Samsung Officially Unpacks Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge At MWC

MojoKid writes Today, at Mobile World Congress, Samsung took the veil off of its much-anticipated Galaxy S6, and also the Galaxy S6 edge. As has been heavily rumored, the S6 foregoes the plastic shell of its predecessor and integrates metal and glass instead, resulting in a far more premium feel, a thickness of 6.8mm, and a weight of 138g on the normal S6 and 132g on the edge. Samsung made it a point to mention that the metal it uses in the S6 is 50% stronger than other smartphones- a Apple bendgate jab, perhaps? Both the S6 and S6 edge share the same hardware, which includes a 5.1-inch Quad HD Super AMOLED display. That gives us a resolution of 2560x1440, and a high pixel density of 577 ppi. The new phones also include an octa-core processor (2.1GHz quad + 1.5GHz quad), 3GB of DDR4 memory, and LTE cat 6 (300/50Mbps) support. Also of note is the phone's rear 16 megapixel f/1.9 camera, which Samsung says will launch in less than a second (0.6 seconds, to be exact). The front camera is no slouch either, also boasting an aperture of f/1.9, and coming in at 5 megapixels. The company says that the phone can add 4 hours of battery-life after a mere 10 minutes of charging, and when compared to the iPhone, it charges up to full in half the time. The S6 also has built-in wireless charging as well.

Comments

Nope

[ledow]

Non-user-replaceable battery, and no SD expansion.

Stick it up your backside, Samsung, and stop emulating the WORST features of your competitors.

Re:Nope

[ShanghaiBill]

Non-user-replaceable battery, and no SD expansion.

A replaceable battery costs more upfront and is incompatible with thinness. Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies.

Re:Nope

[ganjadude]

the funny thing is how all the bloggers and reporters are calling this a step in the right direction. for me it pretty much sealed their fate, no more galaxy line for me.

Everyone talking about how "premium" it feels and is... well a premium phone IMO has expandable storage. It has a removable battery. It can take a fall from a few feet up (glass back???? really??? all my friends who had iphone 4s had cracked backs

to top it all off i dont want to spend money on a "premium feel" when all im gonna do is wrap it in an otterbox anyway!

does anyone make a top tier phone, with an SD slot and a removable battery anymore? because that is who will be getting my business when i buy my next phone (it sucks too because I was putting off buying a new phone for a few months waiting on this one)

Re:Nope

[ganjadude]

5 years ago that was true. Im still using my GS3 which works fine to this day. it gets a little hot, but after replacing the battery i could see me getting a good 2 more years out of it (longer if i wasnt using a bunch of apps)

Re:Nope

[olddoc]

I don't care about thinness. I want to use my phone hard and have it last a full day. I have an aftermarket battery in my S4 and love it. The new battery will charge quickly only with a special charger. If you connect it to a regular USB outlet you won't get very far very fast. The built in battery doesn't have to die. If it loses 30% of capacity before a typical 2 year US contract is up you will want to replace it.

Re:Nope

[ganjadude]

as for thinness, I dont want that! Gimme a phone 2x as thick as current top tier phones (or about 1/2 as thick as old nokia candy bar phones) and give me 4X the battery life. I want some heft in my phone. not zach morris phone thick, but old candy bar phone thick

Re:Nope

[MastarPete]

Last year's LG G3 was the only other flagship to have an SD and removable battery, but it is phablet sized at 5.5".

Re:Nope

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-user-replaceable battery, and no SD expansion.

A replaceable battery costs more upfront and is incompatible with thinness. Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies.

1)
You do not speak for anyone but yourself, despite the fantasies you so obviously entertain.

2)
Some of us want a battery which can be removed so the phone can be powered off without
any question. A non-removable battery is a deal-breaker for those who want this.

