Samsung Ultimate Test Drive- Galaxy S6 Edge

[Mew]

For those that are interested in this or want to learn more, visit this: http://promo.samsungpromotions.com/ultimatetestdrive/

 

I'm just going to do sort of a blog of what it's like using the S6 Edge compared to my 5s running iOS9.1 so I'll just do random updates through the days and weeks. 

 

Some history on my past experiences with Android. I used to be a hardcore Android fanboy, back when I was rocking LG's first Android phone. After I bricked my phone playing around with different roms (ultimately a stock firmware killed it), I was phoneless and my friend lent me his spare 3gs. At first I complained about everything about iOS but eventually saw the reasoning behind the stuff that they do. I got the 4s in the spring of 2012, I don't think the S3 was out in the US at that point. 2 years later, I upgraded to the 5s because it was simply the best phone on the market. Before this test drive, I was strongly considering getting the S7 next May. 

 

Day1 and 2:

The phone is both fast and slow. Apps launch pretty quickly but the phone stutters all around. Phone also gets hot super easily and battery life is complete garbage. Finger print sensor doesn't work well, although it is fast when it works (don't be surprised to have to retry multiple times for it to get it). Battery life is surprisingly bad (when used like an iPhone with all the radios turned on, no effort to save battery life). I'm at 28% battery after 13 hours (including a 8ish hour sleep). System updates also take quite long to install and to optimize apps (whatever that is). App updates seem strange- the twitch app that originally installed from the play store said after installation, that there's an update. When I updated it through the play store, it made another twitch app (so I had an old version and a new version).

 

The screen is kind of a love/hate thing. I immediately changed it to the basic mode for the most accurate colors. The large screen is nice to use sometimes, but other times, when I need to use it one handed, it's almost impossible. The camera ui automatically changes the screen back to the oversaturated color theme so any picture that you're currently taken, won't look the way it will actually look in the gallery or on another device. Pretty stupid imo. 

 

I'm using the Verizon variant which apparently, Verizon removed the default S browser, leaving me with the slow Chrome browser which really feels much slower than Safari just browsing pretty much any website. Pretty much every app also feels inferior to the ones on the iPhone simply because all the buttons are located on the top, out of reach, rather than the bottom. An example of this is Twitter where I'm accustomed to pressing the home on the bottom left to go to the very top. I have to physically scroll to the very top on Android which is pretty annoying. The lack of tapping the status bar to go to the top in Android is something that I'm missing from iOS. 

 

Oh right, auto brightness sucks. I was pretty surprised that I had to manually turn the brightness all the way down in a dark room because auto brightness for whatever reason doesn't do that. 

 

Oh, another thing. Widgets. They kinda suck compared to the ones in iOS, at least for twitch. There's no widget that shows which of your followed streamers are online. 

 

Oh this phone also charges super slow through the computer compared to how quickly my 5s charges through the computer. I guess Android phones aren't capable of using the higher current from MSI motherboards? 

 

Some cool things that are exclusive to Android (I think, maybe it's only exclusive to touchwiz) is being able to watch twitch while doing other stuff. The multiwindow thing that Samsung has right now seems gimmicky, but I'll probably find that useful in a couple days. 

 

Day 3:

Camera sometimes launches fast and sometimes takes forever to launch using the double click home button. Overall, the camera experience is ok due to random framerate dips and occasional slowness. Pictures almost always come out great/perfect though. 

 

I'm using the Google Now launcher and battery life seems to be significantly better now. I'm at 43% battery after about 17 hours off the wall. Only about an hour of SOT though compared to yesterday's 3ish hours. 

 

Day 4:

The quality of notifications is really lacking compared to iOS. Most of the time, notifications don't have the icon corresponding to the app and the screen almost never turns on when a notification comes. Another irritating thing is when a skype call comes, despite being on do not disturb in skype, it still rings the phone with a full answer/hang up screen on the lockscreen. The lack of interactive notifications (i.e. reply to text on lockscreen) is also disappointing. I really expected Samsunged Android to be more functional than this considering how many inspirations they get from Apple in their theming and design choices. 

 

Day 7:

I'm just about fed up with this phone. Gmail app sucks so much, in fact, pretty much every app in inferior compared to iOS. There's only 2 things good about this phone- the screen and the camera. Performance is very iffy. In normal app launch tests, it trades blows with my old 5s- some apps load the same, some faster, and some slower. It shouldn't be slower. And the more infuriating thing is that the S6 keeps less apps in memory, so it would have to reload apps that are otherwise stored in memory. I would literally launch chrome, skype, camera, weather, and chrome again only to find chrome reloading whereas the 5s loads it from memory instantly. I'm going to keep this phone until the end of the trial as a media consumption device. Samsung and Google will need to try ridiculously hard to win me back to Android. 

