and rich and inky and overall it's a really pleasurable screen to use and finally with regard to the screen it's uh also incredibly bright thanks to its uh offering of up to nearly 600 nits i believe so although i tend to leave this on auto brightness and about 75 percent uh up on the scale here for a decent brightness throughout you can sort of whack that right up and get a solid 600 nits so it's nice and reasonable readable and usable even in bright daylight but it also goes to the other end it becomes uh very very dim so i think one or two knits so you know if you're using this in a really dark place or at night it doesn't become too bright either so you know it's good on both ends of the brightness scale so it's just a fantastic display and it sort of builds on the quality that of the note 4 which people associate with having one of the best displays of any uh phone and also their galaxy tab s series tablets which also are reported and reputed to have incredibly good screens and for my own review of the s 8.5 so 8.4 i can confirm it does have a gorgeous screen so this builds on that successful technology as i say combines it with the qhd dis resolution on this 5.1 inch phone so it's bright it's vivid as although it can be a bit more muted if you prefer a natural color more natural color reproduction and overall it's an incredibly impressive display and something that i really enjoy watching and uh watching content on and uh just using generally so enough about designers about screen sizes and resolutions let's just get down to the nitty gritty let's just see how well it performs now inside we have the samsung exynos 7420 processor clocked at 2.1 gigahertz accompanied by three gigabytes of ram now crucially this ram is ddr4 as opposed to ddr3 and pretty much every other smartphone at the moment so that means it's got faster transfer rates and should mean that uh just opening apps and multitasking generally is a bit quicker and also the exynos 7 processor is an octa-core 64-bit processor very similar in those uh regards to the uh snapdragon 810 which is in the htc one m9 and is considered to be sort of one of the best uh and uh closest uh competitor to the uh samsung xnos cpu so it's incredibly fast it's very very powerful and i have actually done a speed test between this and my and the htc one m9 and you can go and check out my video now if you want to see how those two compare directly but i will show you just a couple of benchmarks i took while i was doing those tests on this now it scored just over 61 000 in the antutu benchmark which is an incredibly high score it's significantly faster than the snapdragon 810 which as i say is its closest competitor as a chip for the processor and graphics and although that could be partially down to the fact that this is a the exynos 7 is a 14 nanometer chip so it's built on a smaller micro architecture which means it's more efficient although that probably has a bigger benefit to battery life than overall power but combined that with the ddr4 kind of ram we're getting blistering performance and these scores are exceptional i'll just demonstrate for you quickly just opening a few apps and also we'll jump into a few intensive games to show you that these benchmark results do translate into great real world performance so before we jump into a few apps let me show you that i'll close all the apps in the multitasking draw you can swipe them aside like that or you can quickly press close all so now we've got a phone with nothing running in the background so i can open there our bbc news it opens in a couple of seconds let's uh try spotify again really nice and quick let's uh try uh twitter and again if you want to have a look at my uh m9 versus s6 speed test you'll see that uh this is really really impressively fast and even just opening like your gallery or the camera is super fast now the speed obviously is a combination of the hardware and also software improvements and we'll talk about that a bit later but one thing i will mention just because i think it is a speed uh sort of benefit that if you double tap the home button no longer does the s voice come up instead it opens the camera so even if the screen is off you can just double tap this and within i'd say under two seconds perhaps you get the camera app open so you can see if i close that now just how quickly it opens anyway but to think that you can just uh be anywhere having your pocket then you know see something interesting see a cat falling over or something you can just double tap it and within a couple of seconds you're good to go so that speed really does have an actual real world benefit just a general ui smoothness there's not a hint of stutter or lag absolutely silky smooth and not a hint of lag so that's very very impressive so let's uh demonstrate this a little bit further let's jump into a couple of games we can look at the loading times and also the frame rate uh in real racing 3 here although as i say this video is limited to 25 fps uh but this does go a bit higher so um let's see how well we uh we do here you can see that's just loads so so fast this is one of those games i i do sometimes use to review because it looks so nice and i can tell you just from personal experience that this is a little because i'm going through the menus going through the loading screens a lot faster than uh i'm used to perhaps on other devices so we can test the sound a little bit here i'll play some music afterwards so we can go into more detail about the speakers but it's obviously just a single speaker it's not stereo sound but it's fairly loud decent punch to it but anyway we're here to uh judge the performance so if i jump right in here let's change the camera there we go now i do hate to keep mentioning its competitors because this is obviously the s6 review but uh in the test where i use the htc one m9 alongside it i did notice just uh just from my personal experience just from looking at it and using it that the s6 did appear a bit smoother the higher frame rate almost than the m9 with the snapdragon 810 so the exynos 7 processor that three gigs of uh really advanced ram is really coming into its own here undeniably a super super fast phone and uh let's demonstrate that with one more app let's jump into modern combat 5. the loading screens are just incredibly fast it's really really impressive i'm running out of adjectives to describe the speed here and it's probably a bit annoying me just saying amazing incredible uh fantastic but it it genuinely is uh market leading and ahead of the rest i've played this game a few times in a number of my reviews and they've all performed very very well but it's just to demonstrate that this is just as smooth and if not smoother uh than any other device on the market so you can happily play any game any app that you throw at it from the google play store and be confident that you'll be running it in pretty much the best possible way you can you know the highest frame rate thank these beautiful screen the crisp qhd resolution you're really getting an all-round fantastic package when you combine the power with the display quality and also then just the uh how nice the phone is to use to hold and to look at now moving on from talking about performance to touchwiz and android obviously to get such a smooth and fast phone requires both hardware and software optimizations now the impact of samsung having their own exynos processor inside as opposed to a third party one such as from qualcomm means that i suspect that there's some behind the scenes optimization being that touchwiz and uh the processor can sort of work what you're handing glove there's uh interruptability between them and so that could be offered being some hidden sort of benefits and advantages in terms of smoothness and speed but all i can tell you is in terms of ui in terms of touchwiz you no longer have to worry that i think was one of the biggest problems people have with the galaxy range and also just the samsung range uh to date is that the touchwiz has a reputation for being a bit sluggish a bit laggy a bit unresponsive but i can tell you absolutely that is gone i would say that that's not entirely just for the s6 i have the s5 as well and uh the upgrade to android 5 lollipop did make a big improvement to the speed and performance of that phone as well so it's not exclusive this uh smoothness to the s6 but thanks to its much more powerful hardware and the on the most recent touchwiz and android 5.0.2 which is running this has absolutely no issues with lag or responsiveness and i've shown you generally that apps load really fast in terms of raw performance but also just the user experience the user interface is flawlessly smooth everything closes and opens really nicely and as i go back as i say we go back to that a little uh camera opening function there and one of the things i have said in the past videos i think with the note 4 is that the s voice samsung's s voice used to be tied to a double tap of the home button now that was a bit of an issue because if it would often just press it once to go back to the home screen for example like that