/

Re:Nope

[ganjadude]

i dont want to carry around a charger on me at all times just in case

The only reason to remove SD slots is to force people to buy higher level storage phones. On a business level, i get it if i can make someone buy the 64 instead of the 32 gig model, its more money in my pocket. Me on the other hand, I use multiple SD cards depending on what im doing (blank if going to a concert, a few with different genres of music, a few with movies for long trips etc) i dont have ton constantly move things around, i just pop in the card.

keyboards. how I long for a slider like my droid 3

Re:Nope

[TechyImmigrant]

as for thinness, I dont want that! Gimme a phone 2x as thick as current top tier phones (or about 1/2 as thick as old nokia candy bar phones) and give me 4X the battery life. I want some heft in my phone. not zach morris phone thick, but old candy bar phone thick

Yup. Thinness is a terrible tradeoff.

Re:Nope

[WaffleMonster]

A replaceable battery costs more upfront

Amazing the el-cheapo feature and smartphones are able to afford replaceable batteries while these things tend to go missing in higher end versions costing >5x more.

and is incompatible with thinness.

Why do you say that?

My phone has a replaceable battery, if it were any thinner I wouldn't want it.. hard enough as it is trying to hold without sides of your fingers touching the edge of the digitizer. I've seen back covers of LG and Samsung models and don't see any wasted space.

Most people get a new phone long before the battery dies.

Funny there seems to be a healthy market for replacement and aftermarket expanded capacity batteries.

Re:Nope

[msauve]

I bought a battery for my S4 for $12 shipped. Every bit as good as the OEM. I carry the charged original in my backpack as a spare, no need to find a power source for an immediate "recharge." When the one in use stops holding a full charge, I'll buy another $12 replacement. I could have bought insurance from Verizon if I wanted - but I take care of my phones and over 25 years have never broken or lost one, so I'm still ahead even if I have to buy one at full retail someday in the future.

It looks like AppleCare+ is $99, and only covers out to 2 years (and another $79 if the phone is replaced due to damage). Are iPhones really so unreliable that that presents value?

$12 battery shipped to my home which I can easily replace in less than a minute myself, or $99 and a trip to the store. I'd say I have a better level of service than you - less expensive, too.

Re:Nope

[msauve]

"battery booster packs."

Uh, no. Those things are inefficient. They have to convert the voltage of their own battery to 5V, output to USB, then the phone has to convert that to the battery charging voltage. So, for the same increase in functional capacity, the battery in them has to be much bigger. Plus, they add more than "just a few mm" in thickness, there's even more casing surrounding a separate battery. Then there's the USB plug getting in the way. Plus dealing with disconnecting/removing all that before you can use a proper car dock.

(I assume you're talking about the ones for phones without replaceable batteries, since that's the basis for this thread)

Re:Nope

[MastarPete]

The only reason to remove SD slots is to force people to buy higher level storage phones. On a business level, i get it if i can make someone buy the 64 instead of the 32 gig model, its more money in my pocket.

There are many ways to look at this, including a conspiracy theory I heard summer of 2013 that Samsung was sitting on a stockpile or memory chips and just wanted to milk selling 16gb models for as long as possible by not offering the higher storage models. That one seemed really plausible when you consider the Galaxy S5 32gb never arrived in the US and signs pointed to Samsung themselves completely withholding it from US carriers.

In this case I think you're looking at the wrong end of the sales chain. If Samsung and the carriers were really intent on selling higher storage capacities you'd think they would do a better job marketing them and get employees at all levels better training. I talked to a Samsung sales rep that happened to be in Costco one time and he only seemed to be interested in getting me to just buy the 16gb model, even though he himself had a 64gb.

The carriers stand to make far more money than the manufacturer by getting their customers to use cloud services so they have to sign up for larger, overpriced data plans. So I'm far more inclined to believe that Samsung's previous attempt at selling the S3 32gb in the US failed because of the carriers who largely only sold them online. When asked why they weren't sold in-store they sited inventory logistics as the reason, meanwhile carriers had no problem stocking higher capacity iphones in-store. Don't forget to factor in that the in-store employees are all on commission so why would bother trying to up-sell the device with higher storage when they can't get commission from an online sale.