 

Day 15:

Samsung Pay and Android pay have very, very limited cards supported. As great as Samsung Pay is, being able to work with all the magnetic card readers, the number of banks and cards it supports is only just a handful. With the rise of nfc payments, and seemingly better support of Apple Pay, Samsung Pay was only really a selling point at launch, not 6 months down the road. 

 

Day 18:

Auto brightness really really sucks. It never uses the minimum brightness in a pitch dark room. And outdoors, despite the "basic" color profile, it changes to the "adaptive display" profile which causes hugely inaccurate colors. As great as Super AMOLED is for viewing videos, the technology isn't ready if you can't have LCD brightness levels without compromising image quality.

[ttam]

Sounds exactly what every person with an iPhone says after they use an Android.

 

Just CLOSE your damn apps and your battery life will be fine. It's like a PC, it's open unless you close it.

[Coombzy]

Slow? are you kidding me... I have a S6, and I can say right now, its not slow and doesn't "stutter" at all. The fingerprint sensor also works flawlessly all be it slower than the iPhone 6S that doesn't matter.

[Mew]

Sounds exactly what every person with an iPhone says after they use an Android.

 

Just CLOSE your damn apps and your battery life will be fine. It's like a PC, it's open unless you close it.

 

But I want to go back to the app where it's left off from time to time not reload it. I also found this phone to reload chrome tabs pretty aggressively. I can open 2 other tabs and go to the first only to find that it's reloading it. Maybe the 2? 3? gb of ram on this phone isn't enough. According to the settings, Android itself is using well over 1gb of ram. 

 

Edit: I'm gonna try out greenify tmr once I have a full charge tonight. Standby time is surprisingly not awful as I expected so far though. 

[Mew]

Slow? are you kidding me... I have an S6 and I can say right now its not slow and doesn't "stutter" at all. The fingerprint sensor also works flawlessly all be it slower than the iPhone 6S that doesn't matter.

 

When going back to the home screen from apps, the home screen would actually be "redrawing" all the apps and widgets, it's pretty dumb how unoptimized it is. However, this only happened like 2 times.  

 

Oh, and the fingerprint sensor. When I try to unlock it the iphone way- using home button to unlock and letting finger rest there, most of the time it won't work because I'm pressing it too hard. If I lightly press it, similar to the way it was setup, then it'll work. 

[Mew]

Day 3:

 

Camera sometimes launches fast and sometimes takes forever to launch using the double click home button. Overall, the camera experience is ok due to random framerate dips and occasional slowness. Pictures almost always come out great/perfect though. 

 

I'm using the Google Now launcher and battery life seems to be significantly better now. I'm at 43% battery after about 17 hours off the wall. Only about an hour of SOT though compared to yesterday's 3ish hours. 

[Mew]

Day 18:

 

Auto brightness really really sucks. It never uses the minimum brightness in a pitch dark room. And outdoors, despite the "basic" color profile, it changes to the "adaptive display" profile which causes hugely inaccurate colors. As great as Super AMOLED is for viewing videos, the technology isn't ready if you can't have LCD brightness levels without compromising image quality.

[1823alex]

It's a Samsung. TouchWiz is a self absorbed POS that uses all of the resources because it can. Also as @ttam said, close your apps! It's like a PC. I would never ever buy a Samsung anyways. A Stock google phone like a Nexus 5X/6P is much much better. Because stock w/o Sense, TouchWiz etc. almost every phone skin is bad. 

[michaelocarroll007]

Not to be a dick since you seem to put some work into this review but it seem insanely bias and off from the truth 

 

The S6 is probably in the Top 3 fastest phones you can buy between it and the Iphone 6s and the next contender it Does not lag anymore then any other top phone. 

 

you say it charges slow in the MSI fast charging port and that its an android problem its the fact its Battery is close to double the size of the 5S so it takes longer to charge 

 

The Fingerprint reader on the S6 is amazing and the 4 other people i know who use them every day find it amazingly accurate the S5 on the other hand had one of the worst ones i have ever tried also the 6S is very good aswell and slighty better 5S i would say is worse

 

The Screen was Rated as the Best smartphone screen to exist when it came out then beat by the note 5 

 

Im not saying the S6 is some amazing phone that everyone should buy ( I personally think its overpriced)  but it seems like you targeted things that are actually the exact opposite especially when compared to a 5S 

[Tsuki]

sorry but the only thing i got from this review is "its not an iphone"

i will saw though, samsungs touchwiz is crap. put a stock rom on that phone and it fix everything thats wrong with it.