but it would wait it'll be a delay because it'd be listening for a second press if you were wanting to open the s voice that's something that i always recommend disabling obviously s voice is hidden here and no longer is accessed by the home button but instead it has been replaced by opening the camera which a is more useful but uh b doesn't you know it's still technically listening for that second press but it reacts instantly here anyway despite the fact that it still has a double press to the camera which is very useful so that must be software or and or hardware optimization is doing that but what it means is no longer you no longer have to go through developer options reduce animations turn off s voice and all these lists of things that i would have recommended in the past and even going as far as putting a third-party launcher on to improve the speed this stock is just incredibly fast and fluid and you don't have any issues with performance whatsoever the button here opens your previous apps which can be as i say delete individually or fully if you hold it down you get a side you get a multitasking view which is something that we saw on the note4 and it's reasonably useful there's only a select number of apps you can use on it but for example i might want to have chrome on one side and perhaps uh google maps on the other and you can see like it it works pretty well pretty nicely and you can actually also edit how much space each app takes up but it does come with you know what we're used to in terms of uh gestures or perhaps even you could call them gimmicks uh or that samsung's famous for for me the only one i keep on is direct call that means if it rings you can or if you have someone's contact or message open you can put up to your ear and it will call that person the other ones include mute which so you can turn the phone around and it will mute a call uh palm swipe to capture which uh if you'd enable you just do this no hopefully don't know these things never work for me on camera anyway it's that roughly of that idea it's supposed to take a screenshot but i prefer just to uh hold the power button and the home button and take a screenshot that way uh smart alert uh you just get a vibration when you pick it up if you've got a notification but for me all those aren't particularly useful but fortunately they're not um uh you know they're not in the way anymore and i think derek derek call is the only one i may actually use so you can just leave that it's no longer being bogged down by these motions and gestures that we sort of think that the samsung phones have been in the past but they're still there if you use them which is great now i mentioned before about that parallax effect background which is really nice we'll go onto the camera in a bit but let me show you uh one of one of the best pictures i took uh which uh i'm looking forward to showing you a bit later if i make this my background if i did it if i can remember how to that's why i said this wallpaper you can see that it's not just the standard uh samsung wallpapers that this applies to you can get the parallax effect with any wallpaper so you it looks like the icons are right on top of the phone and the uh picture is maybe a couple of inches beneath it it's a nice effect subtle doesn't make you feel sick or anything but um it's uh it gives it just to say added motion added depth to the whole experience now there's a couple more interesting things about the ui and touchwiz uh if we scroll left uh well i say if we just go right but go left from the home screen we get a flipboard sort of news feed this is very similar to htc's blink feed and you can edit what sort of content comes up in a news fashion food travel for example it's i do like it it's quite nice to see but it's one of those things where if you it doesn't update automatically so if you go over to it and you haven't used it for a little while it'll have a bit of a jarring uh judder and then an update as it then updates the new post so it's the only thing that sort of takes away from the overall uh completely smooth uh sort of interface of the rest of the phone it could because it's sort of updating and downloading the new content so whether you use it or not is up to you but you can get rid of it if you pinch in to zoom in this is where you uh to zoom out you can access themes which we'll talk about in just a second screen grid add widgets and wallpapers but it also allows you to untick this if you wish and you can get rid of it so you get a little checkbox there so if i uncheck it and then go back you can see that screen is no longer there since we're talking about the wallpaper and also how things look generally you can see that currently the apps have their own sort of color coding the messaging is orange the phone is green and the camera is well doesn't have one it's black but you can change it under what they're called calling themes uh if we go to themes and settings you can see that the i'm using the default one which has uh that as a lock screen that has a home screen and shows you the colors and the layout and the fonts that we have at the moment so you can go to the store and find more there aren't a lot on there at the moment no doubt this will increase as the phone's been out longer now aside from the power the screen design all those other bits and pieces one of the biggest upgrades finally and thankfully is that samsung has improved the uh fingerprint recognition uh on the s5 and the note 4 it was really really bad it was inconsistent and people just didn't want to use it because he probably only worked about 50 of the time and also required a swipe down with your finger or thumb fortunately someone's going to fix this so if i jump into the uh lock and security fingerprints and i've already pre-registered a couple of my fingers so hopefully this will work first time if not then well read into it what you will but it's a simple case of pressing your finger down oh no match there we go second time and then you can register a number of fingerprints it's a lot easier in my experience it's a lot more consistent and works well and actually works well enough to use as a genuine everyday security method to open your phone i would say it's still not quite at the level of touch id but it's very very close so if i turn this off i can then simply hold my thumb there like so and uh unlock it like that so it's much much better and a vast improvement over the uh s5 and note 4 and so it's really good to see that finally the fingerprint recognition is something that is actually a selling point now not just a bit of a gimmick that people can say oh oh it's got fingerprint recognition but you know no one actually uses now you can use it so that's really good so i can sum up the camera for you in one word incredible it's one of the best cameras i've ever used on a smartphone if not the best and i think gives the iphone 6 which for me pretty much holds the current uh standard the current benchmark for smartphone cameras and gives it a great one for its money and in many ways beats it and i'm looking forward to doing a camera comparison between this and the iphone 6 uh very soon so on the back we have a 16 megapixel optical image stabilized camera this thanks to the hardware and software optimizations and improvements offers something called live hdr so if i jump into the app i can show you that uh we can have hdr either on off auto or on i tend to just leave it on also because the camera fully knows best and it takes a photo actually if i leave it on to show you it takes a photo with hdr instantly there's absolutely no delay and it takes it's just as quick uh perceivably at least as taking one without hdr there's no processing or loading involved which is great so in addition to that we've got the flash on this side a and it can record up to 1080p 60 also qhd and also 4k now 4k can only be recorded for up to five minutes at a time and if you go anything above 1080p at 30fps you lose the video stabilization feature i can show you now if we go back into the app and go to settings if i change the video size i would recommend just keeping it on i apologize if i recommend keeping on just full hd because as you can see at the top here if you uh go into uhd qhd and qhd actually is the resolution of the phone or full hd with 60fps you lose the hdr you lose the video stabilization you lose the ability to add effects and filters to it and also the tracking auto focus so you're losing a fair bit of the features a fair bit of extra software by going up the resolutions but it is there and it's a nice feature to have and it's also fairly typical in uhd to be limited to as a five-minute recording just for file size and also because the device gets a little warm but that's something that's fairly common with uh phones at the moment and uh something quite similar to the z3 from sony so you can see here that it's going up to five minutes but uh that's fine but for me personally i would just keep it on the standard full hd 30 fps it's a natural it's a good video and i'll show you later some samples but it's a really cracking camera so what better