Re:Nope

[Zontar The Mindless]

As soon as I read the words, "has a more premium feel", I knew this review had been written by a mouth-breathing marketing moron. WTF is that even supposed to be, other than words strung together in attempt to make idiots feel smug about their cluelessness?

As for mine--no removable battery, no removable storage, no desire whatsoever to buy.

Re:Nope

[exomondo]

Never mind that your battery is too weak or that you have a broken leg, crutches FTW!

When the choice is crutches or nothing I'd go crutches...until I get to a charger.

Re:Nope

[msauve]

"But they are efficient enough for most people."

In my experience, most people don't have/use them, and most people rely on the battery in their phone. It's not clear where your claim comes from - do most people you know have them?

Re:Nope

[EdwardFurlong]

I chose my phone based on the removable battery and sd slot. I have lots of information stored on sd cards, some of it reference, some of it sensitive. I like to be able to read it off multiple devices. Phones in my house tend to get passed down. They go beyond the two years.

Re:Nope

[Ksevio]

It likely means it feels more robust and well made. I have an S5, and while it is a good phone, the plastic cover makes it feel a bit cheaper and flimsy.

The vast majority of customers don't remove the battery anyways, so it was probably a move in the right direction on that front. The 128GB internal storage negates the no removable storage issue.

The thing that bugs me is they've given up on making it waterproof which is a cool feature in previous models.

Re:Nope

[unrtst]

SD expansion is only an issue if you don't get enough memory in the first place.

Maybe most people don't care, but there are many very very good reasons to have this feature.
My personal favorite is that, with recent android builds, you can no longer plug your phone in and have it show up as a mass storage device (without rooting/etc). If you want to actually access the filesystem where your data is stored, then you have to take out the SD card and use a reader - at least that workaround is available.

Re:Nope

[Anne Thwacks]

Very, very, very few phones come with an external battery charger,

You might need to download the eBay app from Playstore. External battery charger and two batteries is £10 ($15) for most phones. Sure 1/2 the batteries only last about 6 months, and some of the chargers explode, but the rest last for years. At that price, you can't lose. Just buy more!

£ is GBP, not Australian. Something is badly wrong with Slashdot (and not just Beta)

Re:Nope

[msauve]

I was saying something to the effect that you're an idiot, and have no clue what "counterfeit" means.

Re:Nope

[fluffernutter]

I have a GS3, and it is fine and I won't replace it until it dies.. But I find that I get very poor battery life out of it. Like sometimes dead by 1pm when charged overnight. I bought another fresh battery and same result. I just charge them overnight and swap them so it's really not an issue. I even looked at alternative ROMs because some have improvement on battery use, but mine is a vendor model which most ROMs don't work on.

So.. yeah. No user replaceable battery in the S6? Even though I wouldn't get a Galaxy again, I was thinking of a Note. Maybe this makes me think something else altogether. And yes I've already sworn off Apple.

Re:Nope

[pmontra]

Another SG2 here. I love the SD card, the plastic body, the replaceable battery. Plastic and the replaceable battery help the phone surviving drops because they discharge the kinetic energy (google bent corner iphone or mac). Because of that I won't buy the SG6 when my SG2 dies but hopefully that will happen many years in the future so Samsung have plenty of time to rethink their design.

Other things that I love: the relatively small size, which let me fit it inside my front pockets if I have to, the light weight (but now only 20 g less than the S6, large phones are getting slimmer) and that I can mount it as a disk over USB without going through the MTP madness. A not so nice thing: the SD card is hidden under the battery so I can't eject it without shutting down the phone. This is a bit limiting.

Re:Nope

[msauve]

"You're assuming that I'm conflating counterfeit with legitimate 3rd party... I didn't know Anker (whom is a respectable brand) made cellphone batteries at such a price. "

I assumed nothing. These are your own words:
"You paid for, and trust a counterfeit battery?!... At best, a Samsung S4 battery will use a generic 1500mAh cell with filter material to fake a real one that's rated for 1800mAh."

