Samsung Galaxy S5 review

Apple is under siege. Samsung is moving from strength to strength with every new version of its flagship Galaxy phones and this year is likely to be no exception, with the S5 on the horizon.

What started out as a poor alternative to the iPhone is quickly becoming a powerful adversary; Samsung is quickly matching or outpacing features on the iPhone, desperate to keep up in the race, to make sure that it can always be directly compared to Apple’s flagship.

Not only does Samsung directly target Apple, it’s also got the most popular Android based handset and most of the platform’s market share. While others, such as HTC flounder and fail to gather large crowds, Samsung sells more and more devices.

We’ve taken a look at an almost finished version of the S5 for this review — Samsung says the software isn’t quite ready yet —  so read on to find out just what the company is bringing to the fight this year.

The hardware

When Samsung announced the Galaxy S5, I thought it was a big joke. The renders looked awful; in gold the device was reminiscent of a band aid and I wasloudly disappointed with what Samsung had done. I’ll be honest here; my first impressions were wrong. The S5 is actually an attractive device — a significant improvement over the S4 — in many ways.

The S5 is still not the prettiest girl at the party; it’s up against two all-metal phones that just can’t be matched with plastic, but Samsung has done a good job of making this plastic phone feel well built. If you directly compared the S5 to the S4, it makes last year’s device feel like slippery, cheap, plastic junk. Samsung has realised that how it feels in your hand matters more than almost anything else.

The dimpled back is one of the most contentious points of the phone amongst those online, though, and looks somewhat unattractive in photos. I was won over when I actually held the device for the first time, as opposed to seeing it in photos and renders; it’s attractive and feels nice. By adding these dimples and a rubbery texture to the back, Samsung manages to distract you from the fact that it’s actually just plastic.

On the front, it’s that classic Samsung look. So similar, in fact, that unless you knew what you were looking at then you likely 
wouldn’t guess it’s a new device at first glance. There’s Samsung’s classic giant home button down the bottom, flanked by two capacitive buttons for application switching/going back in menus and the camera and other sensors up the top.

The design has been tweaked slightly, though, with the camera a little less obvious and off slightly further to the right and a slightly larger 5.1″, 1080 x 1920 display than last year.

The lack of change in this area is on purpose; this is probably the most consistent part of Samsung’s design across the last few generations of these devices and is instantly recognisable to almost anyone.

It’s not the most beautiful phone (that’s reserved for the HTC One or the iPhone), but this year’s Galaxy flagship actually looks and feels less plasticy and is more attractive than any other that’s come before it.

What’s probably most surprising about this design is it’s dust-proof/waterproof up to an IP67 rating. If you’re not sure what that actually means, the numbers reflect how much the phone can keep out without failure; this means the S5 is ‘totally’ dust-proof and able to be submerged for brief periods up to 1m deep.

For such a ‘normal’ looking phone, the waterproofing is extremely compelling. I can see it saving me from my clumsy self on a regular basis, although for the purpose of this review the usefulness didn’t extend past submerging the phone in jugs of water at dinner to impress friends.

It’s nice to be able to know that a bit of water won’t wreck your phone and somehow, Samsung has pulled this off without having to cover the phone with flaps (aside from the charger port) like Sony did on the Xperia Z.

I’m not entirely sure how the company made the headphone jack waterproof without a flap, but it still works great even after a pretty significant dunking. In fact, you can submerge the entire phone and it’ll be fine, as long as you don’t do it for too long or go too deep with it which is good enough to survive being you being thrown in a pool with it.

There’s also a fingerprint sensor built into the home button, just like on Apple’s iPhone. It’s not obvious that it’s there, but it works very differently to Touch ID found on the iPhone 5s, which is unfortunately not a good thing.

Rather than simply placing your finger, it requires a swiping motion like traditional biometric sensors found on laptops, which can be a little harder to use. I tried to get in the hang of using it but found it more of a barrier to unlocking the phone than anything else; it feels like it adds a layer of complexity and almost always took more than one attempt to work.

Maybe the software just needs tweaking, but it’s nowhere near as good as Touch ID just yet. It rarely works and doesn’t quite have the same magical feel as using Touch ID. I don’t think fingerprint swiping is here to stay on mobile phones.

The S5 will be available in all the markets that the S4 reached, with the same 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100 network support as well as Category 4 LTE for ridiculously fast speeds where supported.