way of demonstrating how good the camera is than just going through a few photos and videos and i'm afraid selfies uh to show you just how good they are now interestingly uh the front camera is actually a 5 megapixel camera which is pretty good uh for a front camera and interestingly both the front and back have a f 1.9 aperture what that means is it lets in loads of extra light and is a lot better than most phones for uh low light photography and it means it's less noisy uh you get better low light uh images and videos so it's interesting that both the back and the front of f 1.9 it makes most sense on the front because people tend to do selfies perhaps in the evening with friends but it really is very impressive and means that you get really nice bright photo from either camera in any lighting condition so let's uh start i went up for a little bit of a walk yesterday uh and let's start with uh just some standard photos so this is a just a picture of a it's just a priest and a picture of an estate here in england it's a beautiful sunny day and in april which is very peculiar for england but i thought i'd take advantage of it and show you a few pictures so before i jump into any particular sort of features or aspects of the camera it overall just takes a really really solid picture if i move on to the picture of this bush for example i promise these get more interesting as we go you can see that just overall the colors the detail the lighting it's really natural really nice on the phone itself it looks nice and vivid looks nice and bright thanks to the amoled screen but even once you take it off the phone and review it perhaps on a more accurate desktop display or laptop the detail and the vibrancy and the colors do transfer so let's continue with the uh still photography for a moment uh one of the things that i really really like about the camera is just how many um modes there are and effects you can put on now i prefer an auto mode i prefer where i'm not really messing with the iso and the macro and the focus for example but if you do want to do those things there is an option uh to go in if you go into mode and click pro you get to be able to set as i say the focus the iso the uh other bits and pieces and uh also some filters like so now for me the thing i like doing most is i love creating depth of field photos i think they're really powerful and really uh can produce some good images now this works just generally even in auto mode but i went into pro mode a couple of times just to see what i could do with uh perhaps adjusting the manual focus you can see that the plan and the gate is really really in focus really close to the camera but it gives you a really nice depth of field behind it and the best photo for this which was actually taken on auto mode i just simply also selected the uh plan in this way the blue belt at the front of the scene you can see that if you zoom in on the blue belt it's incredibly crisp it's almost i i mean i'm using a canon 70d to film this but shots i've taken with the canon is not dissimilar in just quite in sharpness and detail and clarity than uh even then this s6 which i'm zooming in on the blue belt it's really really impressive and what's even nicer is then if you go past the focus point and look behind it you get this gorgeous sort of depth of field blurred effect so you can create overall a really nice image really vibrant really rich and detailed but the sharpness is there the detail is there when you zoom in which is really really impressive so let me show you a couple of more pictures i i think it looked like a bit of an idiot filming some cows in the field i think people were looking at me a bit funny but uh it looks really really pleasant the colors are nice it's obviously really this is really well lit conditioned so um that's in its favor but overall very impressive but let me give you a couple more examples that aren't just cows and plants i had a bit of a barbecue yesterday you know where english as soon as it becomes you know over 10 degrees everyone puts the shorts on and puts a barbecue on but you can this is a sort of a good uh example of just how the uh camera works in different lightings this is sort of an evening setting so the lighting's less intense and less bright obviously than a full daylight so you'd expect the detail to suffer you'd expect more noise but no you can zoom in and it's still incredibly crisp really nice the colors are punchy everything is natural and vivid so i took this sort of dusk it was getting pretty dark obviously once it gets completely dark you might want to use the flash but thanks to the hdr mode it still means that you get a pretty good pretty detailed and nicely reproduced image even in low light and thanks to that f 1.9 aperture there's not a lot of noise either so while we're still on stills let's jump into the front camera this is me in my garden and you can see it's well lit there's no noise detail is good and it's really well produced and natural now there's a mode called a wide selfie let me show you how to access that if i go to the camera settings turn it on myself and then go to mode you can get a wide selfie and that means that once you take the photo you can angle the phone in both directions and get a wider image so i did this earlier and you can see that this is the standard selfie picture this is how it looks just a normal photo but if you put the super wide selfie mode on you can get a shot like that so it's a bit fishy but you do get a significant uh so you do get significantly more um content in your picture so stills excellent front and back let's look at videos you can just see generally how well uh and how smooth everything comes out so similar to the pictures it's detailed it's bright but it's natural nothing's overblown nothing's overshadowed and it all looks pretty good now i there's also settings for fast motion and slow motion so let me show you those so if we start with the slow motion i can change it to a quarter or an eighth speed and to be fair this doesn't do slow motion as well as the iphone 6 does for me that's still the king of slow-mo but it is pretty good that you and it sort of you can edit the clips in a very similar way if you have used an iphone uh with uh editing uh movies that way but you can bring it down to a quarter speed or an eight speed but interestingly it does record sound as you can hear whether that's a good thing or not is up to you because it's not particularly uh helpful that but uh it's interesting nonetheless so let's put it to 1 8 speed and see what you think of that so this is good lighting obviously this is going to suffer a fair bit if you're doing this in a dimly lit environment but it's impressive and it's better than pretty much any other android phone i've used for slow motion now as well as that it has fast motion so again we can increase the speed from 4 to 32 times let's just go all out and click 32 and see how it looks which is a bit ridiculous let's uh let's try it again on uh force yes just try eight speed that's a a decent uh decent speed to go for so that's pretty interesting it could be a bit of a time lapse generally the camera as i say i prefer to film at 1080p 30 because you get the video stabilization and also the hdr feature for for videos so um let me just show you a couple of clips i took this is just walking through a field and if you've watched any of my other reviews you'll see that this is a common video sample that i take it's a nice environment you get some you get to look at some pleasant cows and trees which is a benefit of living in rural england but as you can see the optical image stabilization does have a pretty good impact a pretty good effect on the camera so when i'm walking you can usually pick up the steps quite noticeably the vibrations for example but that deals with it quite well but what's becoming clear is that the camera just like the rest of the phone that we've looked at so far is really really advanced and really a step up from uh the s5 and also the competition at the moment it's incredibly good really detailed low noise thanks to the high megapixel counts and also the uh aperture being what f 1.9 is really bright and light and also it's uh just pretty fast it's the focal uh focal length of the shutter speed i managed to catch this bird in flight it's not you know it's not completely in focus but it's still pretty impressive for a smartphone camera so as i'm sure you've seen from other reviews the battery life on the s6 is one of the areas it just doesn't do quite as well as the other as the other parts of it so that's not really to say it has a bad battery life it's just that the rest of the phone is so great it's so good that the battery being just above average is uh perhaps a tad disappointing now the fact that it doesn't have a removable battery anymore means that this becomes a bit more of an issue than perhaps it would have done on the s5 but overall it has a solid battery life there's a few mitigating features to make it not quite so bad uh first of all we've got wireless charging and it uses both the chi uh the qi i think they call it the qi