So I've had the AT&T S6 (non edge) for about 16 hours now and figured I'd give out a few first impressions.
Battery life: I'm not remotely reading to start quoting overall numbers but I charged it to full before I went to bed around 12:00 and when I woke up about 6:30 I was at 94%. This is with all location services on, Bluetooth on and connected to a sports watch, WiFi on and basically everything set to how it came out of the box. I did turn off Voice over LTE. Cell standby was also only at 2% for the night and has staid around the 1%-3% range as of this moment, so the cell standby bug may very well be carrier specific. So far the battery is meeting my expectations and then some. We'll see how the numbers hold up over the next week.
Performance: So far no issues with TouchWiz or general performance. It's clear having high speed storage and RAM has helped and Samsung being able to better tune it's software to it's own processor has made a big difference. I have noticed a slight stutter here and there, but it's nothing worse then I've seen before with Sense on my M8 or on my iPad Air 2 with iOS8, and it's not 100% every single time; more 10% of the time I may see a slight stutter somewhere. Everything is very fluid, but I won't say it's as fast as 5.0.2 on my M8. That thing flew, to the point at time I was selecting the wrong thing by accident because it jumped to a different screen at the slightest touch. I got used to it pretty quick, but I can see Samsung using TouchWiz to calm that down a bit so you're average 35 to 45 year old mother or father or whomever doesn't get 'lost' or frustrated when the phone jumps at every little move. I would not, however, say TouchWiz is slow by any means. It's still much more fluid and faster then KitKat and below but maybe not quite as fast/jumpy as you might find with vanilla Lollipop or something like Sense. As someone who despised TouchWiz before and never owned a Galaxy phone because of it, I have no plan to cover it up or change it.
TouchWiz: Holy Bloat Batman. I'll give Samsung credit, TouchWiz has been simplified in many ways, looks better in many ways while still being unmistakably Samsung, and run much much better, but bloat is still out of hand. Samsung isn't fully to blame for this though, as they only have S Heath and S Voice on the device by default. Even the 2 Microsoft apps (OneNote and Skype) were not bad, and I'll use Skype. However I had close to 20 AT&T applications loaded up, some of which can't even be disabled and I I had to deal with set up prompts for several of them. Samsung is big enough, and with their now strong vertical integration for manufacturing, that they you could start calling them the Apple of Android. It's time they flex their muscle with the carriers and push back against of the bloatware and crappy update times, etc. They don't have to go to the extent of Apple but it's rapidly growing out of hand, on AT&T at least. Out of all the TouchWiz stuff there are only two things I take real issue with. The notification shade sucks and I should be able to remove the brightness settings that I will never touch and to get rid of the Wifi Connected notification that I don't need nor care about. The other things is the app dock at the bottom; I can change all the icons I want except for the app drawer icon. It is locked to the far right and I have no idea why other then 'because reasons'. Android is about freedom, to and extent, and little things like this chip away at that. It's not horrid, but it's an annoyance.
Fingerprint sensor: It sucks, pretty much. I ended up disabling it as it would detect my thumb maybe 2 out of 10 attempts on average. T-Mobile, and I think Sprint, got updates with improvements to the sensor and reviews mentioned it got better with an update so I'm hoping AT&T has a 'day 1' update Friday to help with this. Until then it stays off.
Build: This phone is gorgeous. Store displays and pictures don't do it that much justice until you have yours in hand. It's thin, it's feels amazing, has just enough heft thanks to the metal and glass, and does not get all that warm. That said this phone is glass and it will break. Not to the extent of the iPhone 4 or anything, GG4 is on the tough side, but I don't feel comfortable leaving the phone case-less. I have the sapphire black and it shifts between dark black, dark/navy blue, and just blue. There is the deathstar logo on the back, but it's tiny and meshes well with the black color. The IMEI sticker is a bigger eyesore, but that's not a S6 only thing.
Screen: Gorgeous, bright and pretty much perfect. Not a huge leap over 1080P but I don't have much to say beyond that.
Camera: I don't take many pictures with phones but they few I have taken just as a sample have come out pretty good for a phone camera.
Overall: This is the phone Samsung needed to make as the S5, if not the S4. It has taken everything I could throw at it, and aside from a few minor annoyances, I am more then pleased with this phone. That's saying something. I've hated Galaxy phones with a passion for many years as over bloated, clunky, cheap plastic phones made by a company that just tossed everything and the kitchen sink in and called it a day. Power users who push lots of music and video and steam Netflix and want 7+ hour screen time are likely better served by the Note line, and I think Samsung knows this. For your run of the mill, average user (aka those of use who don't browse Android forums and passionately yell about phones
) I think the S6 will serve very well.