I purchased the battery from AnkerDirect, fulfilled by Amazon. Not much opportunity for a counterfeit to get into that distribution channel. 2600 mAh (not 1800), just like the original Samsung. Capacity is actually better than the OEM (and more than 2600), as determined by Battery Monitor Widget. Anker's S3/S4/S5 batteries are all basically the same $12 price. The S4 one was about $15 a year ago.

Perhaps your epithet "a colossal glittering jewel of ignorance" should be directed toward a mirror.

Re:Nope

[mlts]

I would say my HTC M8 is a combination of the two. Replaceable batteries are useful, and my last Motorola phone, the Atrix 2, had one and wasn't considered a porker by any means.

The SD card is more important. Sandisk has 200GB MicroSD cards out. This doesn't give just storage, but the ability to do backups, either with nandroid or with Titanium Backup. Since Titanium Backup uses a very good encryption system for backups (you set a password which encrypts the private key stored with the backup files, and TB uses the public key for backups, only asking for the password to unlock the private key for restores.) To boot, I can copy music to and from the SD card before I load it into the phone. Of course, if something happens and I end up trashing the ROM on the device, I can reload a backup while on the road.

The biggest reason why I won't buy a Samsung Galaxy is because of the fact that it took a major bounty to even get root on the device, much less a custom ROM. The HTC comparable, the One M8 (and the M9 coming out this month) happily runs my custom ROM with XPrivacy and other items. The eFuse issue with the Galaxy is another turn-off. Even with iPhones, if I have a trashed jailbreak, I can use DFU mode and factory restore the device to as good as new. The fact that the Samsung offering permanently disabled functionality is a major minus in my book.

For a corporation, Knox is a useful tool. For an individual, it doesn't do much.

Re:Nope

[Ksevio]

I guess for robots like you that view everything objectively, there is no advantage. Unfortunately it looks like Samsung is catering to us human that can't poke holes through gorilla glass.

A few departures from the S3/S4/S5

[DanTheManMS]

No removable battery. Less space than an SD card. Lame.

In all seriousness, it does look like a very nice phone. And Samsung has gotten better about pre-loading less bloatware on their more recent releases. We'll have to see how the general public receives it though.

What?

[SternisheFan]

No removable battery, no SD card. The best things about Samsung phones have been removed from this version.

what about this rarely-considered feature?

[Anonymous Coward]

megapixels, GHz, bus speed, blah blah blah...I may be the only person on the planet who actually cares about this esoteric feature, but I'll ask anyway: How well does it function as a telephone? Are calls clear & loud? How much does the microphone collect sound? Is it sensitive to wind (noise)? etc. etc. etc. I ask because most cell phones sound dreadful -- like a 3rd generation mp3 played through an AM radio.

In these days of feature checklist pissing contests over most pixels and CPU power, it'd be good to know if a $700 phone can make a decent phone call.

Re:what about this rarely-considered feature?

[AbRASiON]

Mod anon up, important question.
Also often overlooked

Audio quality from headphone port
Speakerphone quality
Mic quality
Time to charge (addressed in this case)
Shock resistance
Warranty period
Quality of service from provider (hate to tip the hat to Apple but holy crap good service)
Screen brightness in the sun
etc.

Re: what about this rarely-considered feature?

[unami]

that would require some attention to detail, which samsung definitely lacks. it will get harder and harder for them to sell phones based on features that have long ago crossed the border of usefullness. 577 ppi - are you selling those phones to eagles? 16mp - i'd rather have 10mp with bigger pixels - plus those photos don't use that much space. 2.1 ghz quad + 1.5 ghz quad, 3gb ram? just give me software that runs on an 1.2 ghz dualcore, that should be more than enough. saves battery too.

Re:what about this rarely-considered feature?

[arielCo]

Blame that on your stingy provider, skimping on bandwidth by packing you all in a few channels. Full-rate GSM is quite clear.