and also pma wireless charging technology so you can go into a starbucks or mcdonald's and charge it so two types of wireless charging technologies if you're into that but i think more usefully is the fact that you can do a quick charge using the uh charging port at the bottom now you're gonna need a fast charging plug as well and one does come bundled with the phone but you're gonna have to buy more if you want obviously more but it does make a bit of a difference so i was actually wondering you know what is the difference between a fast charge and a normal charge now for me a fast charge will get this from zero to 100 in about an hour and 20 in about 80 minutes and impressively also from about zero to thirty percent in 15 minutes so that's really really impressive it means you can get a good few hours of battery from it in only about you know 10 minutes of charging so what's the difference well fast charging i took a screenshot with five percent battery uh on the phone it says it would take an hour and 17 until fully charged and that is with fast charging let me see if i can uh focus this for you there we go that's better so you can see that it's an hour and 17 on the fast charge but on the normal charge it's an hour and 50. so it's a fairly significant difference um but you know it's not exactly slow on a normal charge but you can see there that it's cutting off a solid half an hour by using the fast charge so that's pretty useful uh and combined with the wireless charging it's not too bad at all so finally let's have a quick chat about the sound quality now unfortunately as well as the battery the call quality because i'll include that in the sound quality section is a bit average the uh speaker at the top for your uh for the earpiece isn't particularly clear it's a bit dull it's a bit uh it's just not very good um i would describe it as perfectly average and it's one of those things where in such a high-end phone you know it's cost 600 quid you expect that they get the call quality right but uh it does suffer a bit it's by far it's not bad in by any means and uh i've had many made many calls with this and people can hear me fine i can hear them fine it's just not that crisp all that clear but in general sound quality i'm just really glad that they've moved the speaker finally to the bottom from the back now it's still not quite the same as having dual stereo front speakers that we see on the sony z3 uh the z2 and also uh the htc one uh m7 m8 m and m9 with their boom sound tech so it's not quite at that level obviously this is a similar level to the iphone uh a because it's similarly placed uh and b it's just similar uh audio quality and um general sound quality so uh let me just play a couple of tracks and uh i'll put up to the mic and see what you think of it so what should we play let's put a little bit of um let's put a little bit brian adams on so it's reasonably loud it doesn't get quite as loud as some of the devices and it's um it's all right it's it's better than the s5 it's better than the note 4 but uh i wouldn't say it's quite as punchy or as accurate and varied as the iphone and obviously it's not as loud or as crisp as the htc or sony but it's good and it's an improvement so obviously that's a good thing so sound quality overall is on a sort of similar level as the battery life it's average perhaps even just above average but it's not quite as great as the rest of the phone is so uh it sort of stands out as being a bit of a weaker feature a weaker area of the device as a whole fortunately for you this won't take long for me to sum up this is one of the best phones i've ever used and it's one the one to beat for me in 2015. the combination of an amazing camera great screen with that qhd resolution and the super amoled tech and improved sound quality for the speaker on the bottom super fast charging wireless charging the exynos 7 processor which makes everything blisteringly fast and also the touchwiz improvements means we no longer have the samsung lag that we associated with it in uh years gone by so it's a great all-round phone and i highly recommend it obviously the cost is one of the main issues with it is a very very expensive phone but it's also an amazing phone so i thoroughly enjoyed reviewing and i really hope you've enjoyed watching it for more please check out techjet.com and i really do hope you subscribe to my videos to keep up to date with my upcoming reviews of the competitive including the htc one m9 to see how this goes against it so uh thanks for watching guys and hopefully hopefully see you again soon cheershi guys my name is tom and i'm the tech chap and welcome to my in-depth samsung galaxy s6 review now the galaxy s5 was a great phone but one of the biggest issues people had with it was it just didn't look that great it wasn't much of a looker so it's great to see that samsung's finally listened and made real and significant improvements to the look and design of the s6 it really does look a lot nicer and also feels a lot more comfortable in the hand in any every single way in my opinion this looks nicer than its predecessor now this has come at a cost unfortunately some say that's a little reminiscent of the apple iphone 6 in some ways whether you agree or not is up to you but one thing perhaps they have copied from samsung is this design ethos of form over function we've lost the water resistance the expandable memory and the removable battery of the s5 just for a sort of cosmetic improvement just for better looks now this is a bit of a divisive issue many will appreciate the much better looking phone but others will miss the functionality of its predecessor so it's come at a cost but overall it does look a lot nicer but of course design is only one improvement on the s6 there's a vast array of other improvements and changes samsung's own exynos processors we've got three gigs of ram we've got a qhd screen we've got fast charging but wireless charging there's a whole lot to this phone and uh i'm looking forward to showing you in the full review so stick with me as we go hands-on and let me tell you why i think it's gonna be one of the phones to beat for 2015. so one of the biggest changes we're seeing this year with the s6 is the overhaul of the design and it's a pretty big change and in my opinion a pretty big improvement over its predecessor the s5 this is a really really nice looking phone it's not quite without its flaws but the side bezels are thinner it's uh the home button is taller the whole back is completely redesigned with a nice glass finish so it's small changes on the front uh pretty significant changes on the back we've gone on the is the dotted textured look of the s5 and now we've got this gorilla glass 4 back which is very reminiscent of the sony zed series which also features a glass back but also gorilla glass 4 on the front so it's pretty uh fairly well protected all round although we'll get into a bit later the fact that i have actually made a couple of micro scratches already so it's still a little fragile and i would still recommend putting a case on it because uh the camera does protrude out the back quite significantly it's uh not flush in the slightest so uh to protect the uh glass off the camera lens and also just because it's such a nice looking phone you might want to uh protect it by putting a case on generally this is an extremely nice phone and i'm really impressed with the design on the right we've got a single power button and a nano sim port on the left we have the volume rockers two separate uh buttons here now it's worth noting that the power button is about two thirds the way up if we're going from the bottom on the right side which means it's nice nicely positioned to be easily clickable but either by your perhaps index button if you're left-handed or your thumb if you're right-handed and uh we've got a single uh speaker at the top and but that's simply for the earpiece the earpiece speaker but the actual speaker itself has been upgraded from which was on the s5 originally on the bottom right is upgraded now to a very iphone-y sort of uh bottom here although it does look similar to the iphone 6. it's not quite exactly the same but uh you know that that works well there so why not here and it's a definite upgrade in performance and whether that's due to the speaker being just improved or it's just a better placement of it next to that we have a micro usb 2 port so we're still not seeing micro usb 3 or 3.1 so it's still not it's not reversible or anything but it does have quick charge technology it's very similar to the qualcomm quick charge tech but obviously this is using samsung's own processors so uh it's not quite it's not qualcomm but it does quick charge and it's very impressive as well and we'll go into that later when we talk about the battery and next to that we have this standard three and a half millimeter jack for headphones on the top we've got a very small ir blaster which is uh impressively small considering on the m9 from htc it takes up pretty much the whole of the top surface and we've got a noise cancelling mic at the end of the day it's a really nice