Battery life: I'm not remotely reading to start quoting overall numbers but I charged it to full before I went to bed around 12:00 and when I woke up about 6:30 I was at 94%. This is with all location services on, Bluetooth on and connected to a sports watch, WiFi on and basically everything set to how it came out of the box. I did turn off Voice over LTE. Cell standby was also only at 2% for the night and has staid around the 1%-3% range as of this moment, so the cell standby bug may very well be carrier specific. So far the battery is meeting my expectations and then some. We'll see how the numbers hold up over the next week.
Performance: So far no issues with TouchWiz or general performance. It's clear having high speed storage and RAM has helped and Samsung being able to better tune it's software to it's own processor has made a big difference. I have noticed a slight stutter here and there, but it's nothing worse then I've seen before with Sense on my M8 or on my iPad Air 2 with iOS8, and it's not 100% every single time; more 10% of the time I may see a slight stutter somewhere. Everything is very fluid, but I won't say it's as fast as 5.0.2 on my M8. That thing flew, to the point at time I was selecting the wrong thing by accident because it jumped to a different screen at the slightest touch. I got used to it pretty quick, but I can see Samsung using TouchWiz to calm that down a bit so you're average 35 to 45 year old mother or father or whomever doesn't get 'lost' or frustrated when the phone jumps at every little move. I would not, however, say TouchWiz is slow by any means. It's still much more fluid and faster then KitKat and below but maybe not quite as fast/jumpy as you might find with vanilla Lollipop or something like Sense. As someone who despised TouchWiz before and never owned a Galaxy phone because of it, I have no plan to cover it up or change it.
TouchWiz: Holy Bloat Batman. I'll give Samsung credit, TouchWiz has been simplified in many ways, looks better in many ways while still being unmistakably Samsung, and run much much better, but bloat is still out of hand. Samsung isn't fully to blame for this though, as they only have S Heath and S Voice on the device by default. Even the 2 Microsoft apps (OneNote and Skype) were not bad, and I'll use Skype. However I had close to 20 AT&T applications loaded up, some of which can't even be disabled and I I had to deal with set up prompts for several of them. Samsung is big enough, and with their now strong vertical integration for manufacturing, that they you could start calling them the Apple of Android. It's time they flex their muscle with the carriers and push back against of the bloatware and crappy update times, etc. They don't have to go to the extent of Apple but it's rapidly growing out of hand, on AT&T at least. Out of all the TouchWiz stuff there are only two things I take real issue with. The notification shade sucks and I should be able to remove the brightness settings that I will never touch and to get rid of the Wifi Connected notification that I don't need nor care about. The other things is the app dock at the bottom; I can change all the icons I want except for the app drawer icon. It is locked to the far right and I have no idea why other then 'because reasons'. Android is about freedom, to and extent, and little things like this chip away at that. It's not horrid, but it's an annoyance.
Fingerprint sensor: It sucks, pretty much. I ended up disabling it as it would detect my thumb maybe 2 out of 10 attempts on average. T-Mobile, and I think Sprint, got updates with improvements to the sensor and reviews mentioned it got better with an update so I'm hoping AT&T has a 'day 1' update Friday to help with this. Until then it stays off.
Build: This phone is gorgeous. Store displays and pictures don't do it that much justice until you have yours in hand. It's thin, it's feels amazing, has just enough heft thanks to the metal and glass, and does not get all that warm. That said this phone is glass and it will break. Not to the extent of the iPhone 4 or anything, GG4 is on the tough side, but I don't feel comfortable leaving the phone case-less. I have the sapphire black and it shifts between dark black, dark/navy blue, and just blue. There is the deathstar logo on the back, but it's tiny and meshes well with the black color. The IMEI sticker is a bigger eyesore, but that's not a S6 only thing.
Screen: Gorgeous, bright and pretty much perfect. Not a huge leap over 1080P but I don't have much to say beyond that.
Camera: I don't take many pictures with phones but they few I have taken just as a sample have come out pretty good for a phone camera.
Overall: This is the phone Samsung needed to make as the S5, if not the S4. It has taken everything I could throw at it, and aside from a few minor annoyances, I am more then pleased with this phone. That's saying something. I've hated Galaxy phones with a passion for many years as over bloated, clunky, cheap plastic phones made by a company that just tossed everything and the kitchen sink in and called it a day. Power users who push lots of music and video and steam Netflix and want 7+ hour screen time are likely better served by the Note line, and I think Samsung knows this. For your run of the mill, average user (aka those of use who don't browse Android forums and passionately yell about phones
) I think the S6 will serve very well.
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