Re: they have to compare it to the iphone 6,

[unami]

i don't get it why they drop differenciating features like water resistance, sd-card slot or removable battery instead of making them better. that were the features that made samsung-phones stand out. i can understand samsung wanting to go for the premium market. but they need more than an iphone with android and purportetly better features (in the end, it's still the software, stupid) for a piece of the iphone's cake

No SD card = major weakness

[dwheeler]

One reason I bought an earlier Samsung is *specifically* because it supports a micro-SD card. Nice specs, but no micro-SD is a weakness to me.

Fast charge is nice, but isn't 500+ ppi

[jpellino]

just flagpole-sitting at this point?

Re:Fags and hipsters

[stafil]

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html?_r=0

US Top 1% average household income is $383k. Top 5% $118k. Top 10% $140k. Top 25% $89k.

Depending where you leave I would say that 1 in 4 can easily afford two of these phones every 3 years without a dent in their bank account.

Re: they have to compare it to the iphone 6,

[Shadow of Eternity]

This. Dropping IP67 was the worst decision they made.

Only 8 processors?

[ZipK]

The new phones also include an octa-core processor...

The first blade grabs at the whisker, tugging it away from your face to protect it from the second blade.
Blade number two catches and digs into the stubble before it has the chance to snap back and injure you, pulling it farther out so that it is now ready for shearing.
Triple-Trac's third blade, a finely-honed bonded platinum instrument, cuts cleanly through the whisker at its base, leaving your face as smooth as a billiard ball.

The Triple Trac

Going overboard while falling short

[WaffleMonster]

Oh come on 2560x1440 AMOLED is just insane and pointless. 1080 is ridiculous as-is nobody is ever going to benefit from or notice any difference.

More importantly I won't buy a phone with an AMOLED display. IPS is more reliable, lasts longer, no burn-in issues and easier to see in daylight.

Also no SD card? WTF were they thinking?

No replaceable battery in a device that costs hundreds of dollars... Don't think so - not that rich/stupid.

The good news is

[denisbergeron]

The older S5 with a removable battery and a SD card will see the price down.

Samsung has lost its way

[sremick]

No MicroSD slot and no removable battery means no sale for me. And from the posts on this forum, I'm far from alone.

When my S2 died a couple weeks ago I had already read the rumors that the S6 would lack these critical, basic features. So I went ahead and bought an S5. So glad I didn't wait for the anti-consumer S6.

Removable batteries are both about getting through a full day of hardcore usage without ever being tethered to a charging wire, as well as increasing the overal longevity of the phone by being able to replace it 2-3 years in when it no longer holds a decent charge.

Expandable storage isn't just about having more storage in the device. It's about being able to have safe storage independent of the device that can survive the device failing. Every night my phone does an automatic backup of all my apps and data to my MicroSD card. I can't tell you how many times this has saved me over the years, on multiple phones. More than once on my Samsung Captivate (original Galaxy S). More than once on my S2... including this most-recent time 2 weeks ago. I moved my MicroSD card over to my new S5, restored my data and I was right back where I left off.

And don't give me that crap about backing up to the "cloud". The "cloud" is a joke, and those of us in the Real World don't have data, let alone wifi access 24/7. Just because I don't have wireless signal doesn't mean I don't want my data backed up that night.

Every cell phone I've ever owned has had a removable battery, and every smartphone I've ever had has had a MicroSD card... including some non-smartphones from back when they were called TransFlash. There's no way in hell I'm going to start giving up these basic, core features of owning a phone. If Samsung doesn't get its head out of its ass, stop being stupid and stop being anti-consumer then the S5 could easily be the last Samsung phone I ever buy. I'll miss the OLED screen but they won't deserve my money at that point. I'll vote with my money and give it to a company that isn't into the business of screwing the user and forced-obsolescence.

Re:Answers for both

[AuMatar]

No, we want a quick way to do a 100% reboot if the phone is in a bad state.Without that your only option is to wait 1 day until the battery is dead. Or longer if the radio is off in that state.