Samsung Galaxy S5: practical, less gimmicky

The curtains are up and the most awaited Android flagship smartphone of the year is unvieled. Samsung made Galaxy S5 public yesterday, at Unpacked event in Barcelona. Best part about Galaxy S5 is that, unlike S4, this one is a highly practical phone with scaled down Touchwiz and Samsung did omit unwanted gimmicky features. Though S5 is an incremental/evolutionary update to Galaxy S4, the tiny increments does matter and are worth upgrading.

Key changes (compared to GS4):

• Snapdragon 800 CPU (exynos 5 for GS4)
• 5.1″ display  (5″ for GS4)
• 142 x 72.5 x 8.1 mm (136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm)
• 16/32 GB onboard (16/32/64GB)
• upto 128GB microSD card (upto 64GB)
• LTE for all markets (only select markets)
• USB 3.0 (USB 2.0)
• 16 MP front facing camera (13mp)
• 4K 2160p video recording (Full HD 1080p video recording)
• 2800mAh battery (2600mAh)
• finger print scanner and heartbeat sensors

“With the Galaxy S5, Samsung is going back to basics to focus on delivering the capabilities that matter most to our consumers,” said JK Shin, President and Head of IT & Mobile Communications Division at Samsung. “Consumers are looking for mobile tools that inspire and support them as they improve their everyday lives. The Galaxy S5 represents an iconic design with essential and useful features to focus on delivering the ultimate smartphone on the market today through people inspired innovation.”

Scaled down touchwiz

The biggest complaint from Samsung Galaxy users is the laggy TouchWiz. Even a screaming fast Exynos 5 Octa 5410 powering Galaxy S4 could not do much to reduce the lag. In Galaxy S5, Samsung is introducing a much cleaner and scaled down TouchWiz that should be less laggy and lighter on eyes. Given that KitKat is less heavy on resources compared to earlier versions of Android, we should see much better performance, not just from out of the box phone but also after few weeks of use.

Fingerprint sensor

Taking (another) chapter out of Apple’s book, Samsung has included a fingerprint sensor on the home key. For GS5, you do have to swipe across the button (top to bottom) to scan your fingerprint. To register your fingerprint in the phone, you have to swipe eight times. From what we have seen in ‘hands on’ videos, the sensor does work very well and does not seem to be erratic at all. We do hope that Samsung will release APIs for the sensor so that third party applications can use the sensor for login (unlike Apple keeping their touchID sensor close to their chest).

Heartrate monitor

Just below the rear camera, next to the LED flash, there is a hear rate monitor. Open Samsung’s fitness, keep your index finger on the sensor for few seconds and you get your heartbeat rate. We should see Samsung releasing access to the sensor to developers so that the sensor can be widely used in those health and fitness applications.

Water and dust resistant

This would be very very helpful feature for those who constantly travel on water and in dusty areas and for parents whose kids love to throw phones into bath tubs and water buckets. Samsung released a ‘special’ water resistant variant named GS4 active but this time, with GS5, we dont have to wait for a water and dust proof variant. Galaxy S5 comes with water and dust resistance and is IP67 certified. IP67 certifies that the phone will be totally protected against dirt with zero ingress and can stay alive if immersed in water upto 1metre depth. Though it is not at the level of recently announced Xperia Z2 which can even withstand water projected at all angles through a 6.3mm nozzle at a flow rate of 12.5 liters/min at a pressure of 30kN/m2 for 3 minutes from a distance of 3 meters, this is good enough for majority of smartphone users.

Kudos to Samsung for providing user replaceable battery even though the phone is built to be water and dust resistant. The back panel should be having a  very tough seal with the phone.

Better build quality

Gone are those shiny hyperglaze coated rear panels. Galaxy S5 comes with matte plastic, a bit similar to Note3’s (there are no faux stitching pattern). The display is 0.1″ bigger but addition of water/dust resistance meant that the dimensions have increased a bit when compared to GS4. Galaxy S5 should feel much better in hand than S4, should provide better grip in palm.

What is not good

From the days of Galaxy S3, design has become stagnant at Samsung. Every phone that comes out is based on GS3’s design while note like phablets are based on Note’s design. We expected something more from Samsung with GS5, a radical redesign, a made-from-scratch design. Given how big the brand value is for Galaxy S series and how much of money Samsung Mobile has been pocketing for last three years, they should have taken the risk and did something that would bring out ooohs and aaaahs from geeks. Well, lets just hope that they try something different next time.

Even though the build quality and anesthetics seem to be better, it is still nowhere close to what we see on other flagships like Xperia Z2, iPhone 5S, Lumia 1020 etc. There is no premium feeling and you dont get that rock solid feel in hand when you hold the phone. Wonder how long it will take for this to change (probably, it may never change).

For second iteration in a row, Samsung has omitted FM Radio, something that has become part of daily lives of many (at work, in car, while traveling, while sleeping). Its not rocket science to add FM radio in a phone and we do not understand the reason for omitting this feature.

Samsung Galaxy S5 Product Specifications: