Function over form. The Samsung Galaxy S5 ($660, or $27.50/month) is America’s best-performing smartphone, bringing excellent voice quality, a terrific camera, speedy performance, and the best screen we’ve seen on a handheld yet. It’s better than last year’s Galaxy S4 in a bunch of ways, most notably in actually exercising restraint for the first time in a while. Mainstream smartphone fans, people who like to surf the Web, and shutterbugs will thrill to this model, making it one of our two Editors’ Choices for T-Mobile smartphones.
But that’s the thing—the Galaxy S5 doesn’t stand alone, and why it doesn’t stand alone is telling. Samsung simply can’t figure out premium design, at least from an American perspective. I spoke to the designers behind the S5, and they declared its plastic form to be “modern glam” with a “warmth and softness” (as well as a removable battery) that isn’t available on glass-and-metal phones. But hold the S5 next to our other Editors’ Choice on T-Mobile, the HTC One (M8), and the S5 doesn’t feel like the expensive one.
Physical Features
The Galaxy S5 still has an uncomfortable relationship with its own materials. At 5.85 by 2.85 by .31 inches (HWD) and 5.1 ounces, it’s a big phone, but that’s par for the course nowadays. It’s all plastic. The back is a stippled, textured faux-leather, borrowed from the Galaxy Note series, which is a major step up from the slick, fingerprint-collecting casing on the Galaxy S4. The back comes in black, blue, gold, or white. The design is almost ruined, in my mind, by a cheap chromed-plastic bezel. You’ll learn to live with it, but I didn’t learn to love it. Near the top, a useful colored LED blinks blue when you have a new message. On the bottom, a large micro USB 3.0 port promises fast charging and fast data transfer in exchange for needing to be covered by a silver plastic door. A physical Home button with dedicated, light-up back and multitasking buttons are a little more convenient than the purely virtual buttons on the HTC One.
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The S5 is waterproof and just a bit rugged; it’s about as tough as last year’s Galaxy S4 Active. That means it’s sealed against liquids and made from flexible materials, so you don’t have to worry about getting it wet or dropping it on its edge. You can still crack the screen, though, so a screen protector would be useful.
Dr. Ray Soneira of DisplayMate Labs put it best: The Galaxy S5 has the best screen we’ve seen yet on a smartphone. It’s brilliant, vibrant, and highly customizable, appearing brighter and punchier than competing displays in almost every circumstance. The trick isn’t just the 5.1-inch, 1080p Super AMOLED panel, although the panel itself has better color representation and a more even subpixel layout than the S4’s. It’s software. Samsung’s Professional Photo and Cinema Modes give picky viewers true whites, while Adapt Mode constantly alters the display color for maximum readability, and Super Dimming Mode makes the phone viewable in the dark without blowing out your eyes. Adapt Mode also deals very well with outdoor viewing conditions; I had no problem reading anything on my S5’s screen through a week outside in Seoul.
The screen has a few other neat tricks, too: It works pretty well with styli, including using the tip of a graphite pencil on the screen as a stylus. While there was still a tiny bit of lag, the GS5 showed much better precision when tapping with a small stylus than other Android phones I’ve tried, except for the Galaxy Note line.
Call Quality and Battery
The Galaxy S series have always been excellent voice phones and this model is no exception. The earpiece here gets really loud. If you need volume, you’ll be happy. The earpiece tone can also be tuned to your specific hearing profile, just like on the Galaxy S4. Do that if calls sound a little muddy, which they might on the default setting. Transmissions in normal call settings come through clearly. The phone cancelled street and car noise very well, although some background chatter from a Starbucks came through under my voice.
The single, small, back-ported speakerphone performs perfectly adequately, but it’s nowhere near as clear and powerful as the HTC One’s front-ported BoomSound speakers. Transmissions through the speakerphone mic, on the other hand, are excellent thanks to Samsung’s top-notch noise cancellation. I also had no problems with Bluetooth headsets.
Battery life looks very good. Because of SIM provisioning issues, I couldn’t complete our standard single-long-call test, but the 2,800mAh battery was still at 41 percent after 11 hours, 15 minutes of calling. In a week’s worth of use, it lasted out the day every time.
The new Ultra Power Saving mode delivers peace of mind: Kick it in when your battery is around 15 percent to limit the phone to calling, texting, Facebook,and Web browsing, and watch the phone report that it magically has more than a day’s worth of standby time remaining. With the battery down to 2 percent, I managed to squeeze out several hours of standby, a few text messages, and even a brief phone call. That was magical.
Wi-Fi and LTE
The Galaxy S5 takes networking to a new level. Its Wi-Fi performance outdoes the HTC One significantly when 25-50 feet away from an 802.11n router. At a 30-foot distance from a router with a 30-Mbps-up-and-down connection in a tough environment, the HTC dropped to 7-10Mbps but the Galaxy S5 maintained 15-20Mbps. I saw a similar difference up to about 75 feet, when they both dropped off. That will make a serious difference when Web browsing.
Lousy Starbucks wireless connections could be further enhanced by Download Booster, a Samsung feature which combines Wi-Fi and LTE throughput when you’re downloading files larger than 30MB. I’m worried about this one, though, because it was disabled on my phone. Samsung insisted to me that it would be enabled with a firmware update at launch, but this is just the kind of thing a carrier could kill.
Otherwise, the S5 comes in four different carrier LTE versions. We tested the T-Mobile model, which features the carrier’s Wi-Fi calling. Radio-wise, the handsets all support various carriers’ highest-speed networks but won’t switch between U.S. carriers well. The non-T-Mobile models lack T-Mobile’s main 3G band; the AT&T and Verizon models lack each other’s 700MHz LTE, and the Sprint model won’t work on anyone else’s LTE network. So you need to buy the right model for your carrier and stick with it, like with the HTC One but unlike with the carrier-flexible iPhone 5s.
Annoyingly, both the AT&T and T-Mobile models lack LTE Band 12, which T-Mobile and some regional carriers are implementing at the end of this year to improve rural coverage, but no other phone has that yet, either.
The phone comes with 16GB of memory, with 11.5GB available (slightly more than on the HTC One). There’s a microSD card slot under the back cover which took my 64GB card without complaint.
Processor and Performance
The S5 has a 2.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 processor, the fastest processor we’ve seen on an Android phone yet. Its performance on our benchmarks was pretty much indistinguishable from the HTC One’s. It’s perfectly smooth in high-end applications like Asphalt 8 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Either of these phones will bring the best performance you’ll see for the next few months, at least.
The S5 runs Android 4.4.2 with Samsung’s latest skin, which is somewhat lighter than last year’s version but still won’t please Android purists. (Don’t worry; I’m close to 100 percent sure that a Google Play Edition is on its way, if you’re into that sort of thing.) There’s a lot less Samsung bloatware than there used to be. Most of the S4’s features are still kicking around here, but they’ve been buried in settings; fewer, flagship features take prominence, so the interface doesn’t feel as overwhelming anymore. One of my favorites, S Finder, is a full on-device search that lives in the Notifications panel. That helps cut down on hunting through the interface.
Samsung’s Flipboard preload (not quite as configurable as HTC’s) and TV remote-control app (better than HTC’s, with support for more streaming video services) also come to the front. If you want dual-window multitasking, Kids’ mode, Easy mode, Car mode, or a mode where the display shrinks so you can use it with one hand, well, it’s all here—you just have to dig for it. That’s an acceptable balance.
The overall visual effect is still bright and a bit cutesy—the previous ‘water droplet’ metaphor has been swapped out for ‘shining gemstones’—so it’s less elegant than the HTC One’s, but the bright, colorful theme goes well with the super-vibrant screen.
The fingerprint sensor is a good try, but like most swipe-style fingerprint sensors, the Synaptics Natural ID sensor’s inaccuracy can get frustrating; I often had to swipe it two or three times to register. In 2012, Apple bought Authentec, which makes the unique fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5s; as a result, everybody else is behind. The fact that Samsung’s hardware trails Apple’s here is especially frustrating because its software is superior: There’s an SDK for third parties to use fingerprint ID, and you can already use it to pay for things via PayPal in Samsung’s bundled Web browser.
The health and safety features are still gimmicky. The pedometer is useful and relatively accurate, but the heart rate monitor is awkward and a little pointless: You want a heart rate monitor that constantly checks you as part of a fitness band, not something that you put your finger on once every three or four hours. Samsung said they’re looking for third parties to find interesting uses for the heart-rate monitor SDK, but for now I consider it a forgettable feature. For real fitness buffs, the Galaxy S5 is one of 18 devices that works with the new Samsung Gear Fit accessory (which we have also reviewed).
Camera and Multimedia
The camera is one big reason why this phone is an Editors’ Choice. The 16MP shooter’s UI marks an important step back towards simplicity from the GS4’s ridiculous array of camera modes; all the ones you won’t want to use are buried under “Shot & More,” and you won’t have to see them again. Rather, a few important tricks (most notably, the excellent live HDR) sit on the camera app’s main screen, and there are a half-dozen, rather than 30, modes to choose from.
I took photos with the S5, HTC One, and iPhone 5s side by side. The camera takes about four seconds to launch, but after that, shots are pretty much instantaneous. In bright conditions, the S5 did the best of the three, especially with HDR turned on. It was followed by the iPhone, and then the HTC which struggled with washed-out images. The S5’s flash also worked very well. For flashless photos in the dark, the HTC did the best of the bunch.
The S5 doesn’t have the manual modes that the HTC One does, but its automatic modes are very, very good. On my trip to Seoul with this phone, I ended up just ditching my Galaxy Camera and taking all outdoor shots with the phone in HDR mode. They came out looking great. The 2-megapixel front camera is also a solid performer.
The S5 also has a better video camera mode than the HTC and iPhone do. Not only do you have live HDR video and picture-in-picture dual camera recording, the S5 can maintain resolutions up to 4K and frame rates at 30 fps in all lighting conditions, and there are options for 8x slo-mo and 60fps, 1080p recording as well.
Multimedia playback won’t disappoint, but it doesn’t quite match up to the HTC’s level; those big Boomsound speakers and overpowered headphone amp play in a league that the GS5 decided not to enter. Music on the GS5 is treblier and more midrange-focused than on the HTC, which really bumps up the bass.
Conclusions
The Samsung Galaxy S5 is the fastest, most functional smartphone available today. It has the best screen, the best Wi-Fi performance, and the best camera for an Android phone (outpaced only by the Nokia PureView camera). Samsung dialed back its software excesses to produce a lively phone that’s more fun to use than the previous model.
Samsung still doesn’t quite get how Americans perceive style, though. Over and over again, executives told me how “warm” the phone’s materials are and how they follow fashion trends or emulate luxury items. But ultimately, Samsung’s plastic-metal and plastic-leather are still fakery, and it shows. Nokia and LG embrace plastic more honestly, with better design results.
All this goes to say why the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One will share our Editors’ Choice for Android smartphones for now. The Galaxy S5 triumphs on function, although its style falls a little short; the HTC One is downright gorgeous, but you make some serious compromises with its camera. Both exemplify the current state of the art.