looking phone it's a step up from the s5 and obviously we have lost some functionality uh as an up as a result of the sort of cosmetic upgrade for some it's not going to be worth it but for others this would be exactly why you want to buy the s6 it's really really nice the only other major difference to the design is that the flash and the heart rate monitor has been moved from below the camera up to the side of the camera but um that doesn't um really mean anything or have any impact other than it just looks a bit different so we've got samsung logo on the back we've got uh something on the top this is in the midnight blue color which i i was is one of the three that is being shipped at the moment when it came out and i really really like it it's sort of almost a black but it does have a a bluey tint to it which if i can find the light for you you can see it's a quite a premium quite a classy looking color and one i'd actually really highly recommend beyond that on the front we have a front facing 5 megapixel camera and the camera on the back is a 16 megapixel optical image stabilized camera which is exceptional i'm looking forward to showing you some of the photos i've taken with this later on but as for the design that's pretty much it as i say it's still got a 5.1 inch screen and it's actually incredibly comfortable to hold as well this is thanks to just how thin and light it is and also that the corners are nice and rounded weighing just 138 grams and being just 6.8 millimeters thick means that this is really nice really comfortable really lightweight device which fits really nicely in my hand i get a good reach on the uh for my fingers thanks to its pretty compact uh overall size it's got a decent screen to body ratio of just over 70 percent so that's pretty good it's not class leading but it's uh better than others and especially better than the iphone for example so overall design i'm really impressed with i think it's a big step up from the s5 it is a little reminiscent of the iphone 6 and the front doesn't look that dissimilar from the s5 but overall as a package it's much much nicer just from the comfort the feel the overall ergonomics it's a really really nice phone and great to look at and my friends have commented it's a really really cracking looking device so let's move on to the display and as i say this is a 5.1 inch qhd display so that's 1440 by 2560 res affording it a ridiculous pixel density of 577 pixels per inch which i believe is one of the sharpest if not the sharpest you can possibly get on a phone and in my opinion probably quite way beyond what you're likely to even notice in real life it's reasonably common to see qhd displays on 5.5 inch plus phones such as the lg g3 or the note 4 or the g4 the upcoming g4 but at 5.1 inches this screen is just stupidly sharp and it's uh well as i say whether it's noticeable by the human eye is debatable but you at least you know that you're getting an incredible market leading crisp and sharp display so in conjunction with that qhd display which makes everything really nice and crisp and sharp uh we're still using something super amoled display technology which in my opinion is one of the best uh displays on any android smartphone so uh very very impressive screen it is obviously as we're used to with samsung it can be very very punchy now let me run through very quickly with you regarding the colors uh some of the display options that we can go to if we go to screen mode in the settings i've currently got this on amoled cinema that's my preferred screen mode but it is by default on adaptive display so you can flick through these and see a bit of a bit of a difference you can see the basic is the most muted but actually i believe the most accurate and the most natural so people who want a natural reproduction want accurate colors i would suggest basic uh for me personally i like a little bit of punch i like my phone to pop just a little bit so i stick it on amoled cinema uh but adaptive display for me just uh goes a little overboard for example if i leave that on and then go to youtube you can see that uh the reds at the top although it's not coming out quite so much on the camera because the perhaps my iso is a bit a bit low uh it's it's really really red it so almost loses a bit of detail it looks like it looks a bit fake so personally i prefer keeping it on the uh cinema amoled cinema screen mode but obviously again this is a personal preference and it's nice that we get those options so the whites are beautiful the blacks are really dark and rich and inky and overall it's a really pleasurable screen to use and finally with regard to the screen it's uh also incredibly bright thanks to its uh offering of up to nearly 600 nits i believe so although i tend to leave this on auto brightness and about 75 percent uh up on the scale here for a decent brightness throughout you can sort of whack that right up and get a solid 600 nits so it's nice and reasonable readable and usable even in bright daylight but it also goes to the other end it becomes uh very very dim so i think one or two knits so you know if you're using this in a really dark place or at night it doesn't become too bright either so you know it's good on both ends of the brightness scale so it's just a fantastic display and it sort of builds on the quality that of the note 4 which people associate with having one of the best displays of any uh phone and also their galaxy tab s series tablets which also are reported and reputed to have incredibly good screens and for my own review of the s 8.5 so 8.4 i can confirm it does have a gorgeous screen so this builds on that successful technology as i say combines it with the qhd dis resolution on this 5.1 inch phone so it's bright it's vivid as although it can be a bit more muted if you prefer a natural color more natural color reproduction and overall it's an incredibly impressive display and something that i really enjoy watching and uh watching content on and uh just using generally so enough about designers about screen sizes and resolutions let's just get down to the nitty gritty let's just see how well it performs now inside we have the samsung exynos 7420 processor clocked at 2.1 gigahertz accompanied by three gigabytes of ram now crucially this ram is ddr4 as opposed to ddr3 and pretty much every other smartphone at the moment so that means it's got faster transfer rates and should mean that uh just opening apps and multitasking generally is a bit quicker and also the exynos 7 processor is an octa-core 64-bit processor very similar in those uh regards to the uh snapdragon 810 which is in the htc one m9 and is considered to be sort of one of the best uh and uh closest uh competitor to the uh samsung xnos cpu so it's incredibly fast it's very very powerful and i have actually done a speed test between this and my and the htc one m9 and you can go and check out my video now if you want to see how those two compare directly but i will show you just a couple of benchmarks i took while i was doing those tests on this now it scored just over 61 000 in the antutu benchmark which is an incredibly high score it's significantly faster than the snapdragon 810 which as i say is its closest competitor as a chip for the processor and graphics and although that could be partially down to the fact that this is a the exynos 7 is a 14 nanometer chip so it's built on a smaller micro architecture which means it's more efficient although that probably has a bigger benefit to battery life than overall power but combined that with the ddr4 kind of ram we're getting blistering performance and these scores are exceptional i'll just demonstrate for you quickly just opening a few apps and also we'll jump into a few intensive games to show you that these benchmark results do translate into great real world performance so before we jump into a few apps let me show you that i'll close all the apps in the multitasking draw you can swipe them aside like that or you can quickly press close all so now we've got a phone with nothing running in the background so i can open there our bbc news it opens in a couple of seconds let's uh try spotify again really nice and quick let's uh try uh twitter and again if you want to have a look at my uh m9 versus s6 speed test you'll see that uh this is really really impressively fast and even just opening like your gallery or the camera is super fast now the speed obviously is a combination of the hardware and also software improvements and we'll talk about that a bit later but one thing i will mention just because i think it is a speed uh sort of benefit that if you double tap the home button no longer does the s voice come up instead it opens the camera so even if the screen is off you can just double tap this and within i'd say under two seconds perhaps you get the camera app open so you can see if i close that now just how quickly it opens anyway but to think that you can just uh be anywhere having your pocket then you know see something interesting see a cat falling over or something you can just double tap it and within a couple of seconds you're good to go so that speed really does have an actual real world benefit just a general ui smoothness there's not a hint of stutter or lag absolutely silky smooth and not a hint of lag so that's very very impressive so let's uh demonstrate this a little bit further let's jump into a couple of games we can look at the loading times and also the frame rate uh in real racing 3 here although as i say this video is limited to 25 fps uh but this does go a bit higher so um let's see how well we uh we do here you can see that's just loads so so fast this is one of those games i i do sometimes use to review because it looks so nice and i can tell you just from personal experience that this is a little because i'm going through the menus going through the loading screens a lot faster than uh i'm used to perhaps on other devices so we can test the sound a little bit here i'll play some music afterwards so we can go into more detail about the speakers but it's obviously just a single speaker it's not stereo sound but it's fairly loud decent punch to it but anyway we're here to uh judge the performance so if i jump right in here let's change the camera there we go now i do hate to keep mentioning its competitors because this is obviously the s6 review but uh in the test where i use the htc one m9 alongside it i did notice just uh just from my personal experience just from looking at it and using it that the s6 did appear a bit smoother the higher frame rate almost than the m9 with the snapdragon 810 so the exynos 7 processor that three gigs of uh really advanced ram is really coming into its own here undeniably a super super fast phone and uh let's demonstrate that with one more app let's jump into modern combat 5. the loading screens are just incredibly fast it's really really impressive i'm running out of adjectives to describe the speed here and it's probably a bit annoying me just saying amazing incredible uh fantastic but it it genuinely is uh market leading and ahead of the rest i've played this game a few times in a number of my reviews and they've all performed very very well but it's just to demonstrate that this is just as smooth and if not smoother uh than any other device on the market so you can happily play any game any app that you throw at it from the google play store and be confident that you'll be running it in pretty much the best possible way you can you know the highest frame rate thank these beautiful screen the crisp qhd resolution you're really getting an all-round fantastic package when you combine the power with the display quality and also then just the uh how nice the phone is to use to hold and to look at now moving on from talking about performance to touchwiz and android obviously to get such a smooth and fast phone requires both hardware and software optimizations now the impact of samsung having their own exynos processor inside as opposed to a third party one such as from qualcomm means that i suspect that there's some behind the scenes optimization being that touchwiz and uh the processor can sort of work what you're handing glove there's uh interruptability between them and so that could be offered being some hidden sort of benefits and advantages in terms of smoothness and speed but all i can tell you is in terms of ui in terms of touchwiz you no longer have to worry that i think was one of the biggest problems people have with the galaxy range and also just the samsung range uh to date is that the touchwiz has a reputation for being a bit sluggish a bit laggy a bit unresponsive but i can tell you absolutely that is gone i would say that that's not entirely just for the s6 i have the s5 as well and uh the upgrade to android 5 lollipop did make a big improvement to the speed and performance of that phone as well so it's not exclusive this uh smoothness to the s6 but thanks to its much more powerful hardware and the on the most recent touchwiz and android 5.0.2 which is running this has absolutely no issues with lag or responsiveness and i've shown you generally that apps load really fast in terms of raw performance but also just the user experience the user interface is flawlessly smooth everything closes and opens really nicely and as i go back as i say we go back to that a little uh camera opening function there and one of the things i have said in the past videos i think with the note 4 is that the s voice samsung's s voice used to be tied to a double tap of the home button now that was a bit of an issue because if it would often just press it once to go back to the home screen for example like that but it would wait it'll be a delay because it'd be listening for a second press if you were wanting to open the s voice that's something that i always recommend disabling obviously s voice is hidden here and no longer is accessed by the home button but instead it has been replaced by opening the camera which a is more useful but uh b doesn't you know it's still technically listening for that second press but it reacts instantly here anyway despite the fact that it still has a double press to the camera which is very useful so that must be software or and or hardware optimization is doing that but what it means is no longer you no longer have to go through developer options reduce animations turn off s voice and all these lists of things that i would have recommended in the past and even going as far as putting a third-party launcher on to improve the speed this stock is just incredibly fast and fluid and you don't have any issues with performance whatsoever the button here opens your previous apps which can be as i say delete individually or fully if you hold it down you get a side you get a multitasking view which is something that we saw on the note4 and it's reasonably useful there's only a select number of apps you can use on it but for example i might want to have chrome on one side and perhaps uh google maps on the other and you can see like it it works pretty well pretty nicely and you can actually also edit how much space each app takes up but it does come with you know what we're used to in terms of uh gestures or perhaps even you could call them gimmicks uh or that samsung's famous for for me the only one i keep on is direct call that means if it rings you can or if you have someone's contact or message open you can put up to your ear and it will call that person the other ones include mute which so you can turn the phone around and it will mute a call uh palm swipe to capture which uh if you'd enable you just do this no hopefully don't know these things never work for me on camera anyway it's that roughly of that idea it's supposed to take a screenshot but i prefer just to uh hold the power button and the home button and take a screenshot that way uh smart alert uh you just get a vibration when you pick it up if you've got a notification but for me all those aren't particularly useful but fortunately they're not um uh you know they're not in the way anymore and i think derek derek call is the only one i may actually use so you can just leave that it's no longer being bogged down by these motions and gestures that we sort of think that the samsung phones have been in the past but they're still there if you use them which is great now i mentioned before about that parallax effect background which is really nice we'll go onto the camera in a bit but let me show you uh one of one of the best pictures i took uh which uh i'm looking forward to showing you a bit later if i make this my background if i did it if i can remember how to that's why i said this wallpaper you can see that it's not just the standard uh samsung wallpapers that this applies to you can get the parallax effect with any wallpaper so you it looks like the icons are right on top of the phone and the uh picture is maybe a couple of inches beneath it it's a nice effect subtle doesn't make you feel sick or anything but um it's uh it gives it just to say added motion added depth to the whole experience now there's a couple more interesting things about the ui and touchwiz uh if we scroll left uh well i say if we just go right but go left from the home screen we get a flipboard sort of news feed this is very similar to htc's blink feed and you can edit what sort of content comes up in a news fashion food travel for example it's i do like it it's quite nice to see but it's one of those things where if you it doesn't update automatically so if you go over to it and you haven't used it for a little while it'll have a bit of a jarring uh judder and then an update as it then updates the new post so it's the only thing that sort of takes away from the overall uh completely smooth uh sort of interface of the rest of the phone it could because it's sort of updating and downloading the new content so whether you use it or not is up to you but you can get rid of it if you pinch in to zoom in this is where you uh to zoom out you can access themes which we'll talk about in just a second screen grid add widgets and wallpapers but it also allows you to untick this if you wish and you can get rid of it so you get a little checkbox there so if i uncheck it and then go back you can see that screen is no longer there since we're talking about the wallpaper and also how things look generally you can see that currently the apps have their own sort of color coding the messaging is orange the phone is green and the camera is well doesn't have one it's black but you can change it under what they're called calling themes uh if we go to themes and settings you can see that the i'm using the default one which has uh that as a lock screen that has a home screen and shows you the colors and the layout and the fonts that we have at the moment so you can go to the store and find more there aren't a lot on there at the moment no doubt this will increase as the phone's been out longer now aside from the power the screen design all those other bits and pieces one of the biggest upgrades finally and thankfully is that samsung has improved the uh fingerprint recognition uh on the s5 and the note 4 it was really really bad it was inconsistent and people just didn't want to use it because he probably only worked about 50 of the time and also required a swipe down with your finger or thumb fortunately someone's going to fix this so if i jump into the uh lock and security fingerprints and i've already pre-registered a couple of my fingers so hopefully this will work first time if not then well read into it what you will but it's a simple case of pressing your finger down oh no match there we go second time and then you can register a number of fingerprints it's a lot easier in my experience it's a lot more consistent and works well and actually works well enough to use as a genuine everyday security method to open your phone i would say it's still not quite at the level of touch id but it's very very close so if i turn this off i can then simply hold my thumb there like so and uh unlock it like that so it's much much better and a vast improvement over the uh s5 and note 4 and so it's really good to see that finally the fingerprint recognition is something that is actually a selling point now not just a bit of a gimmick that people can say oh oh it's got fingerprint recognition but you know no one actually uses now you can use it so that's really good so i can sum up the camera for you in one word incredible it's one of the best cameras i've ever used on a smartphone if not the best and i think gives the iphone 6 which for me pretty much holds the current uh standard the current benchmark for smartphone cameras and gives it a great one for its money and in many ways beats it and i'm looking forward to doing a camera comparison between this and the iphone 6 uh very soon so on the back we have a 16 megapixel optical image stabilized camera this thanks to the hardware and software optimizations and improvements offers something called live hdr so if i jump into the app i can show you that uh we can have hdr either on off auto or on i tend to just leave it on also because the camera fully knows best and it takes a photo actually if i leave it on to show you it takes a photo with hdr instantly there's absolutely no delay and it takes it's just as quick uh perceivably at least as taking one without hdr there's no processing or loading involved which is great so in addition to that we've got the flash on this side a and it can record up to 1080p 60 also qhd and also 4k now 4k can only be recorded for up to five minutes at a time and if you go anything above 1080p at 30fps you lose the video stabilization feature i can show you now if we go back into the app and go to settings if i change the video size i would recommend just keeping it on i apologize if i recommend keeping on just full hd because as you can see at the top here if you uh go into uhd qhd and qhd actually is the resolution of the phone or full hd with 60fps you lose the hdr you lose the video stabilization you lose the ability to add effects and filters to it and also the tracking auto focus so you're losing a fair bit of the features a fair bit of extra software by going up the resolutions but it is there and it's a nice feature to have and it's also fairly typical in uhd to be limited to as a five-minute recording just for file size and also because the device gets a little warm but that's something that's fairly common with uh phones at the moment and uh something quite similar to the z3 from sony so you can see here that it's going up to five minutes but uh that's fine but for me personally i would just keep it on the standard full hd 30 fps it's a natural it's a good video and i'll show you later some samples but it's a really cracking camera so what better way of demonstrating how good the camera is than just going through a few photos and videos and i'm afraid selfies uh to show you just how good they are now interestingly uh the front camera is actually a 5 megapixel camera which is pretty good uh for a front camera and interestingly both the front and back have a f 1.9 aperture what that means is it lets in loads of extra light and is a lot better than most phones for uh low light photography and it means it's less noisy uh you get better low light uh images and videos so it's interesting that both the back and the front of f 1.9 it makes most sense on the front because people tend to do selfies perhaps in the evening with friends but it really is very impressive and means that you get really nice bright photo from either camera in any lighting condition so let's uh start i went up for a little bit of a walk yesterday uh and let's start with uh just some standard photos so this is a just a picture of a it's just a priest and a picture of an estate here in england it's a beautiful sunny day and in april which is very peculiar for england but i thought i'd take advantage of it and show you a few pictures so before i jump into any particular sort of features or aspects of the camera it overall just takes a really really solid picture if i move on to the picture of this bush for example i promise these get more interesting as we go you can see that just overall the colors the detail the lighting it's really natural really nice on the phone itself it looks nice and vivid looks nice and bright thanks to the amoled screen but even once you take it off the phone and review it perhaps on a more accurate desktop display or laptop the detail and the vibrancy and the colors do transfer so let's continue with the uh still photography for a moment uh one of the things that i really really like about the camera is just how many um modes there are and effects you can put on now i prefer an auto mode i prefer where i'm not really messing with the iso and the macro and the focus for example but if you do want to do those things there is an option uh to go in if you go into mode and click pro you get to be able to set as i say the focus the iso the uh other bits and pieces and uh also some filters like so now for me the thing i like doing most is i love creating depth of field photos i think they're really powerful and really uh can produce some good images now this works just generally even in auto mode but i went into pro mode a couple of times just to see what i could do with uh perhaps adjusting the manual focus you can see that the plan and the gate is really really in focus really close to the camera but it gives you a really nice depth of field behind it and the best photo for this which was actually taken on auto mode i just simply also selected the uh plan in this way the blue belt at the front of the scene you can see that if you zoom in on the blue belt it's incredibly crisp it's almost i i mean i'm using a canon 70d to film this but shots i've taken with the canon is not dissimilar in just quite in sharpness and detail and clarity than uh even then this s6 which i'm zooming in on the blue belt it's really really impressive and what's even nicer is then if you go past the focus point and look behind it you get this gorgeous sort of depth of field blurred effect so you can create overall a really nice image really vibrant really rich and detailed but the sharpness is there the detail is there when you zoom in which is really really impressive so let me show you a couple of more pictures i i think it looked like a bit of an idiot filming some cows in the field i think people were looking at me a bit funny but uh it looks really really pleasant the colors are nice it's obviously really this is really well lit conditioned so um that's in its favor but overall very impressive but let me give you a couple more examples that aren't just cows and plants i had a bit of a barbecue yesterday you know where english as soon as it becomes you know over 10 degrees everyone puts the shorts on and puts a barbecue on but you can this is a sort of a good uh example of just how the uh camera works in different lightings this is sort of an evening setting so the lighting's less intense and less bright obviously than a full daylight so you'd expect the detail to suffer you'd expect more noise but no you can zoom in and it's still incredibly crisp really nice the colors are punchy everything is natural and vivid so i took this sort of dusk it was getting pretty dark obviously once it gets completely dark you might want to use the flash but thanks to the hdr mode it still means that you get a pretty good pretty detailed and nicely reproduced image even in low light and thanks to that f 1.9 aperture there's not a lot of noise either so while we're still on stills let's jump into the front camera this is me in my garden and you can see it's well lit there's no noise detail is good and it's really well produced and natural now there's a mode called a wide selfie let me show you how to access that if i go to the camera settings turn it on myself and then go to mode you can get a wide selfie and that means that once you take the photo you can angle the phone in both directions and get a wider image so i did this earlier and you can see that this is the standard selfie picture this is how it looks just a normal photo but if you put the super wide selfie mode on you can get a shot like that so it's a bit fishy but you do get a significant uh so you do get significantly more um content in your picture so stills excellent front and back let's look at videos you can just see generally how well uh and how smooth everything comes out so similar to the pictures it's detailed it's bright but it's natural nothing's overblown nothing's overshadowed and it all looks pretty good now i there's also settings for fast motion and slow motion so let me show you those so if we start with the slow motion i can change it to a quarter or an eighth speed and to be fair this doesn't do slow motion as well as the iphone 6 does for me that's still the king of slow-mo but it is pretty good that you and it sort of you can edit the clips in a very similar way if you have used an iphone uh with uh editing uh movies that way but you can bring it down to a quarter speed or an eight speed but interestingly it does record sound as you can hear whether that's a good thing or not is up to you because it's not particularly uh helpful that but uh it's interesting nonetheless so let's put it to 1 8 speed and see what you think of that so this is good lighting obviously this is going to suffer a fair bit if you're doing this in a dimly lit environment but it's impressive and it's better than pretty much any other android phone i've used for slow motion now as well as that it has fast motion so again we can increase the speed from 4 to 32 times let's just go all out and click 32 and see how it looks which is a bit ridiculous let's uh let's try it again on uh force yes just try eight speed that's a a decent uh decent speed to go for so that's pretty interesting it could be a bit of a time lapse generally the camera as i say i prefer to film at 1080p 30 because you get the video stabilization and also the hdr feature for for videos so um let me just show you a couple of clips i took this is just walking through a field and if you've watched any of my other reviews you'll see that this is a common video sample that i take it's a nice environment you get some you get to look at some pleasant cows and trees which is a benefit of living in rural england but as you can see the optical image stabilization does have a pretty good impact a pretty good effect on the camera so when i'm walking you can usually pick up the steps quite noticeably the vibrations for example but that deals with it quite well but what's becoming clear is that the camera just like the rest of the phone that we've looked at so far is really really advanced and really a step up from uh the s5 and also the competition at the moment it's incredibly good really detailed low noise thanks to the high megapixel counts and also the uh aperture being what f 1.9 is really bright and light and also it's uh just pretty fast it's the focal uh focal length of the shutter speed i managed to catch this bird in flight it's not you know it's not completely in focus but it's still pretty impressive for a smartphone camera so as i'm sure you've seen from other reviews the battery life on the s6 is one of the areas it just doesn't do quite as well as the other as the other parts of it so that's not really to say it has a bad battery life it's just that the rest of the phone is so great it's so good that the battery being just above average is uh perhaps a tad disappointing now the fact that it doesn't have a removable battery anymore means that this becomes a bit more of an issue than perhaps it would have done on the s5 but overall it has a solid battery life there's a few mitigating features to make it not quite so bad uh first of all we've got wireless charging and it uses both the chi uh the qi i think they call it the qi and also pma wireless charging technology so you can go into a starbucks or mcdonald's and charge it so two types of wireless charging technologies if you're into that but i think more usefully is the fact that you can do a quick charge using the uh charging port at the bottom now you're gonna need a fast charging plug as well and one does come bundled with the phone but you're gonna have to buy more if you want obviously more but it does make a bit of a difference so i was actually wondering you know what is the difference between a fast charge and a normal charge now for me a fast charge will get this from zero to 100 in about an hour and 20 in about 80 minutes and impressively also from about zero to thirty percent in 15 minutes so that's really really impressive it means you can get a good few hours of battery from it in only about you know 10 minutes of charging so what's the difference well fast charging i took a screenshot with five percent battery uh on the phone it says it would take an hour and 17 until fully charged and that is with fast charging let me see if i can uh focus this for you there we go that's better so you can see that it's an hour and 17 on the fast charge but on the normal charge it's an hour and 50. so it's a fairly significant difference um but you know it's not exactly slow on a normal charge but you can see there that it's cutting off a solid half an hour by using the fast charge so that's pretty useful uh and combined with the wireless charging it's not too bad at all so finally let's have a quick chat about the sound quality now unfortunately as well as the battery the call quality because i'll include that in the sound quality section is a bit average the uh speaker at the top for your uh for the earpiece isn't particularly clear it's a bit dull it's a bit uh it's just not very good um i would describe it as perfectly average and it's one of those things where in such a high-end phone you know it's cost 600 quid you expect that they get the call quality right but uh it does suffer a bit it's by far it's not bad in by any means and uh i've had many made many calls with this and people can hear me fine i can hear them fine it's just not that crisp all that clear but in general sound quality i'm just really glad that they've moved the speaker finally to the bottom from the back now it's still not quite the same as having dual stereo front speakers that we see on the sony z3 uh the z2 and also uh the htc one uh m7 m8 m and m9 with their boom sound tech so it's not quite at that level obviously this is a similar level to the iphone uh a because it's similarly placed uh and b it's just similar uh audio quality and um general sound quality so uh let me just play a couple of tracks and uh i'll put up to the mic and see what you think of it so what should we play let's put a little bit of um let's put a little bit brian adams on so it's reasonably loud it doesn't get quite as loud as some of the devices and it's um it's all right it's it's better than the s5 it's better than the note 4 but uh i wouldn't say it's quite as punchy or as accurate and varied as the iphone and obviously it's not as loud or as crisp as the htc or sony but it's good and it's an improvement so obviously that's a good thing so sound quality overall is on a sort of similar level as the battery life it's average perhaps even just above average but it's not quite as great as the rest of the phone is so uh it sort of stands out as being a bit of a weaker feature a weaker area of the device as a whole fortunately for you this won't take long for me to sum up this is one of the best phones i've ever used and it's one the one to beat for me in 2015. the combination of an amazing camera great screen with that qhd resolution and the super amoled tech and improved sound quality for the speaker on the bottom super fast charging wireless charging the exynos 7 processor which makes everything blisteringly fast and also the touchwiz improvements means we no longer have the samsung lag that we associated with it in uh years gone by so it's a great all-round phone and i highly recommend it obviously the cost is one of the main issues with it is a very very expensive phone but it's also an amazing phone so i thoroughly enjoyed reviewing and i really hope you've enjoyed watching it for more please check out techjet.com and i really do hope you subscribe to my videos to keep up to date with my upcoming reviews of the competitive including the htc one m9 to see how this goes against it so uh thanks for watching guys and hopefully hopefully see you again soon cheers\n"